Movies about Severed finger
Brendan Gleeson torches his longtime relationship with Colin Farrell in Martin McDonagh’s new dramedy.
T hough 2017 feels like several lifetimes ago, movie devotees may recall that Martin McDonagh‘s last film — Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — drew a mixed reception, each critical lashing paired with another heap of awards nominations. But for his long-awaited return to feature directing, McDonagh’s going back to Ireland and back to basics, erring toward the acidic banter of In Bruges for his latest seriocomic portrait of stunted masculinity.
The first trailer for The Banshees of Inisherin came online this morning, and teased an odd premise: one day, seemingly out of nowhere, a man cuts off ties with his best friend. Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson) have been daily-hang buddies for decades, but something in Pádraic’s endless droning about the content of his pony’s droppings has finally broken his reluctant audience, who’s had enough.
Colm draws a line, and his pal’s refusal to accept the sudden dissolution of his life’s most meaningful interpersonal relationship forces Colm to grow more extreme in his establishment of boundaries, ultimately threatening to cut off a finger every time Pádraic tries to force him back into conversation. The confused, upset Pádraic seeks counsel from his sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) and local youth Dominic (Barry Keoghan, trying a bit of comedy on for size), but only sinks deeper into depression over his inexplicable loner status.
McDonagh once again rips open the divide between melancholy and levity, showing the miniature absurdities in the lives of discontented, searching people. And that still leaves the question of what Colm’s not saying, the explanation that his friend needs to hear before he can fully move on and leave the man alone. The writer-director-playwright is blessed with the gift of gab like few else, and he’s posed a clever challenge for himself by making a movie about someone who just wants all the talking to stop.
Upcoming premieres at Venice and Toronto will make this film a fixture of the fall festival season, and if the distributors at Searchlight Pictures have their druthers, awards season as well. Between this, God’s Creatures, and Enys Men, it’s shaping up to be a strong year for descendants of the Celtic peoples.
The Banshees of Inisherin comes to cinemas in the US on 21 October. A date for the UK has yet to be set.
HORROR TEN SPOT: Top 10 Cut Off Fingers
When I had attended this year’s 1st annual Toronto After Dark Film Festival, I watched this short by Dave Mcgrath entitled, Disfingered. (Check out the short’s website here:
www.disfingered.com ). It was about a man who keeps waking up each morning with one of his fingers cut off.
My friends made fun of me for being so creeped out by it, but it was that short that made me realize how squeamish I am by seeing fingers getting hacked off. I know I’m not the only one out there either who feels the same way, which is why I decided to do this week’s top ten on moments that always send chills up my spine. Thanks Dave for the inspiration!
WARNING – SOME SPOILERS AHEAD!
1. Nightwatch
Many of you may not have even heard of this film starring Ewan McGregor and Patricia Arquette, (rent it if you can find it!) but it has one of the most chilling scenes I have ever seen before in a thriller. When Josh Brolin’s character gets handcuffed to a table by the killer, he makes the brave decision to cut off his own thumb to get out of the situation. I still can not watch this scene entirely to this very day. I always thought the filmmakers of Saw were influenced by this scene, but I guess great minds think a like.
2. Ubytovna
A movie with sliced Achilles tendons, clipped off eyeballs, mutilations, a bloody train wreck… and its the sawed off fingers are what got me the most. (That and when Paxton cuts off the doctor’s fingers at the end.) The “tamest” part of the gore sequences, and it got me. I’m such a wimp. Please Mr. Roth, no more dis-fingered moments in Hostel 2!
3. Vlčí potok
This movie was very disturbing, but the surprising death scene of the lead heroine turned victim will forever be locked in my memory. The Aussie Killer just slices her fingers off in one swift gesture and then sticks the knife in her spine. It was a hard scene to watch, especially knowing it could have happened in real life, since the movie was based on true events.
4. Noční můra v Elm Street
If you’re a fan of this film, you know exactly what scene I’m talking about, since it’s the scariest f*cking scene in the movie. During the Tina chase sequence, Freddy pops up from behind a tree, calls Tina’s name and proceeds to cut off one of his fingers with his infamous Gansu knife glove.
This causes green blood to spurt out of the wound. I used to wonder why that was written in the script, and then I realized it’s because there’s other squeamish audience members like me who would be completed freaked out by seeing that. Good job, Wes for freaking us squeamish p*ssies out.
