Mindless Violence

Editor’s note: The article you are about to read was originally written in 2008 by my mum, an all-round amazing woman. Today marks two years after her passing, so, instead of writing something myself, I am publishing this article in her memory. Mum was simply the best, a lunatic with a huggable exterior and a sharp wit inside her mind. It’s an honour to be able to share some more of her work with you. I hope you all enjoy this sliver of my mum’s brilliance and insanity.

There’s nothing wrong with a spot of mindless violence, I say. Not actual real life violence, of course, which is appalling and nasty and painful into the bargain. No, I mean TV violence, whether it be films, TV or even video games. Because it’s not real, you see.

It all started with Tom and Jerry. The Tom and Jerry triple bill was the highlight of an otherwise dull and dreary Sunday populated, after Thunderbirds in the morning, with snore-fests such as Weekend World, Ski Sunday and, shudder, Highway with Harry Secombe. At about Tea Time, however, you could be guaranteed 15 minutes of total crazed savagery of such viciousness that it appeared to be more like an animated snuff movie than children’s entertainment. But the absence of blood and the fact that Tom repeatedly got up and ran off to be freshly hammered, flattened, scorched and battered makes it OK.

Nowhere else could a poor grey feline be skewered, chewed, singed and roasted for our entertainment without someone calling in the RSPCA. Of course now it has all been ruined because in these soft and squishy times, with our delicate sensibilities, it has been deemed that Tom and Jerry should be friends. Friends. I mean, I ask you. But never mind, this was our introduction to all things violent and horrid as a precursor to the horror films that awaited us and we couldn’t have been more thrilled.

The other night, I watched several soldiers who were marooned together in the Scottish countryside get variously chased, eaten, bitten or torn apart by werewolves and it was great. Of course, I wasn’t involved in these atrocities myself, they were presented with more ketchup and plastic innards than you can shake a stick at in the film Dog Soldiers. If entrails are your thing, then this is the movie for you. If you want to see more internal body parts or watch someone having their spine ripped out then watch Predator. The acting is almost as frightening as the violence which I don’t think was the intention but, hey, even if you find it difficult to distinguish Arnold Schwarzenegger from all the other large chunks of wood in the movie (it is set in a jungle) it still works as a cracking gore-fest. Another good one is From Dusk Till Dawn. Now, I don’t want to spoil it for you so I won’t tell you the plot but if the first 40 minutes don’t satisfy your blood lust then just be patient until about half way through and then I strongly recommend that you hold onto your hat.

The Blade movies are excellent if you like spurting jugulars, rivers of blood, black leather and lots of ash (they are vampire films, for the uninitiated), or if you like your violence raw and visceral try Apocalypse Now but your enjoyment of this one really does depend on how much Dennis Hopper you can stand. It is also a bit long (I have had a copy of the Redux – translation “Extra Long” – Directors Cut for 5 years but haven’t yet been able to set aside the small lifetime it takes to watch it) but you will be rewarded for you perseverance. The pinnacle of horror so far seems to me to be the film Planet Terror – a movie so disgusting, cruel, blood-splattered and gross that I watched it twice. Ah, welcome to Film 2008 – Die Screaming in Lots of Little Bits Edition. Do please note that if you are of a sensitive or queasy disposition, don’t rent any of the above movies as you will, I can assure you, spend an awful lot of time behind the sofa.

Now, while I sit with my popcorn avidly relishing all this horror and horridness, I have one unfortunate flaw. I have a natural intolerance to films that contain anything at all designed to make me jump. You see, the jumpy bits make me crap myself. There’s a bit in Snakes on a Plane when I actually shouted “aarrrghh!!!” In Terminator, although I knew that the machine wasn’t really dead and would indeed, be back, and as it suddenly reached out to grab the film’s heroine, I was on the phone booking a plane ticket to anywhere away from this movie. Even in something as innocuous as Independence Day, when the aliens’ exo-skeleton opened up with a bang, I hit the ceiling. It is not always just me, you understand. Years ago, when living as a young couple in a little studio flat, my partner and I had my brother and his future wife over for a boozy sleep over and we camped out on the floor of the living room to watch the execrable but extremely jumpy Prince of Darkness. At a particularly tense moment in the proceedings we lay there, silently rapt, until a tiny drip of condensation fell on us from the skylight above at which point we erupted as one in a be-duveted mass of screaming and flailing. Presumably we thought that the devil in the movie had come to get us with his icy fingers and so collectively we shat ourselves. On that occasion, I was not alone, but mostly it is just me.

When I am not leaping out of my skin, I am shouting at the screen, or more precisely the actors on the screen, who are creeping around the dark attic and are about to be leapt upon by the mad axe murderer which will, inevitably, make me leap out of my skin. As the glamorous young actress gingerly makes her way down the stairs into the darkened basement, I yell “Go back up, you stupid cow! ‘I know! There’s a murderer in the house, so I will pick this precise moment to go down to the basement to check that we have enough shoe polish.’ You moron! Go back up, for God’s sake! Well, in that case, you deserve to die!” before diving behind the armchair and then annoying my fellow viewers by repeatedly asking if she’s dead yet. The Blair Witch Project, which is universally deemed to be very silly and not scary at all, kept me 3 inches above the sofa cushions. From this elevated position I was able to berate the characters for having the stupidity to go into dark, creepy, woods that were inhabited by some sort of strange murderous old bag when no other sane person would even entertain the merest possibility of doing such a foolhardy thing and then intermittently diving behind the armchair again. I am just not cut out for this sort of thing.

The problem with jumpy films, you see, is that all the darkness, nocturnal noises, scary music, creaking floorboards and all the rest of it terrifies me because it leaves me alone with the one most frightening thing of all – my imagination; and you can’t get much scarier than that.