Word: mayhemic
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...Carter is a doggedly nasty piece of business made in blatant but inept imitation of Point Blank. While the violence in Point Blank defines some surreal and chilling points about the savagery of contemporary urban life, the mayhem in Get Carter is a gruesome and almost pornographic visual obsession. Fledgling DirectorMike Hodges clearly hoped to put together a jazzy paean to the classic detective story; the film's protagonist, in fact, is shown in a couple of scenes poring over a copy of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. But Hodges seems to have learned more from Mickey...
Garrulous is what boxers get when fight time nears, spilling out a kind of blow-by-blow preview of coming mayhem. Frazier's spiel: "Clay can keep that pretty head, I don't want it. What I'm going to do is try to pull them kidneys out. I'm going to be at where he lives?in the body. Then I'll be in business, when I get smoking around the body. Watch him?he'll be snatching his pretty head back and I'll let him keep it. Until about the third or fourth round, and then there...
Oliver Reed, looking like a well-dressed rain barrel, does not do much, but he is appallingly convincing at scenes involving mayhem and sadism. The script, by Richard Harris and Eleanor Perry, is proficient, and the direction by Anatole Litvak, a kind of Preminger without pizzaz, gets the job done. So does The Lady, if you have an empty evening that requires nothing more than passive entertainment...
...Magnuson's bridgework gleams in a smile of childlike innocence, and bromides fall from his lips like gentle rain. On the ice, beware. The angelic face twists into a toothless snarl, while the bromides give way to threats of mayhem. Magnuson is a "policeman," a player whose job it is to keep the other team in line. Other than football, no team sport puts a greater premium on bodily contact than hockey-the crunching board check, the elbow-flailing combat for the puck behind the net, the boiling free-for-all over real or imagined irregularities...
...related danger is to romanticize and sentimentalize the family. From the Greek tragedians to the modern psychoanalysts, men have known that the family, along with being a source of immense comfort, is also a place of savage battles, rivalries, and psychological if not physical mayhem. Psychoanalyst R.D. Laing says that the "initial act of brutality against the average child is the mother's first kiss." He finds it hurtful that a child is completely at the mercy of his parents, even to having to accept affection. Laing's colleague, David Cooper, calls the nuclear family the "ultimately perfected form...