Gutterballs (2008)

It's a rare film that contains a pretty equal amounts of elements that I really enjoyed, and elements that I found completely awful.  Gutterballs is making me glad I decided that review scores were for pill-munching dandyheads because any arbitrary grade I gave this movie should wouldn't feel right.  This movie is a gory butterfly trapped in a autistic amateur's cocoon, and I just want to cut all the dumb bullshit away and let it fly, fly away.

Gutterballs is about a slasher in a bowling alley.  It's Canadian, and very gory.  The victims are all awful, either scenesters of various stripes, punk greaser types, or vapid ladies who exist to waggle their boobs around.  In a movie like this, the audience doesn't care about character traits or motivation, we just want to see the blood and cuts come at a steady pace, and in this respect, the movie doesn't disappoint.  Once the murders start, they keep coming at a constant ten minute pace, like the world's most perfect 50-year-old jogger. And for this, I applaud.  The kills hit about every possible way you could murder someone in a bowling alley, and then some, and they're all creative and messy.    Detailing them is probably the only spoiler I care about in these kinds of film, so suffice to say that while they were bloody and messy and pretty cringe inducing, it's another positive tick for this movie that none of the kills went for that gross psychological terror angle.  I mean, people are begging for mercy and all that, but the camera is focusing on the disemboweled guts and not a crying face, if that means anything to you Hostel-raised wippersnappers.

I also have to give a kudos to the soundtrack, as was done by Gianni Rossi, who had a hand in the faux disco prog shit that all horror nerds love about 70's Italian horror.  I'll admit that I only heard of the movie after downloading the soundtrack and grooving to some pure 80s nostalgia.  The wikipedia page on the movie had some malarky about it originally having a "who's who" of canadian rock, and I think everyone who has watched that movie can breathe a sigh of relief that that shit fell through.

Okay so what was awful about this movie.

SOUND.  For a movie with a soundtrack that makes me feel all warm inside, the actual production values on non-soundtrack audio were beyond awful.  Everything is muffled, distant sounding, and colliding together.  One looks forward to the death of the characters in the film moreso than normal because the early scenes of the film are an unending stream of Canadian drama kids all trying to talk over each other.  It's less of a problem than it could be, since all of the dialogue, as far as could be made out, was the sort of banal improvisational troupe exchanges you'd see in some ten-dollar cover charge theater in Portland.

RAPE SCENE.  This isn't really a spoiler, as the summary of the film on any site includes the notice that there's a rape.  What it doesn't say is that the rape is not some standard, exploitive "oh no aiiiie awkward angle shots occasionally showing a boob and a scary leering rapist face" rape scene that, while pretty gross, is sort of a part and parcel of a certain segment of the horror scene.  No, what we get is the answer to a theoretical question of "what if some not really that great filmmakers were challenged to do a rendition of the Irreversible rape scene in a bowling alley's arcade room?"

I didn't hate the rape scene because it was overwhelmingly brutal and honestly kind of uncomfortable to watch with my girlfriend, to the point that I just started looking at the arcade machines* because holy shit was this scene going on for way too long and hey what are they doing with that oh my god.  Really brutal rape scenes can work, or at least have a sort of internal logic, with certain kinds of films.  These kinds of films do not remotely include Gutterballs, which is at all other points a fun little throwback to 70's giallo inspired slashers. Those kinds of slashers do have rape scenes, but they are, let's be honest here, usually for the excuse of titillation and not much else.  There is nothing titillating about the Gutterballs rape scene, which is just really weird and off-putting for a film that otherwise seems to have its tongue firmly implanted in its cheek.

Amazingly Awful Ending!  I'm not going to spoil the ending since there's already a summary on wikipedia that goes into excruciating detail about the fifteen palm in face twists, but suffice to say it is a total goddamned mess.  It's true that giallo slashers love their shocking twist endings, but while the ending of Deep Red amazes you and the ending of Phenomena shocks you in delight, the ending of Gutterballs just forces the viewer to throw up their hands in realization that the subconscious part of every true horror watcher that cynically predicts the dumbest obvious twists was totally correct this time.

All in all, Gutterballs is worth watching if just for the great gore and inspired soundtrack.  Just don't feel bad about skipping minutes of cinema at a time.  The life you save may be your own, unless you're near a ball polishing machine.

* true fact: in one of my not-so-proud moments, I pointed out the 4-in-1 neogeo arcade machine while it had metal slug on attract mode to my girlfriend.  She wasn't impressed. ;_;