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Junk Films

By Jimmy Squarejaw
www.facebook.com/yallaredead

When FACES OF DEATH was released in 1978, it was originally produced for the death hungry population of Japan by an Italian documentarian who wanted to up the ante a little in the mondo/bizarro/documentary genre.  In the land of the rising sun it was originally titled JUNK, and according to the commentary on the FACES OF DEATH 30^th ANNIVERSARY release it eventually grossed more than STAR WARS at the box office in 1977.  (Why the FUCK do I live in America?)  In the tradition of the JUNK movie series Tsurisaki Kiyotaka, director of OROZCO THE EMBALMER, compiled a collection of his psychotic short films and titled it JUNK FILMS which was released in the states a little while ago by Massacre Video.  Shall we?

JUNK FILMS opens in India (I think) with a few nice shots of an incredibly overcrowded tent town full of cripples, the impoverished, and amputees; it really sets a nice theme of “hey, life can be total shit.”  Scenes from Tsurisaki’s ambulance chasing days follow including first hand aftermath footage of, amongst others: a guy who got into a motor scooter accident and looks like a skin chalupa crammed full of guts, a lady stabbed to death with an eerie ceiling fan lingering above her, and a guy with his head split open displaying a plethora of webbed meninges everywhere.  One scene in this grouping of shorts I particularly like is a scene in an apartment above an alley where a guy has passed away by what seems to be natural causes while surrounded by his family and a lot of confused emergency service crew looking at each other trying figure out how to get this dude out of the apartment two stories up.  Take note kids, a lot of people don’t realize when you die you have to be transported to either a funeral home or morgue before you turn into a heap of jellied human jambalaya hosting a maggot orgy.  So the next time you think about shooting up and jerking off with a bag around your head, don’t fucking do it in your attic unless you weigh 80 pounds!  Moving along.  

One of Tsurisaki’s more elaborate shorts included in JUNK FILMS is of the Vegetarian Festival on Phuket Island, Thailand.  If you haven’t partied at the vegetarian festival you ain’t livin.’  These guys wail the fuck out of themselves on the back with blades until they split open like a hyman being ripped apart by a Los Angeles Laker.  After that stunt they stick guns, bars, and swords through their faces and follow in procession through the city.  I predict in 30 years this shall replace the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and we can all kill ourselves at any point before that happens.  Really, all we are missing is keg stands, twerking, and high fives and we got one hell of a vegetarian party!  But seriously this stuff is fucked up to watch and these people must have balls the size of skulls! Too bad that’s probably the reason smite was delivered to Phuket shortly after these films were shot in the form of a tsunami created by the righteous Pat Robertson and Jesus. 

The last scene in JUNK FILMS drove me fucking crazy and I really wish I didn’t ever have to watch it again.  Taking place in a nicer than nice looking crematorium, a group of Japanese people in their 30’s surrounds an urn containing the cremated remains of their buddy.  Instead of their brain using a two second buffer to restrain some of their idiotic comments, this group of hip folks just spout out the fucking stupidest shit for twenty minutes about death, and dying, and bones, and blah fuckin’ blah fuckin’ blah!  I cannot believe no one has ever pointed out to them how ANNOYING they sound as they try to weigh out life’s ultimate mysteries!  I bet Mr. Cremated Remains committed suicide because listening to these introspective morons for a short amount of time made me want to swallow a bee hive and ask a bear to fuck it out of me!

Other than that scene, I enjoyed JUNK FILMS quite a bit.  Tsurisaki did a good job making every segment interesting; whether it was with editing, camera effects, spooky music, or the subject matter itself, JUNK FILMS stands apart from the otherwise distended corpse known as the death film genre. There are a lot of scenes in this film I didn’t chat about so don’t let my brief synopsis throw you, it’s well worth picking up!

For Purchasing go to 

http://massacrevideo.com/site/shop/junk-films-standard-dvd/

Blake and Jimmy’s Extreme-O-Gauge!

Violence/Gore: 5 out of 5, it’s a death film for real.

Rape: 0 out of 0

Animal Death: 0 out of 0, a nice reprieve from the usual animal massacre in death vids.

Necrophilia: 0 out of 0.

Torture: 0 out of 0, no one is seen tortured but I bet the family of the dead guy in an urn surrounded by his fucking moron friends at the funeral home were slightly tortured listening to those fucking idiots.

Overall Movie: 4 out of 5, very nice, very good, very well!

OROZCO THE EMBALMER!

By Jimmy Squarejaw

*WARNING*

All movies reviewed for SUNDAY SNUFF contain graphic depictions that may include rape, live animals being murdered, and extreme gore.  None of the writers condone such acts we just watch this shit. 

