notice the boiled fleshnotice the lethal hand
sure, I like my escapist surrealist horror films weird and hard. Lots of gore, lots of violent action, plenty of the in-out adult action - and by this I don't mean the man-sausage cherry-pie type in-out action, I mean Freddy Krueger with his boiled flesh and lethal hand in Nightmare on Elm Street ripping through the plump bodies of spoilt American teens for the sins of their fathers & mothers kinda in-out. In fact, if I was watching WOLVERINE (cert 12) back in those halcyon days, I wouldn't have been surprised by its adult rating. But, no, somehow (maybe because it's a massive global entitiy like Marvel comics) this atrocity of the eyes gets a 12-cert. "Wolverine is nothing like Freddy Krueger (Cert X)," you're screaming at your work station. But he has the boiled off flesh (the Nagasaki nuclear bomb scene) and he has the lethal baseball glove knives. Oh, except these things are embedded under the skin of his fist (!) And later in the film these extended fist blades are LOCKED IN PLACE and then lopped off by a burning blade. Then, and this is the Driller Killer (Cert X) moment of all kiddy television horror-porn, they are DRILLED INTO by a nightmare chrome robot (while he's still conscious i.e. no anaesthetic) and his eternal life ability is sucked out of him. Wolverine even performs a heart by-pass de-bug on himself, slicing open his own chest in full graphic fashion for all the kiddies to linger over. And that Viper woman peeling off her infected skin, worthy of something out of The Fly (Cert X) Whether it's 'based on a comic' or not, IT'S NOT A COMIC... ...it's a Hollywood Feature Film, made with real actors in real settings and depicting these real people in life-ending over-dramatised over-indulgent fashion. I had a similar ratings issue with the original face-off between Spiderman and The Green Goblin in Sam Raimi's 2002 film version, it was a totally over-the-top BRUTAL end-scene with all sorts of graphic detail in the injuries and insane amounts of depiction of pain and suffering in the action; twisted, nonsensicle. I had a similar issue with the X-cert face-melting scenes at the end of Spielberg's original Indiana Jones film. Is this where we're at then, after years of Hollywood manipulation of our senses? Reguritating once-banned-level sex, death and violence for a MAINSTREAM AUDIENCE of desensitized CHILDREN of the age of twelve years old (or younger, when some parent gets the title for his whining pre-teen kiddy-wink)? Is this where Modern Man is headed? Into a hard-faced no-respect world that looks something like TEA-TIME DEATH AND TORTURE is the Neo Reality TV? And all the War Simulation games that G3 or Global Gambling Game is selling our shilldren? Why are we doing this to our kids, to ourselves, to our futures? Is it to prepare them (and us) for World War Three where ALL THE PROFIT will be made? IN SUMMARY: the Wolverine film is an easy 15-cert. Even today.