GUT

Tom (Jason Vail) is married to the hot Lily (Sarah Schoofs), with whom he enjoys bringing up their daughter Katie. He has an office job, a home, a family … but he’s bored. Even sex has become a chore for him.

Maybe the problem is that the family are planning to move out of his home area, suggesting more change than perhaps he’d wish for of his own accord.

His lifelong friend Dan (Nicholas Wilder), a clown in the workplace and possibly the only thing that keeps Tom going on a day-to-day basis in the meantime, is the first to realise this. In the café where the pair spend their lunch breaks, he remarks on how his mate has become withdrawn – to the extent that his once-insatiable appetite has all-but gone.

The bespectacled Dan, it transpires, is still single. What’s more, he’s still fixated on the single life of swigging down beers and watching horror videos that the pair used to share in their teens. In one early scene, we see him watching a (pretty funny) home video the pair made as teenagers, where they vow to grow up making horror films together.

Dan, then, gets an idea of how to cheer his best friend up: he orders a rather enticing horror tape from an obscure online source, and invites Tom round to view it with him.

Feeling guilty after a minor bust-up, Tom agrees to pop round Dan’s filthy apartment and watch the tape. It ends up being a crudely shot, unnervingly realistic (and plotless) depiction of an anonymous female having her stomach torn open by a fishing knife.

The night ends abruptly when Tom leaves the viewing in disgust. However, when he returns home, what he saw on the tape starts to play on his mind. Could it be that it has reawakened the teenager in him?

It’s probably more than that, to be fair, as he starts to hallucinate visions of huge bloody gashes in his wife and daughter’s stomachs. Furthermore, these disturbing images thrill him to the extent that his sex life with Lily improves to no end, as does his appetite at the aforementioned café. And not just with regards to the food, as the waitress will attest.

Meanwhile, more tapes fall through Dan’s letterbox as he finds it increasingly difficult to cope with what he witnesses on them. Especially when waitress Sally (Angie Bullaro) shows up getting gutted on one of them.

He shows the tape to Tom, and they both watch in horror as her belly is ripped open on the TV screen. Having decided against calling the police, it’s left to the two friends to get to the bottom of what’s going on …

It may seem like a vague synopsis, but I’ve talked you through over half of GUT there. And yet, this review is not riddled with spoilers (I do try my best never to do commit such a heinous crime) because the build-up is quite deliberately, and in a most considered fashion, slow.

Well, when I say ‘slow’ others may say ‘intense’. In truth, the film’s pace is somewhere between the two. It is a very measured form of storytelling from writer-director Elias, but it’s always engaging and never deviates from its extremely simple, economic set-up. Kudos to Elias – a.k.a. Biff Juggernaut, the psychotic mind behind THE VOICE INSIDE (if you haven’t seen this short, then you must do) – for making it work over the course of 90 minutes.

The sex scenes are genuinely erotic; Vail and Wilder make for a good double-act (the latter has a look and manic energy about him, both of which recall 80s-era Jeffrey Combs); the splatter is spread out sparingly for maximum impact; nods to VIDEODROME are unmistakable and yet never blatant.

Expertly composed, considered and lit, GUT is extremely well-shot. The acting is universally good too (yes, even the little girl). More sombre in tone than its synopsis perhaps suggests as well, this is a very interesting and sporadically mind-blowing low-budget effort with highly effective – if slightly repetitive – gore FX to boot.

Although only provided for review on a DVD-R, GUT looked very good in this uncut 16x9 presentation. It benefits from amazingly sharp detail and great, strong colours that add to its impressive depth and texture. I imagine the film is shot on HD – it certainly looks that way.

The English 2.0 audio track provided on the screener disc was also impressive, allowing for a consistent and well-balanced playback.

Elias/Juggernaut has progressed somewhat with this film, and I look forward to it earning a legitimate release on both sides of the continent (gory though the film can be, there’s nothing here that would trouble the BBFC – I don’t think so, anyway …). And there’s real evidence here that the director, with the right budget, could produce a genre masterpiece.

Review by Stuart Willis