1. Kill List
Uwe Boll's 2007 horror
Seed contains an extended scene in which an elderly woman is shown strapped to a chair and bludgeoned to death by a masked man. Although the sight of a hammer clashing with flesh is, understandably, terrifying to begin with, such repetition and over-the-top gore quickly renders the film into a video game; needlessly shaking the frame with every blow. At the end of its five-minute duration, any shock or subtlety has long since gone. It may be an oddly inappropriate adjective to reach for but, yes, it is boring. Perhaps this is Boll's commentary on an increasingly desensitised audience, or perhaps it's just not a very good scene. Who can say? There are further questions to be asked of
Kill List, a film best watched through the gaps between your fingers, but those are the ones that will keep you awake at night. The story follows ex-soldiers Jay (Neil Maskell) and Gal (Michael Smiley) as they become contract killers for a client whose hit- list includes some seemingly unconventional targets. Far from being your typical crime thriller, there's something much more unnerving waiting for us in the finale... But first, the list. After deciding to pay a house visit to Target Number Two, a man known only as The Librarian (Mark Kempner), Jay and Gal tie their victim to a chair and subject him to the most horrific torture imaginable. Given what they know about him, (or perhaps more accurately, what they've been led to believe) such violence is seemingly justified. Cigarette burns to the neck are one thing, but the introduction of a hammer is quite another. Because of its everyday, domestic setting, the film detaches itself from the multi-angled, super-stylised sheen of torture porn and instead favours a more naturalistic feel. As a result, you feel as though you're right there in the kitchen with them, panicking, pulsing and complicit in their crime - and yet, of course, you're equally as helpless. Just when you think/hope you are to be spared the final blow, director Ben Wheatley reminds us that he has other ideas. But what makes this scene so utterly chilling, so indelibly etched into the back of your mind is the curious, and frustratingly unrealised, question: why did the man beaten to death in his own home, the man who immediately resigned himself to two strangers on a tip-off, the man who committed unspeakable (and, for an audience, unseen) horror; why did this man look his killers in the eye and splutter a heartbreakingly earnest '
thank you'?