The funeral industry is an odd little enigma in the United States as well as our exposure and reaction to that little inevitable bastard known as death.  If you look at other cultures and how they treat their dead, how much exposure they get of death, and their beliefs towards death itself you’ll get a very different impression than the way we deal with it in the ol’ North American continent.  This week I’ll be chatting about Kiyotaka Tsurisaki’s documentary OROZCO THE EMBALMER released in the states by our good buddy Louis Justin’s company, Massacre Video.

OROZCO THE EMBALMER is about Froilan Orozco, the local embalmer in the “El Cartucho” neighborhood of Bogota, Columbia.  Kiyotaka does an amazing job scanning the landscape, capturing it on film to really paint the hellish conditions of this neighborhood.  The entire area looks like a bomb went off complete with hollowed out buildings, vast plots of land completely covered in garbage, and ramshackle homes that make Tijuana look like a kingdom.  Kiyotaka also captures a lot of the local flare in footage featuring drug addled vagrants and drug smuggling hookers with explosive tempers.  Once establishing a haunting atmosphere, Kiyotaka begins displaying the central character Froilan Orozco. 

Froilan Orozco is to me a typical Funeralista.  He is crass, blunt, and lacks any real emotion from decades of exposure to the worst shit imaginable.  He has been jaded doing the monotonous work of an embalmer for over forty years and doesn’t really mince words when it comes to complaining about corpses.  Froilan takes great liberty, I assume, calling almost everyone on his prep table a son of a bitch at one point then grabs a dead baby a little bastard.  Being in many a prep rooms with many seasoned morticians myself the gallows humor and rough exterior of Froilan is about as natural as the sun rising.  He looks at all of the corpses that roll through his business as a job that has a start and a finish and to the average Joe watching this that might sound unbelievable.   

From my standpoint, being an embalmer myself, I initially got interested in this movie to see the inner workings of Froilan’s prep room and his technique used.  Turns out he doesn’t really embalm anything, a fact I think is funnier than I can even begin to describe.  My ethnocentric mind immediately assumed there was a few universal procedures of embalming that are shared in some regard or another across the entire world.  What Froilan does is a little different than the typical embalming as we know it.  First he gets the deceased onto his prep table, a long metal table that has iron bars across the top of it so when he cuts open your stomach and fills your body with water he can roll you over to spill all of your guts out.  That’s after he disconnects all of your viscera and deflates all of the air pockets in your intestines of course.  The first time I saw this scene it reminded me that the pressure in your body is higher than the atmosphere, so when you get cut open your intestines pop out like that old gag gift snakes in a can, oh memories!  After he cleans off your guts, Froilan puts them into a bag and jams them back into your body cavity, pours formalin (a solution of water, high amounts of formaldehyde, and methanol) in you, jams some rags into you to maintain a normal looking body, and stitches you on up.  After that he puts cotton on a knife that looks way too big and fills your nostrils and mouth.  If I remember right Froilan explains a basic embalming like that equals about $40-$60 American dollars, and if you’re fat it’s more expensive so lay of the Carl’s Jr. and Arby’s folks. 

Kiyotaka visits with a few other embalmers and of course they all talk shit about each other and the shotty embalming jobs they all try to pass off as skill, just like in real life kids!  One of the other embalmers shows us how he preserves a body that’s about to go to a hot and humid area.  He takes a very big knife, lifts the upper lip and starts severing all of the connective tissue in the cheeks.  Then he switches to the eyes and jams the knife under the skin around the forehead and cheeks as well.  This was insane to watch to say the least but it was necessary to prevent moisture from building in the tissue from the humidity, I guess.  After embalmer #2 gets finished he takes an additional stab at Froilan stating he can preserve a body for 20 to 30 days and Froilan could not.

The film also goes to the scene of a few deaths where authorities arrive to investigate or lack there of.  A body dead in the street or wedged against a house is an everyday occurrence and in every scene all of the locals crowd around and watch the deceased get rolled around, stripped, and investigated for the cause of death.  Even little kids get a front row view, all of who look like they’ve seen the same scene hundreds of times and aren’t too disturbed by it, unlike all of the whimpering pussy 8 year olds we have in the United States. 

OROZCO THE EMBALMER could’ve been 3 hours long and it would have captivated me the whole way through.  The story is interesting and the filmmaker does an amazing job capturing a complete picture of the aging embalmer, the shit hole he lives in, and the daily activities he dutifully performs.  Do yourself a favor and pick this up at www.massacrevideo.com

Some additional insight to the movie and Froilan can be found here, http://www.orozcoelembalsamador.com/public_html/en/contents_who.html

      

Blake and Jimmy’s Extreme-O-Gauge!

Realistic Gore: 5 out of 5, it’s the real deal kids.

Rape: 0 out of 0.

Animal Death: 0 out of 0

Necrophilia: 0 out of 0, but if you look at the above website there is a monetary figure for this.

Torture:  0 out of 0, the dead feel no pain.

Overall Movie: 5 out of 5, this movie was incredible!