August Underground

August Underground
Directed by Fred Vogel
USA 2001

PLOT

Two young men from American bourgeois society, bored by the monotony of their daily lives, are in reality psychopathic serial killers.

THOUGHTS

August Underground is a mockumentary that is deliberately anarchic both in concept and execution, lacking in means and resources. Despite its minimal availability of tools and ideas, it has quickly become a cornerstone of the extreme genre.

What is blatantly shown to us is an unstoppable sequence of torture, sex, and depravity by the two killers, culminating in brutal murders. The amateurish nature of the filming, the filthiness of the locations, and the scarcity of resources lend the film a subtle sense of reality (it’s no coincidence that the film is often mistaken for a snuff film, though it isn’t one).

Fred Vogel and his friend Allen Peters are both the director and screenwriter, but they also play the two sadistic psychopaths. Throughout the 70-minute runtime, we see them both as serial killers dealing with their victims (tortures, sadism, violence, murders) and as bored, idiotic young men wandering around, driving, and making tasteless jokes. This may be the film’s major flaw: there is no trace of a coherent plot. The scenes are fragmented, poorly connected, badly edited, and of terrible quality.

Whether this was intentional or not is unclear, but it’s certainly true that everything feels extremely real. Vogel, during his university studies, attended a special effects course taught by none other than Tom Savini, and this is evident in the film.
The results are remarkable: the murders and blood flow are some of the most realistic ever seen on screen. The film dives straight into the action with no prelude: in the domestic basement, the setting of the protagonists’ deranged acts, we find a gagged and bound girl, covered in cuts, begging for mercy. In the adjacent room lies the body of a man whose penis has been severed.

The images are blurry, the colors distorted, and the two killers chat and laugh while the girl screams. The handheld camera shakes uncontrollably, constantly changing hands, and the video quality suffers, likely to create a more authentic and raw style.
But August Underground is entirely like this. While some scenes are almost unbearably brutal, the film’s extremity makes it hard to digest for many viewers.
For some, it’s a cult classic; for others, an abomination. Nonetheless, it spawned two sequels (Mordum in 2003 and Penance in 2007).