After the smashing success of their live-action ode to anime blood, Adam Chaplin, Italian production company Necrostorm debuted their second film in September last year.

Much like their previous effort, Taeter City is a movie accomplishing savage violence through the use of digital and practical effects on a shoestring budget. As before, Necrostorm reaches their goal admirably, creating a cogent if dizzying movie experience deserving of universal acclaim, even if the only thing we can mutually agree upon is how thoroughly it shames mediocrity.

Necrostorm is a courageous outfit. The total amount of people on the core team is cryptically small, though if I had to guess it wouldn’t exceed five or six. They smartly use prosthetic devices and masks to create the illusion of normal-sized casts in their movies, and they handle their own sales distribution, website programming  and promotion. However big the company is, Giulio de Santi stands in the center as writer, director and executive producer of Taeter City, as well as the CEO of Necrostorm.

Let me get it out of the way right now: these films are beyond direct-to-video. They’re not backed by major distributors. Hell, they don’t have UPC codes. Spunk and enthusiasm is what holds them together. The sales page for Taeter City proudly proclaims “over 4,000 copies sold in only thirty days!”

I ordered the collector edition. It came with a baseball cap, signed movie poster, fake Taeter Burger coupons, and biker ID badges I can use to pretend to be one of the movie’s protagonists.

It was all so charming I didn’t mind they forgot to include a copy of the actual movie in the DVD case, which required an additional month of wait time to import. To their credit Necrostorm customer service moved to resolve the issue as soon as I reported it to them by email.

So what’s this movie about?

In a future world ravaged by chaos, one city has discovered a way to quell the barbarism inherent in man. The Authority, a monolithic governing body/corporation, has implemented the Zeed System, a technology that reads people’s brainwaves to detect criminal intent. When someone expresses violent urges, or even thinks them, the Zeed System creates a feedback loop that internalizes those urges. The would-be criminal uncontrollably mutilates himself until found by a biker officer and humanely put out of his misery.

Criminal bodies are then collected and pulped into fast food for the law-abiding citizens of Taeter City. Taeter Burger is the chain where these delectables are sold, the cannibalism far from a trade secret. “Fried fingers, crispy, tasty, and hot” one of the brightly-animated commercials for Taeter Burger goes. “what are you waiting for?!”

A sociopathic killer who’s immune to the Zeed System escapes from custody and the Authority dispatches a set of biker enforcers to take him out. Taeter City, unlike Adam Chaplin which tried to work along a more traditional three-act movie structure, is composed of slick vignettes telling different parts of the story out of order, intercutting them with lighthearted but brutal commercials.

The collective effect of all this compounded gristle goes beyond what’s often termed “body horror,” maybe even being some new genre territory Necrostorm has established for itself. By focusing solely upon the gory, exaggerated ramifications of being a living thing made out of meat, this movie becomes a focused exercise, a preposterous one for sure, but also disarming and uncomfortable. Taeter City masters that fine line of being a totally absurd creation without pomposity or insincerity. Its existence is a victory.

We live in an age where people probably dabble too damn much, the sheer amount of possibilities in expressing oneself becoming an overwhelming distraction that prevents us from accomplishing any of those possibilities. So you have people who play with the idea of writing a novel for decades of their life, animators who use their YouTube fame to focus on easier things like Let’s Play videos, or budding filmmakers who lack the discipline to commit to videos longer than five minutes.

It’s inspiring when someone with a vision sees it through with gusto, without the approval or encouragement we tend to weakly rely on. Think about it. Necrostorm delivered two feature length movies in three years to a growing international fanbase. They created their own DVDs and shipped them across the world without anyone’s permission, without even being Kickstarter-ed for goodness’ sake!

This rugged DIY attitude rarely generates the viral recognition it deserves. Then again, how many good things do?

Dredd – let’s collectively agree to keep the 3D suffix out of the title, shall we? – is a sleek, whizzing engine of a movie. It’s whiskey without any sugary junk mixed in. Hell, not even an ice cube. So no hangovers the next morning, just good memories.