5. House of Wax (2005)
Think what you want about this so-so slasher remake, but you can’t tell me you weren’t somewhat shocked or surprised when you saw Elisa Cuthbert’s finger get clipped off. It caught me off guard, because in most slashers, you hardly see the leading lady get hurt like that. She may get roughed up a bit and go catatonic, but by the end of the night, all of her digits are usually in tact.
6. Demons
Dario Argento’s Demons is probably one of the goriest zombie films I have ever seen. I haven’t seen this movie for a while, but I remember the graphic and explicit scenes with zombies biting off the fingers of the movie patrons in the theatre. I’m not going to lie, the fast forward button was pressed a couple of times when I watched this.
7. Fakulta
Remember those guillotine style paper cutters your teachers used in school? Did you ever have the fear some dumb ass classmate was going to play with it and accidentally do something very stupid and cut all their fingers off? The reason for my fear of the paper cutter was depicted onscreen in Robert Rodriguez’s alien-thriller when Zeke (Josh Hartnett) uses it to cut off all the infected teacher’s (played by the great Jon Stewart) fingers off. The most disgusting thing was seeing the dismembered fingers scurry away like mice with the bones showing. Ick!
8. Fantasmus
It’s been years since I’ve seen the original Phantasm film, but one scene is still embedded in my memory. Watching The Tall Man not only get his fingers slammed in a door, but also get them all hacked off by Mike freaked the sh*t out of me. Also, seeing that yellow ooze come out of his wounds didn’t help either. Maybe it’s cheesy now, but it wasn’t when I was little.
9. Hory mají oči (2006)
Lot’s of people say the trailer scene affected them the most, but for me it was seeing Doug (Aaron Stanford) getting his fingers hacked off by the ax-wielding, Pluto. (That and hearing Beauty getting butchered.) Yup…forget torture, burnings, blown off heads, and rape, show a man getting his fingers cuts off and a dog being killed, and THEN you crossed the line. (Yes, I know…I need help.)
10. Čtyři pokoje
In Quentin Tarantino’s short for this film, we see Quentin, Bruce Willis, and Jennifer Beals trying to convince the bellhop (Tim Roth) to cut off their friend’s finger if he can’t light a lighter ten times in a row. The moment where Tim Roth easily chops off the finger was actually hysterical, but the scenes leading up to it, made me a little tense. I thought it was going to be a lot gorier than it was. I know this anthology film isn’t a horror movie, but when you have Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino involved, the movie is worthy enough to make it on the list.
DIGITAL NIGHTMARES: TEN WINCE-MAKING EXAMPLES OF FINGER OR TOE ABUSE IN THE MOVIES
What is it about fingers and toes that brings out the sadist in film-makers? Heads, arms, legs and ears all suffer their share of mistreatment in the movies, but once you start noticing digit abuse, you can barely sit down in a cinema seat without being confronted by some fresh yet horrible instance of finger or toe torture. Ever since 1935, when slivers of flaming bamboo were driven beneath Gary Cooper’s fingernails in Životy bengálského kopiníka, fingers and toes have been at the receiving end of some of the nastiest treatment known to man; they regularly get broken or severed or sliced and diced.
And not just in horror movies such as Ubytovna, where you more or less expect it, but in graphic novel adaptations (Sin City), period dramas (Jízda s ďáblem), action adventure (Vertikální limit, which rings the changes with a spot of frostbite and dislocation), buddy movies (Polibek Kiss Bang Bang), cop movies (Sharkyho stroj), fantazie (Prestige), even musicals (Malý obchod s hrůzami). It’s not hard coming up with examples; the hard part is picking just ten.
Maybe it’s because fingers and toes are phallic symbols. (Phalanges, phallus – hey, they even sound similar, so no wonder some people get confused.) And since there are (mercifully) limits to what you can show being done to private parts, screenwriters reach for the symbol instead.
Or maybe it’s simply because, while not everyone in the audience has personal experience of being strung upside-down and flayed alive, everyone can relate to a cut finger, a stubbed toe, an icky toenail. Take John Carpenter’s Věc, in which aliens are erupting left, right and centre in a barrage of extraordinary special effects. It’s when Kurt Russell decides to give everyone a blood test, and the characters start slicing their thumbs with a scalpel that you can really sense the audience wincing.
