Manhunt 2

Last week's routine trawl of the DVD trade-in dug up a £2.50 copy of Rob Zombie's horror film debut House Of 1000 Corpses. Like its demented follow-up The Devil's Rejects, it was a crass lesson in subversive terror, spooning out the splatter in big, thick globs. Limb amputation, bloody scalping and wide-awake brain surgery, all orchestrated on whiter-than-white victims by deranged, dribbling killers, whose mockery of classic genre convention saw them not only kick shit in such hideous fashion, but get away with the whole damn thing too. Another day in the age of the sado-horror flick.

Now let's take a small jaunt back to the previous week, perched on the tip of a black, leather sofa, as I was, in Rockstar's cosy office in London's billionaire playground of Chelsea. Up ahead, flashing on a giant screen, gentle-looking amnesiac Daniel Lamb (a twisted joke, surely?) was smashing in some stranger's head (presumably, a bad person) with a heavy slab from a toilet system while taking a pee.

Crrraacckkk (or it could've been more of a crrrrunnnchhh - either way, there were some pretty gratifying sound effects going on there that suggested this wasn't some lazy-arsed robbing of the BBC sound library).

Soon I was being treated to some tastier, more stylised set pieces as villains were multi-punctured in iron maidens and winched to the ceiling on giant, two-pronged hooks. And blood, conspiring with those great schlocky sound effects, was rampant in full glorious flow.

Oh sorry, let me introduce you to the world of Manhunt 2 by the way...

Just two days prior to my visit, the BBFC had famously denied Rockstar's 'stalk 'n slash' sequel an age rating, condemning it for "unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone". This, the normally liberating BBFC, who were passing torture scenes on innocent victims in movieland, and had yet to viciously waggle a finger at a video game since Carmageddon in the late '90s. It all seemed to point to one resounding fact - that Rockstar must surely have cocked up somewhere on a spectacularly grand scale.