Cutups

APPARENTLY, SEVERAL special effects teams got the same bad/good idea at the same time: playing with the bagel slicer. This gruesome device was up there with the brain-parer orb of Phantasm: both Resident Evil and Ghost Ship included an all-too-memorable slice-and-dice scene, of a military unit getting cut through with a laser guided by a bad building and a dance floor of passengers being bisected by a high-speed ship's cable, respectively. Of course, these scenes have to be drawn out to oogey degrees, with the viewer wondering if anything really happened, until a thin line of blood appears and body parts start sliding apart with the sound that cold cuts make under a knife. Attribute it to the cross-sectioned horse imagery of The Cell, excessive C.G. twiddling, or a morbid, wartime fascination with innards – I have my own name for this weird, incredibly strange trend: the Deli Meat Effect. (Chun)