Cannibal, Exploitation, Violent, Euro, Trash, Sleaze; DVD - New Sealed "The genius of this film is impossible to put into words. There are times when the celestial bodies which rule our fates like the machined cogs of so many gears in an enormous and ethereal mechanism come together at one moment of perfect alignment to produce an event of such staggering proportions that it stands out like a beacon of what it means to be human. Such is the nature of this film. The script, acting, special effects, and the music - oh the music! - are all sublime. The direction is GENIUS. This, surely, is cinema at its very greatest." --- Ernesto Guerriero

Gaspar Noe, Disturbing, Violent, Revenge; DVD - Used 'I Stand Alone' goes where few movies dare these days. It presents a portrait of hatred, disgust, despair and nihilism. Many would probably not like to face up to the fact that people like "The Butcher" exist in our society, but they do. By ignoring them we compound the problems they present and represent.  Philippe Nahon plays a middle aged unemployed French butcher who is trapped in a loveless relationship with his pregnant girlfriend (Frankye Pain). She has some money and uses it as a power trip, promising to set him up with a new shop. When that doesn't eventuate he attacks her in a fit of rage, and leaves with a gun and three bullets. He heads back to Paris with no money and no prospects. As he sinks lower and lower into hopelessness his anger intensifies, and his mind races with fantasies of violence and revenge. This is a confronting and profoundly disturbing movie, mainly because of it's realism and believability. While it certainly features some scenes of extreme violence, and one scene of explicit pornography (blurred in the print I watched), most of what makes it so powerful and horrible is the almost non-stop venomous monologues of "The Butcher". Director Gaspar Noe self consciously apes Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver' in several scenes, but this movie is a truly original vision. Highly recommended for movie buffs with strong stomachs, and the ability to deal with dark and troubling material.

Dark, Depressing, Disturbing, Historical, Documentary; DVD Witness, if you will, just a smattering of the horrors within: A ten-year-old boy and his younger brother run away from home, find a remote farm several miles away and promptly blow the owner’s head off. They spend the rest of the summer frolicking at the ill-gotten farmhouse until the farmer’s brother comes for a visit. The boy is sentenced to life in jail.   A funeral director is suspected of botching a burial. The woman’s body is exhumed and the woman is found to have been buried alive, her fingers bitten half off in madness after discovering her horrific fate.  A sixty-year-old woman, afraid that the rash on her back would kill her, steps into her backyard, douses herself with gasoline and self-immolates.  A young mother takes her three children out for a day at the beach, and then drowns them, one by one, while the others watch. A fifteen-year-old Polish girl burns down her employer’s barn—and his house—because she wanted some “excitement.”  A young German man, having only moved to Black River Falls a month prior, attempts suicide by train, lying down on the tracks and refusing to move. He is finally removed by four men. He later vanishes. A teenage girl, jilted at the altar by her fiance, goes mad with grief, hanging herself in the local asylum. Meanwhile a young man, also recently jilted, shoots his ex-fiance and then himself. A recently divorced man shoots his ex-wife and her family dead in the crowded town square. An outbreak of diphtheria kills off a score of local children. The school is closed and the houses of the afflicted burned to the ground. A formerly world famous opera singer moves to town and within a month is reduced to eating chicken feed to survive.  A farmer decapitates all of his chickens and burns down his farmhouse, convinced that the devil has taken over his farm. A drifter is taken in by a kindly family. He has dinner with them and as they sleep, he shoots them all and then himself. And there’s more, so much more. Just endless misery death, murder, mutilation, arson, starvation, cruelty and unrelenting depression. And all in the space of just a few years