Versus

Welcome back to another installment of "Death Scenes We Love", a recurring feature here at Horror Squad where I wax poetic about some of my all-time favorite scenes of cinematic carnage.

Today we tackle one of my most beloved of Japanese cult films, Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus. Kitamura went on to direct some other very cool films (I happen to love Sky High--and no, that's not the film about the superhero kids at school...) and is best known to American audiences for his work adapting Clive Barker's Midnight Meat Train a few years back. However, amongst hardcore splatter fans and cult Japanese cinephiles, I think Versus is his most revered work.

I first stumbled on to it back in late 2000 or early 2001. I was a frequent customer at San Francisco's Le Video (one of the greatest video stores on Earth...) and the guy behind the counter saw me walk in and immediately told me I had to watch this movie. What he handed me was a bootleg version of Versus (because we were still a ways off from Tokyo Shock getting around to releasing it on DVD at that point--hardly anyone here had ever even heard of the film). I took it home, popped it in, watched it all (and you know it's a great bootleg when the movie runs just over two hours and someone dubbed it at SP speed and it cuts off the last minute or so of the credits) and was immediately in love.

Jump past the break, where I'll regale you with tales of why I was so smitten.