I’ve yet to see all the 2012 films I’d like to, partially because movie theaters are for chumps and partially because I’m developing into a deranged shut-in, but Dredd is easily the best I’ve encountered thus far.

You’ve no doubt some familiarity with Judge Dredd, the off-beat sci-fi cop created in British comics anthology 2000 AD, and later disserviced with a 1995 film starring Rob Schneider. Now we have a movie aiming to be more in line with the original character, but I say no one should really care about any of that. Is it a good film? That’s what matters.

The answer is a resounding HELL YES. Let me put it this way. Dredd is like a sleight-of-hand card trick expertly performed by a street magician. It’s soundly rousing in a subdued, guttural sort of way, but its very nature encourages you to overlook its value. The trick isn’t that you’re blown away by witnessing something impossible. People don’t watch magic tricks to see the impossible, magic just doesn’t have that primal affect on us anymore, nor does film.

The real trick is that you didn’t notice how easy it would have been for the street magician to mess up 1000 different times over the course of his two-minute performance. The trick is in the clean execution, flawless technique. And Dredd is as cleanly executed an action sci-fi flick as any I can think of. It does nearly everything right without ever stopping to congratulate itself. In a year comprised of overly-long, incompetent SF on the most basic of terms (Prometheus, Total Recall), Dredd‘s brevity of wit is itself a breathe of fresh air.

Dredd also subtly subverts its own fascist leanings. For the first hour of the movie, Judge Dredd appears to be an almost mythic personification of the justice his ilk impose upon the world, showing us why their absolute judgment works in a dystopian future riddled with gray stuff like poverty and drug addiction. It’s awesome, right? It’s like Batman with a gun, right?

Then Ma-Ma calls four Judges to her fortress and commands them to kill Dredd. Instantly the black-and-white reductive fantasy is destroyed.

All the authority behind being a Judge, or even looking like a Judge, vanishes. As plainly as Judge Lex asks Ma-Ma who his target is, the authoritarian high ground evaporates. There isn’t any loud soundtrack cue. There’s absolutely no fanfare at all. Poof. It’s just gone.

The leather outfits, the sharp helmet designs, they now indicate nothing. Even Lex’ strong jaw and cleft chin undercuts the power of Dredd, outdoing his macho presence as surely as his muscular build does.

Lex eventually shoots Dredd in the gut, immobilizing him. Dredd reacts fearlessly but with utter impotence, unable to do anything but grope for words and die–and he would have died if it wasn’t for the psychic timing of his training partner. The simple biology of his near-death experience shows us the frailty of his body, and he overcomes it without bashing your skull in with a conspicuous metaphor like Dark Knight Rises did. When Dredd gets back up, he simply dresses his wound, that much more intent on judging Ma-Ma.

In an age that’s overflowing with comic book movies preening to make the characters more realistic and relatable, throwing pleading, injoke winks at the camera as if the actors were blinking into the fucking sun, Dredd unapologetically erects a comic book hero inhumanly calculated and expert in a milieu relatable to us through its depiction of poverty and drug addiction. Maybe it’s not the trendy route to go, but it makes for better films, the less genial approach.

By Dredd’s singular, inevitably-flawed worldview (hinted at in this movie ever-so-carefully; it’s planned that sequels will elaborate on the idea if indeed they ever get made), he personifies the super part of the word superhero both by his abilities and by his tragic nature, without ever being a superhero character, shaming whatever cinematic billion dollar-grossing mess both nerds and people who watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians appear to equally enjoy (hint: the movie I’m talking about rhymes with who the hell was jack kirbvengers.)

There’s a ton left to say about Dredd. For example, why it’s better than The Raid, how it compares to Looper, it’s exemplary use of 3D, Lena Headey’s terrific performance and disarming function as an antagonist (and how under-appreciated an actress she is), and why we live in an age where action movies should almost always be ninety minutes long.

I just don’t have the time to get into it all right now… I wanted to post this the same day the movie comes out on Blu-ray, and I’m writing this without any compensation! I’m not going to stay up all night working like it was a college paper.