This is an age old puritanical argument often lobbied by Christian groups as well as censorship and decency laws which I’m not always on board with outside of rare occasional exceptions: can a film be inherently evil and reprehensible? Sure it’s just a movie, sure it’s just manmade and depicting a fictional staging of what we see onscreen. Sure it’s only serving up old fashioned shock value by providing the bloodthirsty viewer (usually myself included) with pure unadulterated violence and brutality with the fervent glee of a sideshow geek.

Being an avid consumer of all forms of cinema ranging from the G rated to intolerable transgression, nothing should phase me. There was a point where I was obsessed with, not so much because of the content but because it was told in such a masterful and technically proficient fashion.is one of the great nonjudgmental character studies of our time.is the work of a great artist at a moment of artistic crisis in his illustrious career. I even sat through the terminalmovies, familiarizing myself with Toe Tag Pictures’ ongoing efforts to promote their visual effects technology despite the films’ obvious lack of anything substantive to say. Let’s not get started on the rampant animal cruelty exhibited by Ruggero Deodato or Umberto Lenzi’s pictures. Needless to say, I love extreme movies that push the envelope in search of something we haven’t seen before and never thought I’d be on the opposite side of the fence…until now.

Shock is inherently always going to be an important aspect of the cinematic medium and how it is used will illustrate the difference between art and trash. With all of that in mind, the question then becomes at what point can a film cross that thinly veiled line of what’s acceptable in film and what isn’t? With Nick Palumbo’s utterly vile and hateful 35mm serial killer shock fest, it is safe to say for good or for ill, the line is no longer thinly veiled but instead is easily identifiable. The story of a German photographer played by Sven Garrett who shoots erotica by day before raping and murdering prostitutes at night, it begins and ends there. The rest consists of porn actresses in the nude being penetrated, mutilated, tortured and degraded with lip smacking glee, often for extended periods of time. Then it gets into exposing child actors to sex, nudity, violence and graphic murder. Not even hardcore BDSM pornography is this degrading to the cast members unlucky enough to be involved in it, some of whom tried and failed to get their scenes cut when they found out the hard way just the kind of puerile exploitation they unknowingly agreed to be in.