10 THE PIANO (1993) directed by Jane Campion.
Sam Neill axes off one of Holly Hunter’s fingers in this arty-farty Franco-Kiwi chick-flick with added crinolines and (courtesy of Oscar-winning Anna Paquin – what was the Academy myslící?) one of the most annoying child performances known to man. Would that Neill had done it sooner so we wouldn’t have had to listen to any more of Michael Nyman’s tedious tinkle-tinkle-plunk score. But does losing a finger stop her piano-playing? Does it heck – she simply straps on a metal prosthetic, which changes the score to tinkle-tinkle-plunk-zing.
Still, it’s not every day you get such uncompromising digit abuse in a chick-flick.
9 THE BIG LEBOWKSI (1998) directed by Joel Coen.
Trophy porn-star wife Tara Reid paints her toenails green, so it was a toss-up as to whether the Coen brothers’ slacker variation on The Big Sleep should be included here, or in Ten Shining Examples of Notable Nail Varnish. But when smarmy factotum Philip Seymour Hoffman hands Jeff Bridges an envelope containing a severed toe (with green-painted nail) wrapped in cotton wool, and millionaire David Huddleston exclaims, ‘By God sir, I will not abide another toe!’ we tip over into unambiguous digit abuse territory. And when later we get a close-up of a German nihilist’s foot, wrapped in a bandage stained with blood where the little toe should be, it seals the deal.
For other examples of toe abuse, see Den výplaty, Piráti a Jezero Placid.
8 TAXI DRIVER (1976) directed by Martin Scorsese
Když jsem poprvé uviděl Taxíkář, in the Leicester Square Theatre way back in 1976, I’d never heard of Martin Scorsese and, tempo Peckinpah, had yet to become blasé at the sight of blood not just pouring, but actually proudící out of gunshot wounds. It wasn’t as though I were expecting Carry on Cabbie, but even so, I was caught off guard by the bloodbath near the end. When Robert De Niro shoots the fingers off a man’s hand, I began to feel queasy. Then Harvey Keitel turns up and shoots De Niro in the neck, which squirts out blood, then De Niro shoots Harvey several times and gets shot again by another man, whom he then shoots several times, and then he bashes and stabs and shoots the fingerless guy, and then tries to shoot himself, but he’s all out of bullets and when the cops arrive there’s blood dripping off his finger as he points it has his head and makes pow! pow! noises. Which is when I had to put my own head between my knees to stop myself fainting. This has only happened to me twice in a lifetime of movie-going, and I’ve been wary of Scorsese ever since.
7 MAD MAX 2 (1981) directed by George Miller.
Miller’s post-apocalyptic version of Wacky závody, featuring warrior tribes dressed in leather S&M gear, serves of a winning hand of mythological archetypes. The Feral Kid has a razor-sharp boomerang. We know it’s razor-sharp because it has already sliced deep into the forehead of a pretty young catamite. The catamite’s psychopathic owner, a human attack dog called Wez, is so enraged he hurls the boomerang back at the Feral Kid, but of course the Kid ducks, and it comes swooping back towards the bad guys. The Toadie sticks up his hand, backpedalling furiously like a cricket fielder, and shouts, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ And zip! His fingers go flying. Cue all-round hilarity.
6 THE LORD OF THE RINGS: The RETURN OF THE KING (2003) directed by Peter Jackson.
It took place at the climax of an epic trilogy. It was essential to the plot. It was one of the most significant examples of digit abuse in the first half of the first decade of the twenty-first century. And yet no-one saw it, because the victim was invisible. Gollum bites off Frodo’s index finger, and with it the One Ring, before toppling backwards into the molten fires of Mount Doom, where both he and the much-sought-after bling are destroyed, leaving the now-visible Frodo with a stump.
But if you think that’s the end of Peter Jackson’s stonking great adaptation of Tolkien’s pointy-eared saga, you can think again, because there are still 40 minutes to go. And the questions remain. If Gandalf can send eagles to pick up Frodo and Sam at the end, how come they didn’t use Eagle-Air to fly straight to Mount Doom in the first place?
