In movies, you're the voyeur, in the former, you're the player. Inevitably the BBFC's concerns crawl back to that complex, age-old passivity versus interactivity argument. And let's not forget who our victims supposedly are in Manhunt 2, either. Call it a photo-realism thing, or the fact that such accounts were being perpetrated on emotionally more developed and humanistic characters (both very significant factors), but while I was disturbed by the brutal raping of The Hills Have Eyes remake, and the spine severing of Wolf Creek, I don't ever recall wincing at Manhunt 2's violence once. However, if it's the grimace-provoking gore and relentless sadism that has ruffled the BBFC, then consider that the impact of watching the likes of The Devil's Rejects and Hostel were (for me personally, at least) far more powerful and repellent than the executions in Manhunt 2.
It all seemed to point to one resounding fact - that Rockstar must surely have cocked up somewhere on a spectacularly grand scale.
This, the normally liberating BBFC, who were passing torture scenes on innocent victims in movieland, and had yet to viciously waggle a finger at a video game since Carmageddon in the late '90s. Just two days prior to my visit, the BBFC had famously denied Rockstar's 'stalk 'n slash' sequel an age rating, condemning it for "unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone". Oh sorry, let me introduce you to the world of Manhunt 2 by the way.
And blood, conspiring with those great schlocky sound effects, was rampant in full glorious flow. Soon I was being treated to some tastier, more stylised set pieces as villains were multi-punctured in iron maidens and winched to the ceiling on giant, two-pronged hooks. Up ahead, flashing on a giant screen, gentle-looking amnesiac Daniel Lamb (a twisted joke, surely?) was smashing in some stranger's head (presumably, a bad person) with a heavy slab from a toilet system while taking a pee.Ĭrrraacckkk (or it could've been more of a crrrrunnnchhh - either way, there were some pretty gratifying sound effects going on there that suggested this wasn't some lazy-arsed robbing of the BBC sound library). Now let's take a small jaunt back to the previous week, perched on the tip of a black, leather sofa, as I was, in Rockstar's cosy office in London's billionaire playground of Chelsea. Another day in the age of the sado-horror flick. Limb amputation, bloody scalping and wide-awake brain surgery, all orchestrated on whiter-than-white victims by deranged, dribbling killers, whose mockery of classic genre convention saw them not only kick shit in such hideous fashion, but get away with the whole damn thing too. Like its demented follow-up The Devil's Rejects, it was a crass lesson in subversive terror, spooning out the splatter in big, thick globs. Last week's routine trawl of the DVD trade-in dug up a £2.50 copy of Rob Zombie's horror film debut House Of 1000 Corpses.