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On Apocalypto's opening day, it's anyone's guess as to whether moviegoers this weekend will have a hearty appetite for Mel Gibson's Grand Guignol vision of a dying Mayan culture, or choose to instead flock to the comparatively benign pleasures of The Holiday, where they'll be spared from even a single instance of Jack Black devouring lovelorn home-swapper Kate Winslet's face. As our early review round-up first suggested, Gibson's isn't a movie for the weak-stomached or faint-hearted, and if a sampling of today's review headlines are any indication, those early warnings of a screen run red with arterial geysers and freshly plucked, still-beating hearts were right on the Mayan-dismembering money:
· Snuff Epic [Indianapolis Star]
· 'Apocalypto' soaks the screen in gore [USA Today]
· Review: Violence overwhelms 'Apocalypto' [CNN]
· Drowning in sea of blood [Edmonton Sun]
· "Apocalypto": Bloody and beautiful [Seattle Times]
· Gibson leads a brutal yet transporting Mayan journey [Boston Globe]
· 'Apocalypto': Bloody lessons [Toronto Star]
· Mayan melodrama: Gibson crafts bloody, breathless tale of doomed civilization [Mercury News]
· Apocalypto: Mel's Bloody New Beginning? [E! Online]
· Rape, murder, mayhem — there goes the civilization [SF Chronicle]
· "Apocalypto": blood, gore and not much more [China View]
· Violent excess mars Gibson's Mayan vision 'Apocalypto' [Int'l Herald Tribune]
· Savage and then some [Dallas Morning News]
· Another bloodbath, Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" doesn't miss an impalement or a dismemberment. [LAT]
· "Apocalypto": Mel Gibson's latest pretends to care about the fall of man, but it really only wants to impale, flay, disfigure and torture him. Sound familiar? [Salon]