5 BLADE RUNNER (1982) directed by Ridley Scott.
There’s only one rogue replicant left for Harrison Ford to track down and ‘retire’. But barrel-chested Rutger Hauer turns the tables, and Ford the hunter ends up hunted, pursued through the upper floors of a dilapidated tower block. We’ve already seen Hauer crushing a man’s head with his bare hands, but he obviously can’t do that to the film’s star. So he punches through a wall, grabs Harrison’s gun hand, brings it back to his side of the wall and snaps two of his fingers like twigs, saying, ‘This is for Zhora. This is for Pris.’ And, scary though he is, it’s hard not to sympathise.
4 REPULSION (1965) directed by Roman Polanski.
Next time you go for a manicure in a London beauty parlour, make sure it’s not nutty Catherine Deneuve holding the nail clippers. A manicurist once accidentally sliced my cuticle, so I can attest to the accuracy of the amount of dripping blood that ensues when our girl sinks into one of her reveries while in possession of a sharp-bladed instrument.
The victim gets off lightly, of course, compared to the guys that come round to Deneuve’s South Kensington flat later on.
3 THE FLY (1986) directed by David Cronenberg.
Most digit abuse in the movies involves slicing or severing, and is visited on the victim by an outside party. The advanced digit abuse that occurs after Jeff Goldblum gets fused with a fly at a molecular-genetic level is self-inflicted, and will strike a chord with anyone who has ever squeezed a blackhead or picked at a scab. Goldblum stands in front of the bathroom cabinet and fiddles with his fingernail, which squirts pus all over the mirror. He continues to fiddle, and ends up lifting the fingernail clean off his finger.
For an artfilm version of self-inflicted fingernail removal, see Lodge Kerrigan’s Hladce oholený.
2 THE HITCHER (1986) directed by Robert Harmon.
Rutger Hauer has the questionable distinction of being responsible for not just one but two Top Ten instances of digit-related unpleasantness, the second of them in this feverish psycho-chiller that’s prevented from attaining classic status only by C. Thomas Howell’s tragic 1980s haircut. After escaping from Hauer’s clutches, the exhausted Howell stops at a roadside diner, where waitress Jennifer Jason Leigh (and we won’t even talk about what’s going to happen to her later on in the movie) serves him a burger and French fries. Howell, whose mind is on other things, like the truckfuls of people the hitcher has already slaughtered, absent-mindedly picks at his chips. Except the last one he picks up and moves towards his mouth isn’t a chip at all, it’s a… severed finger. Ewww.
1 THE YAKUZA (1974) directed by Sydney Pollack.
Trust the Japanese to turn digit abuse into a philosophy. Yubitsume is the yakuza ritual of severing the last joint of the little finger, wrapping it in cloth and offering it to one’s boss as a gesture of repentance. But since life is too short to catalogue all the severed pinkies and detached body parts flying around in the movies of directors such as Takashi Miike, Takeshi Kitano or Kinji Fukasaku, I’m wimping out and offering a Hollywood version místo toho.
This is not to be sneezed at by Japanophiles, however, for the screenplay is by Paul Schrader, with contributions from Robert Towne, and treats Japanese culture with appropriate respect, while the strong cast is topped by the dream team of Robert Mitchum, at his world-weariest, and Ken Takakura, veteran of many an authentic Japanese yakuza movie. Each actor cuts his little finger off, though not in the same scene.
Fifteen years later, Ridley Scott’s Black Rain, in which Takakura co-starred, also featured ritual finger-chopping, though Michael Douglas, the film’s star, contrived to emerge with digits intact.
Ten Places You Wouldn’t Expect to Find a Severed Head původně se objevil v Ten Bad Dates with De Niro, A Book of Alternative Movie Lists (Faber and Faber, 2007) edited by Richard T. Kelly. Please click on the image below for more information from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.
