Word: guignol
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...luckless trollop, and with a knife at least as big as the minute hand on Big Ben opens the poor girl from 'ere to 'ere. At such moments Hill hoses the screen with such a preposterous torrent of catchup that gross horror becomes Grand Guignol, and even the squeamish should concede that his sense of humor is simply ripping...
...York (once) in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960. Despite the efforts of the fire department, his machine destroyed itself. Since then, his bolt-and-nutty contraptions have been more durable. His Dissecting Machine (opposite page) is a gleeful guillotine a gogo, a Grand Guignol comment on man as the victim of his own existence. Says Tinguely: "Life is play, movement, perpetual change. From the moment life is fixed, it is no longer true...
...unnatural conditions of servitude. But Director Nico Papatakis and Scenarist Jean Vauthier twist this black theme into a cinema of absurdity that falls somewhere between the Marx Brothers and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? In its liveliest moments, Les Abysses is unwittingly hilarious, an amateur Grand Guignol about a pair of sleazy, sullen chambermaids running amuck in Bedlam. When they are not dancing or screaming, they stab the furniture with hatpins, chip the plaster, bring in termites, pulverize the best china, wallop their mistress, throw fish at her daughter, uncork the wine vat, scrape rubbish off the floor...
...PERSONALITY." He condemned it in Stalin, but he erected one around himself. His clowning, boorishness, shoe-pounding and endless references to buffaloes, wolves, tigers and housecleaners could at first be refreshing, in a weird way. But gradually Khrushchev became, in the words of the French Communists, "too Grand Guignol." Besides, he was stubborn and intractable. There were growing signs that the comrades were getting desperately tired...
...Curse of the Living Corpse, despite its air of amateur Grand Guignol, unreels with grisly assurance. The plot involves "a homicidal maniac-bent on revenge by the most horrible means possible." Though locked in the family vault, a late and unlamented patriarch seemingly wants to settle his estate heir by heir. One morning the hired girl comes up on the dumb-waiter head first. Head only, in fact. Subsequent victims are cruelly disfigured, dragged behind a horse, stabbed, burned alive, or drowned in the bath. In this orgy of supermarket sadism, the blood looks like Brand X catchup, but there...