2004 has been a great year (for me, anyhow) for exploitative shocks. I finally saw Fight For Your Life, and was pleasantly sickened by its potent mix of crude racism, humiliating psychological torture, and its shocking scene of child murder. It's a shame that Straw Weisman would explore outright absurdity (and thus weaken) his approach in later efforts like the horrid Graverobbers. There was gruesome vaginal mutilation in Cerchi's SOV Barker-esque Hellinger, plenty of flesh-tearing, rape, and tongue-hacking hijinks in Franco's The Bloody Judge, wound-salting in Stanze's Ice From The Sun, and many other cringe-worthy moments that I finally had the pleasure of viewing this year.

True, all of these are not "recent" films: unfortunately, I have not had the pleasure of sitting down with sickies like August Underground's Mordum or Scrapbook, so keep your pants on.

Imagine my surprise when I sat down to watch Heretic Films' recent release of I'll Bury You Tomorrow and found myself squirming more than during the STD chapter in health class (note to indie filmmakers: this is not permission to make a movie about full-body gonorrhea. Same goes for you, David Cronenberg.). Not only is there a disturbing scene of formaldehyde-pump rape, but the resulting torture and brutal gut-flinging murder of the assailants actually made me yelp in shock. Really!

Oddly enough, these hideous scenes are the exception and not the rule. IBYT is, at its heart, a convoluted human-horror caper with an Italian edge that seems just as happy to make you grin and groan as well as grimace.

We meet our "heroine" Dolores (the lovely and chilling Zoe Daelman Chlanda) as she arrives in the small town of Port Oram to start a new life, with a mysterious steamer trunk in tow. Her first order of business is to find work, which she does almost immediately at the Beech Funeral Home. Mr. Beech hires Dolores for her expertise in the area of mortuary work, whereas the slightly balmy Mrs. Beech is convinced that Dolores is in fact their long-missing daughter returned to them. Of course, Dolores has plenty of secrets to hide, the big one being that she keeps her dead parents stuffed inside her precious trunk.

To further complicate matters, two of Mr. Beech's assistants are running a black-market grave-robbing ring, swiping cadavers from their coffins. They then sell the parts to their seamy clientele for undisclosed reasons (although I suspected more for cannibalism than medical reasons) for a tidy profit. Unfortunately, they stumble upon the Beech’s new golden child’s twisted secrets with violent (and sadly lame) results.

I’ll get my one big beef out of the way: IBYT is a victim of split identity. On one hand, it wanted to be a somber, disturbing piece, with the aforementioned rape/murder sequence and Dolores’ genuinely creepy "relations" with cadavers in her possession. Sure, it’s not outright necro-grossness in the vein of Necromantik, but it’s ends up being a little creepier with Dolores cuddling with the corpses in a definitely post-coital manner.

On the other hand, at times the movie turns into an almost silly splatterfest, with gory coolers full of people bits, throat-gouging, eye-plucking, stabbings, shootings, the works. When Dolores actually spouted a one-liner (a rather tepid one at that) before dispatching a victim, I groaned. What had happened to my creepy corpsefucker from before? Had her coke-snorting cohort (who reminded me of a white-trash Tom Savini) truly reduced her to a hipster killer?

Thankfully, the mild screenplay schizophrenia didn’t completely sour the sheer lunatic enjoyment I gleaned from IBYT. While running a wee bit long at 119 minutes (one can clearly see where a few of the scenes should have been whittled down), I was very rarely less than 100% absorbed in the movie at hand. It was sometimes stupid, sometimes brilliant (Dolores slow dancing with the corpse of young Eddie was eerily striking), and always entertaining. This is the least that I hope for when I get a movie, and IBYT delivered completely.

Heretic presents IBYT in a non-anamorphic 1.85:1 transfer, which doesn‘t fare so well. Colors were rather muddy and the overall picture lacked definition. Sound was moderately clear and dialogue was passable. Given the micro-budget nature of this one, I don’t hold that much against it. Extras include a blooper reel, a photo gallery, and almost 20(!) deleted scenes. Hell, had these been kept in, we would have been dealing with the indie horror equivalent of Lawrence of Arabia (in quantity, not quality).

Overall, Heretic films has given us a rather decent starting line-up for their DVD catalog with this film and Sacred Flesh (check out Paul’s review here). Time will tell if these guys are a force to be reckoned with, or just another "horror company." I certainly hope for the former.