A professional killer retires to his colorless apartment but soon starts to suffer from horrible headaches along with that he hears voices. In order to cure himself, he starts practising self-trepanation and hammers a nail into his skull. This seems to do the trick at first, but after a while he needs more, and more, and then some..
Imagine to hold a nail pressed against your skull and with your other hand take a hammer and start to pound it in.. the very thought kinda makes you cringe now doesn't it. Well, welcome to Russian director Andrey Iskanov's Nails, a sadistic piece of cinema that will most definitely make you cringe, over and over again. It might not be as horrible as it sounds though, and furthermore, while I at first thought that this movie was exclusively aimed at gorehounds, it later proved not to be the case at all. But to be able to dig Nails though, you'll have to have a very open mind because this is weird art, of the gruesome kind that is.
In Nails we are at first introduced to a hitman who's out on a job and seems to get it done right. We then get to follow him to his apartment where he start to experience these horrible headaches that just seems to never go away, and the same goes for the voices that he keeps hearing. Desperate for a cure, the hitman reads up on self-trepanation and soon hammers a nail into his skull. Trepanation being a medical procedure where you drill a hole in your head to expose part of the brain. This method, putting holes in the head, was used long ago but is a primitive method that's not really used anymore, and also something that you shouldn't practise on yourself. With that being said, this is exactly what the hitman does and it helps him. Problem though is that putting one hole in the head in not enough, kinda like doing heavy drugs.. you need one more fix, and then another and well, there you go.
 
As soon as the first nail enters his skull, he sees the world in a more sort of clear kinda way, but at the same time it's even more terrifying. He keeps putting nails into his skull and so keeps having horrible visions like on a bad acid trip or something like that. Comparable to the drug thing is that he becomes a "nail junkie", meaning that he can't stop what he's doing, and as the need keeps increasing, normal nails won't do anymore and after a while, well, it's time for the drill. I guess you can see where this is going and while it might sound like one guy just practically torturing himself for a good hour, there's more to Nails than just that.
What Nails really is, is extreme experimental filmmaking, like a heap of different drugs mixed together and injected at the same time, with this being the weird and scary result. Early on in the film, it was shot in black & white and I really dug that. Oftentimes these low-budget indie flicks have a tendency to look way more professional when shot in b&w; I've seen it a bunch of times before and for most of the time with a very good result. So I was happy at first because the movie looked kinda slick, but poow, suddenly it changed to color. After a while though it started to look good, being shot in color and all, and color was definitely something that this film needed to enhance the experience.. you'll know what I mean when you see it.
Set in a small desolate town somewhere in Siberia, Nails has this grim look of hopeless and lifelessness to it, but after a while it becomes very atmospheric, not to mention quite colorful. Iskanov is definitely a very creative guy, not a single doubt about that, who shows his art in a pretty raw and primitive form. While it for a while there somewhat reminded me of Eraserhead, Nails is definitely a movie that is quite different from your normal horror type of movie and if you're (very) open to new and different things when it comes to filmmaking, you might wanna give Nails a shot.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Gvozdi
MOVIE YEAR: 2003
DIRECTOR: Andrey Iskanov
WRITING CREDITS: Andrey Iskanov
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Alexander Shevchenko, Svyatoslav Iliyasov, Irina Nikitina
COUNTRY: Russia
RUNTIME: 60 min
RATING: 6/10
Nails Website/IMDB Click here
Nails Trailer
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