In the 80s, we thought we’d be bombarded by nuclear missiles. Instead, we were bombarded by films about nuclear missiles. The United States initiated this conflict in 1983, with WarGames and The Day After. The USSR retaliated in 1986 with Letters of a Dead Man. The United Kingdom wasn’t slow to unleash its own nuclear missile film arsenal, with Threads exiting the bomb bay doors in 1984 and the animated When the Wind Blows following in 1986. Fortunately, the average film has a very small radioactive footprint, or none of us would have survived.

“Threads” is probably the most memorable of these films. It traumatized children upon its release, and even now it’s a compelling watch.

The film opens like a sitcom, with a couple in Sheffield decorating their flat. Television broadcasts warn of impeding nuclear war. Usually, sitcoms have to deal with their cast quitting the show, aging out of their role, or getting caught snorting coke. Threads solves the problem by killing almost the entire cast, and a great many people besides.

Soon, the cold war becomes extremely hot, and the world is engulfed by a three gigaton nuclear firestorm. Regrettably, some people actually survive. The rest of the film documents their struggles in the desolate aftermath. Society collapses to subsistence level. Basic wants are in dire need. We start to wonder about genetic mutations and birth defects, and the final scene gives you a lot to think about.

There are a lot of unforgettable images in Threads. A woman cradling a charcoal-black baby. Glass milkbottles instantly flash-melting. A burning cat. After nuclear winter collapses the biosphere, we see a door to door salesman selling dead rats for meat.

The film is almost comically grim, and you start to wonder if it’s supposed to be a parody of nuke films. If it is, it fooled me. I can’t find a single moment where the cast (or director Mick Jackson) winks at the camera – everyone handles the material with dour seriousness.

The BBC’s small budget works well for the film, giving it a filthy, lived-in quality. Sometimes the cheapness adds a new dimension to the horror, as in the hospital scene where open wounds are being sterilized with supermarket containers of Saxa salt.

There’s something intrinsically frightening about nuclear weapons. Perhaps it’s their hopelessness, and the way they knock the traditional rules of war into a cocked hat. Once, better weapons meant you were in a favorable position. Bill has a stick, and uses it to guard his food. Bob has a bigger stick, and uses it to take Bill’s food. So far, so good. But now Bill has a B53, and Bob has a RS-28, and now when they go to war neither of them will win. There will be no Bill, no Bob, and no food to fight over. They’re the most ghastly “off switch” ever achieved. And the only way to prevent their use is to…make more of them?

This is the sort of movie that dirties your TV screen or monitor. You think, your finger will come away coated in dirt and soot. It is a fantastic film that I don’t plan on seeing again, which I think was the goal.

Once, I heard a description of Family Guy that cuts right to the heart of the show’s failings. “The Simpsons, if every character was Homer.” Everyone’s crazy, everyone’s a clown, everyone’s the Lord of Misrule. Everyone’s a Punch and nobody’s a Judy. It’s a common failing in comedy: “the straight guy is boring. The screwball gets the laughs. So if we eliminate the straight guy and have two screwballs, it will be twice as funny!”

The straight guy provides ballast, you fool. Comedy’s like a game of table tennis. You can get pretty creative playing it, slamming balls off the wall while standing on your head. But it only works if you have a stable, unmoving net.

Ichi the Killer is not quite a comedy but has a similar weakness. It draws us (or perhaps anti-draws, given that it’s an adaptation of a Hideo Yamamoto manga) into the world of sadistic yakuza enforcers, and asks us to bask in the sangfroid of one particular sadistic yakuza enforcer, who is different to the others to the extent that he has scars on his face.

I don’t know what’s supposed to be shocking and awful and Ichi. Everyone in this film is a repulsive person. Gangsters crack jokes while scraping bloody remains off ceilings. Sociopathic prostitutes manipulate their johns. The movie sets gray against a backdrop of slightly lighter gray. It’s a good setting, but it needs some contrast. It needs a “straight guy”. It’s Family Guy all over again. If Homer’s the baseline, then Homer stops seeming shocking and funny – he’s just just the way things are.

I like the scars on Ichi’s face. A “Glasgow smile”, as they call it a few thousand miles away. The film’s best scene comes early on, where we see Ichi blow smoke through the cuts.

