Peter Berg should stop dabbling in lame action movies and get back to doing what he clearly does best - making black comedies of the darkest order.

Berg started out in the movie business as a young actor who appeared as the lead in Wes Craven's horror Shocker way back in 1989, before becoming a regular on TV medical drama Chicago Hope.

It was there he first got behind the camera for an episode called Colonel of Truth (1997), before going to direct action-adventures Hancock (2008) with Will Smith, The Kingdom (2007) with Jamie Foxx, Friday Night Lights (2004) with Billy Bob Thornton, and Welcome to the Jungle (2003) with Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson.

However, in between was a little-known film that will leave a lasting impression on each and every one of its viewers - for good or bad.

The film was Very Bad Things, one of the sickest comedies I've ever come across - and I loved it.



It makes me think of what might've happened if the guys from Seinfeld (my all-time favourite TV show I might add) found themselves in an even more uncompromising situation than what the parameters of a sit-com allow.

The premise of the film is 'how far will people go to save their own ass', or even to simply get what they want.

Interestingly another actor-turned-director Jon Favreau (the man behind Ironman) plays the main figure of Kyle, who before marrying Cameron Diaz' overbearing Laura, heads to Las Vegas for a buck's party.

Joining him are his four close friends played by Daniel Stern, Leland Orser, Jeremy Piven and last, but certainly not least Christian Slater in a scene-stealing role as the sadistic Boyd.

This is the once 'It' actor Slater in the best form of his career, just prior to ending up in the B-grade movie wilderness.

Piven's Michael sets the gory ball rolling by unwittingly driving the head of a stripper he is having sex with in the groups' hotel bathroom into a towel hook.

Boyd however is at the centre of the next and easily most disturbing scene of the film when he drives a cork screw into the heart of a hotel security guard who has 'popped' in to investigate the commotion.

Even people who have enjoyed the film as a whole have had trouble watching, or more to the point, hearing the guard's screams for help as he suffers a very bloody death in the bath tub.

While most of the men are panic-stricken, Boyd remains cool, calm and calculating as he plots the rather grisly dismemberment of the two bodies now lying in the bathroom and then their burial out on the desert outside of Las Vegas. Suffice to say a large meat carver gets a good work-out.



It's only the shape of things to come as each man deals with the two deaths in their own very different way. The shocks do grow more and more savage, but hopefully you've become attuned to them by the second act.

Even Diaz' seemingly innocent bride-to-be shows a nasty streak with her wedding-must-go-on-no-matter- what-the-cost mentality. She rivals Slater's real estate agent Boyd for pure cold-heartedness.

Stern and Piven, who filled the shoes of Adam Sandler who dropped out for The Waterboy, are also fantastic as they completely self-destruct

What Berg has pulled off under all the blood and guts is a quite a witty, comical, and yes, shocking adventure that is simply a parody of the darker side of man, and woman.

But I can't stress enough that it must be viewed in the right frame of mind and that is - 'it's only a movie'. Let the blood run free.