Heads Up, Ears Down

This blog accurately identifies depictions of violence and cruelty toward animals in films. The purpose is to provide viewers with a reliable guide so that such depictions do not come as unwelcome surprises. Films will be accurately notated, providing a time cue for each incident along with a concise description of the scene and perhaps relevant context surrounding the incident. In order to serve as a useful reference tool, films having no depictions of violence to animals will be included, with an indication that there are no such scenes. This is confirmation that the films have been watched with the stated purpose in mind.


Note that the word depictions figures prominently in the objective. It is a travesty that discussions about cruelty in film usually are derailed by the largely unrelated assertion that no animals really were hurt (true only in some films, dependent upon many factors), and that all this concern is just over a simulation. Not the point, whether true or false. We do not smugly dismiss depictions of five-year-olds being raped because those scenes are only simulations. No, we are appalled that such images are even staged, and we are appropriately horrified that the notion now has been planted into the minds of the weak and cruel.


Depictions of violence or harm to animals are assessed in keeping with our dominant culture, with physical abuse, harmful neglect, and similar mistreatment serving as a base line. This blog does not address extended issues of animal welfare, and as such does not identify scenes of people eating meat or mules pulling plows. The goal is to itemize images that might cause a disturbance in a compassionate household.


These notes provide a heads-up but do not necessarily discourage watching a film because of depicted cruelty. Consuming a piece of art does not make you a supporter of the ideas presented. Your ethical self is created by your public rhetoric and your private actions, not by your willingness to sit through a filmed act of violence.

Blood Hook

Blood Hook. Jim Mallon, 1986.
😿
Edition screened: Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray #220, released 2018. English language. Runtime approximately 111 minutes.

Summary: Minimal fish cleaning.

Details: The head is cut off of a dead fish at a bait shop, 5:21-5:28. 

Blood Hook was not as horrible as I expected it to be. Because it is a “comedy horror” movie, because main characters are zany teenagers on some kind of holiday, because the plot context is a fishing contest, I began viewing with the three biggest clothes pins I could find clamped tightly on my nose.

To my surprise, Blood Hook could have been much worse. It’s not that the film grabbed opportunities to excel, but that it didn’t grab opportunities to be as base as possible. The biggest surprise, almost a lift, was provided by characterizations and dialogue of the teenagers. Just this once, lines simply did not just alternate between unfunny comedy and unsexy promiscuity. The teens in Blood Hook were superficial inarticulate morons, a character type far easier to watch than wisecracking frenemies. 

Also, our director used the fishing context backdrop to create humorous, idiosyncratic character obsessed with a sport, rather than as an excuse for a lot of cheap gross-outs about fish guts. One 7-second bait shop scene early in the film, and quite a few scenes of people lugging around huge fish. That’s it.



at
Labels: ,