Elsewhere, the film’s aesthetic is less successful. The violence is undercut by the fact that 1) the effects are cheap and 2) the acting doesn’t sell us on the brutality. There’s a scene where Ichi tortures a man by puncturing his cheeks with an alarmingly huge pin…and in between bouts the man speaks calmly and lucidly. It’s like watching a WWE pay-per-view where wrestlers bounce back up after getting chairs smashed over their head.

Later, the effects team just gives up trying. CGI looked better in 1993. The remaining wheels fall off the movie’s wagon when we get to horrible special effects that look like a SyFy movie made in an antifreeze lab.

I haven’t read the manga, although I read Yamamoto’s other big work: Homunculus. It was fascinating, for what it was, but he doesn’t seem to be very adaptable as a mangaka. That might have been Ichi the Killer’s undoing. Generally, there are two schools of adapting manga: the first is to capture everything, the second is to try to capture the “spirit”. Both of them can fail horribly, but in unique ways. Judging unseen, this feels like the first case. You can’t shove ten volumes of manga into a DVD player, and you shouldn’t even tr

This was crying out to be something like that Cronenberg film, Eastern Promises, particularly that scene in the bathhouse, involving linoleum cutters. That moment was what this movie dreams of being when it grows up. Now, it’s just blowing smoke.

Not the best Japanese gore porn film (who would want to be the best?) but one of the most famous. A man abducts a woman and dismembers her with a camera rolling. It doesn’t sound like much when I describe it, but it won’t seem like much when you watch it, either.

Apparently Charlie Sheen thought it was real (no doubt while tooting more than just his flute) and called the FBI. That seems to be the time-honored route of fame in the gore porn film industry – try to hint that it might be real. Eventually an actual snuff film will make it to market, and we’ll all call it a boring publicity stunt.

Supposed horror legend Hideshi Hino both directs and plays the killer. He’s more often associated with manga, which are a different beast entirely. His manga efforts (Hell Baby, and so forth) resemble a Japanese Goosebumps, complete with fill-in-the-blanks storylines and a cast of characters that you wonder even he doesn’t forget. The gore is offset by a cartoonish, exaggerated art style – you can imagine children reading Hino’s manga, but this, not so much.

Viewers will find two possible routes of enjoyment: first, the gore, and second, analysing the special effects. It’s a low budget film, and a lot of it isn’t very well done. The woman’s flesh has a rubbery quality. The blood seems like copiously squirted cherry juice. Much of the film is shot in extreme close-up, focused on a single body part that’s an obvious prosthetic. The production quality can be described as “muddy, dark, and distressed” – adding a gritty grindhouse quality at the expense of us actually being able tos ee see what’s going on. You’ve heard of Hollywood’s famous L-shaped bedsheets? Where the male lead has his chest exposed and the female lead has her chest covered? Here the woman’s body spends so much time covered up, she’s practically a goddamn Quaker. The movie takes a lot of care to hide bad special effects, but it’s all in vain.

The admin of the legendary shock site rotten.com was once asked how he knows the gruesome pictures on his site are real. He said something to effect of “I just do”, which is pat, but also probably accurate. He also mentioned that they received large volumes of fake pictures, and that they were usually quite easy to spot.

Little tells always gave the fake pictures away – tricky camera angles, harsh lighting, conveniently poor photo quality. It’s pretty obvious: if a murderer really did dismember someone and make a snuff film, he’d capture it in the best quality possible. Remember the Mitch Hedberg gag about Bigfoot being a blurry, pixelated monster roaming the landscape? It’s the same for gore porn. If the real stuff ever appears, we can assume it will be in 1080p. Fuck this dark, murky crap. It’s for wannabe auteurs and professional fakes.

I like extreme art, but for something like this you really need…more. Of what? Almost anything. Some individuality. Some personality. Something that would separate it from a film generated at random by a sophisticated computer. There’s exactly one interesting angle (Hino wears a samurai outfit), and a lot of fake WWE blood. Apparently, some of the other Guinea Pigs are more story focused. I’ll probably never know. The sad truth is that a perfect gore porn film will probably never be made: anyone ready to outlay the necessary money will want it to be marketable enough to sell. Flower of Flesh and Blood is an interesting historical curiosity, but those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.