Mohlo by vás také zajímat:
TEN PLACES YOU WOULDN’T EXPECT TO FIND A SEVERED HEAD
SCARY BITS: PART 1
THE TOP TEN WALLPAPER MOVIES
THE THING: FIGURES IN THE FRAME
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7 thoughts on “ DIGITAL NIGHTMARES: TEN WINCE-MAKING EXAMPLES OF FINGER OR TOE ABUSE IN THE MOVIES ”
The scene from ‘Mad Max 2’ is a classic. Batty breaking Deckard’s fingers never fails to bring tears to my eyes. Talking of which, i’ll never forget the day in secondary school during P.E., when Steve Cree broke his index finger after it being hit with a basketball – his finger was bent completely backwards. The P.E. teacher ordered me to go and help him get changed, but i think i was a shade more hysterical than poor Steve was. A few more examples of movie finger abuse that i can think of:- the thumb amputation (which is followed by an arm amputation) in the original ‘Two Thousand Maniacs’ Alec Baldwin’s fingers (or was it just the tips? can’t remember) sliced off with a machete in ‘Miami Blues’ (i happen to think that the scene where his eyebrow is stitched back on was way worse though.) Jack Nicholson finding a severed finger in his pocket in ‘Wolf’ Barbara Hershey snipping Natalie Portman’s fingernails in ‘Black Swan’ Dwight Yoakam’s fingers caught in ‘Panic Room’s door (btw Anne, is there to be no Multiplex Heaven/Hell this year?)
Some nice (?) digit abuse there, thanks! I did a version of Multiplex Heaven/Hell for the Telegraph site. That was quite enough round-up for me. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10541381/And-the-cat-performance-of-the-year-is…..html
Batty is a very naughty killing machine, not only does he snap Deckard’s, fingers, a few scenes later he stomps on them again. KatBeck chops her own finger off in ‘Whiteout’, a film that would not normally get near a top-ten list of any sort, (and only came out a year after you wrote the original piece). There is a bit of finger abuse in ‘Resident Evil’, but only as an entrée, the owner of the digits does really have bigger problems than that to deal with I think some fingers ‘pop off’ in ‘Cube’ but again that is just a starter. Clint has his crushed in AFoD and then decides to put all this gunslinging malarky on hold whike he takes up metalwork for a bit..
Nice suggestions. Resident Evil, Cube… ah, I see what you’re getting at there. Slicey laser-beams, non? Also, doesn’t Batty even drive a nail through his OWN hand during that scene, when he feels himself slipping away? I saw Whiteout, but can’t remember the finger business – I was so bored I’d probably started doing something more interesting by that stage. Maybe an interesting tangent to go off on with films in which artists or experts (violinists, gunslingers, kung fu students etc) have their fingers sadistically crushed and then have to painstakingly recover their expertise, or learn to use their other hands.
Resident Evil, Oui! The Cube series does tend to favour the lower tech end of things, the thing I’m thinking of is like a giant egg slicer, it might have been Cube Zero?, Roy is chasing an adreniline rush, Harry Palmer uses a similar trick in Ipcress. ‘Whiteout’, good cast, terrible script, the fingers get frost damaged and have to come off, having looked it up, she doesn’t take them off herself as I thought, but spends bloody ages angsting about it. The actual severage is a major plot spoiler, so I’ll draw a veil over that. I did think of 3 more, (but only after I’d pressed post). Staying with Clint, ‘Escape from Alcatraz’, the painter loses it in the workshop and Clint in full snarly mode picks up the digits and thrusts them at the guard. In ‘Black Hawk Down’ somebody gets their thumb almost completely severed by bullet, it sort of flops about all tendons and blood until somebody else ties a hanky round it. (The film can be written off as MANLY MEN being MANLY, but pull back a bit. The whole film is a lesson in the folly of men. Split it into three acts, the first is pure testosterone filled willy waving, but this turns into ‘Assualt on P13’ for Act two, in Act three it shifts again into ‘The Warriors/Southern Comfort’ Not convinced? Not buying this ‘It’s an Homeric Journey’ rubbish, Thought not It is over long, and I will admit to zoning out from time to time just to drink in the cinematography, which is fantastic.) Now for a real trip back in time, I thought it was ‘The Twilight Zone’, but was wrong(again).It was a ‘Hitchcock Presents’ episode, ‘Man from the South’. Original story by Roald Dahl, starring Steve McQueen. A wager is struck around a cigarette lighter, a car is staked against a finger.
Rehab as a theme is hard to carry off, apart from ‘Yojimbo’ and the various clones/reimaginings, it does usually get reduced to weary old ‘We’re gonna need a montage!’ territory. Going upto the wrist does open it up to the obvious, Dr Julius No, Mr Han etc. But on the upside, ‘The Hands of Orloc’. That in turn spawned the insanely odd ‘Mad Love’.
oh lots of meaty stuff there! Hands is another issue entirely, and deserves another post of its own (in my Severed Body Parts series). The Beast with Five Fingers!
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