Shrapnel Games Blog

Over the weekend I found myself traveling down the seedier streets of the ‘net. No, I wasn’t scouring Google images for Dominions porn, but while checking out some movies I ended up on the site for a rather bloody independent horror flick.

I won’t mention the name, or point to the site, because frankly it doesn’t really need the publicity. In the past few years a new genre has arisen in indie fright flicks, that of the pseudo snuff film. These are gore films without any redeeming values, designed only to shock and disgust. Films like August Underground or Scrapbook. Films that make Cannibal Holocaust and other Italian gorefests look like Citizen Kane.

This particular flick, judging from the production stills and clips, is a non-stop misogynistic splatfest. See naked woman tied to a chair get her head sliced in twain with a chain saw. See naked woman drown and then get her throat slit. See naked woman get her face sliced off. See semi-naked woman corpse with her infant clinging to her lifeless body. See 9/11 images. Hunh? But yeah.

It’s revolting. Disgusting. I just hope everyone involved had enough common decency to at least once a day during filming stop and go, “Jeez, we’re some effed up individuals, ya know?”

I mean look, I don’t mind gory movies. I listen to death/gore/black metal. Anyone who’s played in one of my RPG sessions knows that when PCs encounter evil, they encounter E-V-I-L. But still, gore for gore’s sake is just pointless. And well, frankly, a tad bit immature. I must be getting old because I definitely get tired of shock for shock’s sake.

Now, have you ever seen anything as repulsive as some of these indie flicks in a computer game? No. Nothing has ever come close.

The Soldier of Fortune series, for all the hoopla about its dismemberment and disembowelment engine, still looked like polygons splashed with red instead of crime scene photos. It wasn’t disturbing unless your reality was a Cubist one.

The Postal series? Please. Start off with the fact the games suck as games before moving on to the so-called controversial issues, of which none are any worse than your average first person shooter.

Grand Theft Auto? Again, much ado over nothing.

Anyway, it never ceases to amaze me the brutality that is depicted by so many other mediums, and in a much more graphic and more realistic fashion than any computer game has ever done, and yet everyone wants to pick on gaming. I’ve talked ad nauseum over the past decade on computer games and violence so I’m not really looking to get into that whole discussion, I just wanted to share an observation. I know I can’t be the only one who often wonders why other entertainment industries seem to get a free pass…