John’s Horror Corner: Laid to Rest (2009), viciously gory with truly innovative death scenes.

MY CALL: This movie’s death scenes are outrageously awesome. If you’ve bypassed this movie thinking “yeah, it doesn’t look that great” and you like gory death scenes, you need a strong course-correction. Because that’s what this movie is: a last dying breath of innovative “death scene” fresh air. MORE MOVIES LIKE Laid to Rest: For another gory, mean, pleasant surprises from the 2000s slasher genre, consider The Hills Run Red (2009).

After waking up in a casket, a woman (Bobbi Sue Luther; Night of the Demons, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, Happy Horror Days) has no memory of her identity or how she got there. About as quickly as the mortician comes to her aid (a brief appearance by Richard Lynch; Halloween, The Lords of Salem, Necronomicon: Book of the Dead, Puppet Master III, Alligator II) he has rebar plunged through his torso by a Chromeskull-masked slasher (Nick Principe; Xenophobia).

After escaping this murderer, Cindy (Lena Headey; The Purge, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Dredd) hesitantly takes her into her home only to have this Chromeskull killer impale his knife through her temple quicker than you can recognize her from Game of Thrones. It’s unapologetically abrupt… and I very much appreciate that.

The gore is… innovative. Chromeskull twists his knife back and forth in Cindy’s skull and we see her eyeball rotate accordingly. And when he yanks it out, the sticky drippy sound effects are a gross delight as fluid dumps out of her gaping headwound. For his next kill, he stabs (Johnathon Schaech; Flight 7500, Prom Night, Suitable Flesh) through both cheeks and then scythes off the entire from half of his skull. It’s awesomely gross! You see everything you could ever want in an effects scene like this.

Our amnesiac final girl keeps recruiting help from strangers, neighbors, gas station attendants and the like, and gets (nearly) all of them horribly butchered. It’s funny how I keep recognizing actors and they end up getting killed right away. This movie is murderously persistent and bloody relentless. The gore packs a memorable punch with the heavily lacerated, bloody flesh of the victims. Chromeskull slits one victim’s throat back and forth so roughly it’s like he was sawing off her head, he explodes a man’s (Sean Whalen; The People Under the Stairs, Hatchet 3, Halloween II, Idle Hands) face with an air can to the ear, and a gunshot detonates a head into raspberry jam. This gore looks sloppy and sounds juicy. I love it!

There is a lot in this movie that could benefit some explanations… like why does Chromeskull literally glue this chrome mask to his face? Why does he have a shoulder-mounted video camera to record his handy work? Why does he have a Chromeskull vanity license plate? Another thing that doesn’t get properly explored or explained is that there are lots of dismembered cadavers of naked women—although I think we’ve now discovered Chromeskull’s hobby. Chromeskull also has a talent for removing bullets (from inside his own body) and suturing his wounds. He probably has a cool backstory. But this movie doesn’t get into it. And the fact that all these questions go unanswered is, well, just fine actually. Because this film is excellent at what it pursues—butchering human flesh in shocking and inspired ways.

The flesh-melting, face-peeling finale is a great gore gag complete with sucking sloppy sounds and a mangled deteriorated skull-face. As this occurs, our amnesiac final girl escapes with passerby (Thomas Dekker; A Nightmare on Elm Street, Village of the Damned) who picked the wrong gas station that day.

This movie was WAY cooler than I expected. For the sake of simply pleasing the gorehound in me, this was truly awesome. The gore was innovative. Not just that, but the acting and production quality were pretty solid even if the plot was very basic. This is among the better modern slashers I’ve seen! I wish director and writer Robert Hall (Fear Clinic, Chromeskull: Laid to Rest 2) had done more movies.