Wednesday, November 30, 2011

The Bunker of the Last Gunshots (1981)

A group of soldiers are locked inside a concrete bunker and we see how they deal with the ensuing madness that follows from being locked there for an unspecified amount of time. (Imdb rating 6.1)

The Bunker of the Last Gunshots is not a short film that gives answers. While I was smart enough to figure out the general plot (that's a first for me) of this experimental steampunk French movie, there isn't much help, with a lack of any dialogue whatsoever. But really, the gaps don't need to be filled in.

I would hazard a guess that this movie is a microcosm of how humanity can deal with stress wrongly; as when a seemingly important counter starts to slowly reverse back down to 000000, the men start to kill each other with wild abandon. Before the countdown, they looked bored shitless, with one chap even collecting particularly good specimens from his nose and placing them in containers. Another guy electrocutes beetles. Another guy apparently uses masking tape and garbage bags to wrap up corpses.


Don't judge me!

The bunker society seems based around the two arch-principles of baldness and Nazism though, and after the discovery is made, it's open season for gunshots and strange tortures, like shooting electromagnetic waves into ears and what disgustingly looks like death by force feeding. The ending is great as well, as it shows the futility of all the abhorrent behaviour throughout the movie.

I was really impressed by this. It was strange, it was experimental, but it wasn't pretentious or unnecessarily confusing. The Bunker of the Last Gunshots stands on it's own.

Things I learnt:

  • Going outside on a completely dead Earth/some other random planet requires you to dress as a sand person from Star Wars.
  • You can feed severed hands in jars as you would a fish.
  • In the future, everyone will be bald!

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