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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kai Lord" data-source="post: 1180762" data-attributes="member: 3570">Wow, I just read the Ebert review and must say it might possibly be the most pathetic and hypocritical review I've ever read.TCM was "vile, ugly, and brutal" while Kill Bill was "redeemed, justified, illustrated and explained by the style?"  TCM, not Kill Bill, is a "meditation on the geek-show movie?"  Good.  Lord.Ebert is so far gone its not even funny.  TCM was fantastic.  For starters the cinematography rivaled the best work of David Fincher.  You know what I mean, dripping, decaying, and yet strangely beautiful.The tension was great, I get VERY irritated when a movie resorts to making you jump simply by blasting the speakers (28 Days Later I'm looking at YOU...and a thousand other recent attempts at scary films), but TCM just keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole way through.  Its relentless.  As it should be.Ebert complains that its "strewn with blood, bones, rats, fetishes and severed limbs, photographed in murky darkness, and scored with screams???"  WTF?  Did he think he was purchasing a ticket to the Texas Oven Mitt Massage Parlor?  The film's based on the dementia of Ed Gein (who also inspired the characters of Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, and Hannibal Lecter), the guy who made lamp shades and wastebaskets out of human skin, and yes even full body suits and masks.  The guy who went crazy after his wacked out mother died and started digging up graves of recently buried women before upgrading to live ones.Truly sick stuff, to be sure, and any movie that references or draws inspiration from Gein's work is definitely one to be aware of going into it.  But damn TCM for drawing from the same inspirational source as other ZERO STAR films such as Psycho and Silence of the Lambs.  Damn them for including Gein's fetishes into the Leatherface character, and DAMN THEM FOR HACKING OFF LIMBS.Why couldn't it be a brilliant and beautiful movie like Kill Bill which had NONE of that?  Severed limbs are for geeks.  Ditto for fetishes.  The whole school girl routine in KB?  She was poor and liked wearing her uniform home, right Roger?  A mature character study of Japanese youth.What an utterly, utterly AWFUL review.  None of the violence in TCM is played for laughs, none of it.  Kill Bill?  Give me a break, don't even need to go there, its too easy.Uma's rampage is high art because she's in a more colorfully shot movie?  Yeah, no cynicism or ugliness in her story, because the bouncy soundtrack has us walking out of the theatre feeling happy and exhilirated!TCM does indeed follow some major slasher film conventions, but it also does them right.  Its Silence of the Lambs meets the original Terminator.  A truly visceral edge of your seat experience.  The characters DON'T behave like stupid horror movie characters (funny that even Roger acknowledges that other critics completely disagree with his assinine claims) and the gore is largely OFF SCREEN.Spoilers for some of the character deaths:[SPOILER]When Leatherface chases the guy through the hanging linen sheets, he angles in on the guy, swings his chainsaw, and you see a ton of blood splatter the sheets and then the guy collapses and starts rolling around.  Only then do you notice his leg's missing, and even still the focus is on him crawling around and trying to keep from being carried off by his attacker.Later, when Leatherface knocks the one girl down and slices her up you see Jessica Biel's POV from inside the van, from behind Leatherface we see him lower his chainsaw and the down padding from the girl's coat goes spraying up all around him.  We know she just got cut in half but they don't even show any blood.[/SPOILER]I won't spoil the other deaths but like those two, they are NOT in your face gory and are nowhere near what you see in Kill Bill.  Not. Even. Close.TCM might not be as elegant as Silence of the Lambs, but if you liked the sheer adrenaline rush go for broke no pulled punches style of the first Terminator or Aliens, I'd definitely recommend it.</blockquote>

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