There is nothing I can really say about this fucking movie.
That line could be read as negative. I could be about to lunge into a critique of this film's many structural flaws. But no, that's not really what this fucking blog is at all. Of course I love this movie. I cherish this movie beyond many other movies like it, and it is a movie that is so much a part of my life that I've already exhausted words about it elsewhere. I've written about this movie semi-professionally in college, and I've shared it with literally everyone I've met. Whether they've watched it or not I don't know. It should be watched. It is a movie that is honestly shocking to behold, no matter what walk of life one comes from. To fans of "good" movies, movies like 2001 or Citizen Kane, it will be an offensive shock. To fans of "bad" movies, like Birdemic and Saving Christmas and maybe even some sprinklings of Driller Killer or Manos, it will also be an offensive shock. However, you will come to love it. The pain it brings is so self-evidently proud of the accomplishments it stems from. It is, like so many movies I love, a movie that has taken the limits of poverty and transformed them into riches and boundless constructs that sometimes rival the "good" movies of their environments. I would rather watch Mautier than Truffaut. I do have to wonder who the harder watch is, however.
Ogroff is atmospherically dark, visually ambitious, bizarrely comical, and disturbingly well-plotted. The movie opens with many seemingly unrelated scenes of Ogroff, a masked trepanned killer who lives in the French woods in a shack full of porn and axes, killing several people. He also eats them, feeds bits of the bodies to zombies in his basement (more on that later), and masturbates with an axe substituting his dick. More importantly, he engages in a duel with a chainsaw-wielding lumberjack that is as or more gripping than a middle-school fanfic of some crossover with Leatherface. (If you have a sense of humor this will be very gripping.) Chessboards, chainsaws, and children--none are safe from the axe of Ogroff, who reminiscences over how he served and was presumably disfigured in World War II. There is almost no dialogue, and even with subtitles the dialogue present is meaningless. ("Walking's good for you, you stupid bitch!") This all leads up to where he meets a lady friend...and the rest is history. Let us just say that the movie attempts to pass off the sadistic child-killing cannibal as a knight in shining armor, and partially works.
Every so often in my fiction you'll come across a reference to Ogroff. I could write forever on it, and how precious it is as an example of refined Eurotrash. Talking about be-alls and end-alls, however, is rarely interesting, which would lead me to instead talk about the fine details. But as ever, the fine details are not particularly related to one another. Blood drips out of a crushed car over a stick of Donald Duck. A woman changes oil in her car. Flies buzz while people are tied to stakes. But sometimes, truer scenes will enter--most are disturbing. Ogroff decapitates a child and feeds her mom's tongue to a dog. Other times, they will feature things like Ogroff bursting out of a woman's locked car trunk without any setup. Those times are amusing. The movie is a real slushy cocktails of a bunch of different types of stories, and it's made for so very little...
It's the archetype of a trash movie superstar. Imaginations fill the empty voids of "normal" or "workable" budgets or filming conditions. Everything is wrong, and yet the ambition replaces the wrongness with innocence. Even when Ogroff, who has probably not showered in forty years if this movie is set at the time of release, sleeps with a random woman who stumbles into his shack from the woods. I think she might be a reporter. In any case, she's fine with him being a killer and everything. She ripped a man's head off, after all. However, it's tough living the life with Ogroff. Sometimes, you'll accidentally free all the zombies he keeps trapped under his property, which he's been keeping locked away and placated using the remains of his victims. Whoops. And away Ogroff goes--in pursuit of his lady-love, wielding an axe on a motorcycle. With a helmet over his nailed-on mask, even. That's, like, seven different movies, or maybe it just feels like that. It is legendary. It is...
I can't say anything else or it will genuinely ruin it. You'll see. I haven't mentioned Howard Vernon in it. He's only in there for a little bit, and it's a good glimpse to prepare for the Howard love that will appear on this blog. You better like long shots of zombies wandering, though. Of course that was how the movie was going to end up--that disconnected craziness cannot last forever. However, those early glimpses create a great tower for the ending to sit on. We see at the end that this is a world of crazy: Evil Eyes, werewolves, vampires, zombies, and masked serial killers. It all concludes as humbly as it began. This is an every fact of life for this part of the French wilderness. That's all it is.
I suppose now I've gone and told everything. I couldn't help it--it is constantly a presence in my mind now. Perhaps it is something malevolent...I have noticed that I'll notice things almost every time I rewatch, and I've rewatched it about two dozen times. I think that's a sign that the movie changes. Let me know if this affects you, too. I've been trying to see what it wants with us.
Portents aside, Ogroff is still a thing of divinity. It is beyond our words, and thus, something-something Sapir-Whorf, I believe it is beyond our world as well. For good or for ill. Watch it.
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