Chop

You know by now this isn't going to change your life or how you define film, so let me tell you what it can do for you. A perfectly decent latenight comedy horror viewing, made proportionately better by how much beer at hand.

The guy behind this grinded his teeth working at Troma, so he knows film as Lloyd Kaufman taught it; make your own damn movie, doesn't matter how cheap or choppy so long as the game is agile, self-aware and one step ahead of you dear viewer. This is done on the cheap but is all the rest. The setup here is that our likable guy is being quite literally chopped away until he can remember how he affected others. Turns out he was a pain in the ass junkie before he cleaned his act. Strangers are brought in to take a piece. Our half-mad psycho keeps taunting for an answer.

There is some gore and some tension involved that is probably being spoofed from Hostel - our guy looks a little like Roth anyway - but this is pitch black comedy first and foremost, like Trome used to do it minus too much explicitness. So throw some weirdness on screen that you know is going to attract a crowd, then be a good host and make everybody have a good time. This one does, up to the halfway point at least.

The downside: it's a great premise, our guy wakes up and fingers are missing. It hinges a lot of its power on us feeling genuinely sorry for the plight of our awkward protagonist. But that's the whole thing and it's not taken further. While enjoyable and riproaring for a while, it gets tedious in the latter stages.

The Pegg/Wright team could have done this with more acerbic wit, a young Sam Raimi with some cinematic verve. It would have been a classic in both cases.