MB, I'm wondering if maybe it's the angle on the henchman's face and the way the light hits the blood that makes it more effective. It looks like it could possibly be the same makeup technique as on Gabriel, but the angle and lighting on Gabriel make it much less effective.
I finally found the time to do what I wanted to do, which was to examine the henchman's sequence using some Linux software that can break down video files into their individual frames. And having done that now it would seem as if the makeup for the henchman is different from the makeup for Gabriel. When it comes to the henchman, in addition to the blood, his makeup has little bits applied to his skin, apparently put there to approximate the skin that was torn by Angelique's nails (and interestingly enough, the same sort of makeup technique seems to have been used for Gerard's cheek wounds). But Gabriel's cheek wounds don't seem to have those bits - or if they do, they're covered up by so much "blood" as to be indiscernible. Unfortunately, we don't get to see a side view of Gabriel's wounded cheek either before or after we see it full on, so if there are bits applied, we can't check to see if they stick up from his skin.
Is there anyone active here who has seen the 129-minute cut? (Have you, MB?)
I've only seen the presentations that Darren Gross has done at the Fests. Though during the presentation that he did in '04, he showed practically all of the recovered footage, and that was a real thrill to see.
I wonder if some shots originally were intended to last a bit longer. There are certainly some very rough edits in the version we have currently. And they definitely shortened/eliminated some shots to de-emphasize gore and sex between the (97-minute?) "pre-rated" or "R-rated" version and the 95-minute official release version. (I saw the 97-minute version twice on the very first day of release. Quentin and Angelique's kisses, and Gerard's moves on Tracy, were certainly eyebrow-raising, at least for an impressionable 14-year-old.
Yes, the 97 minute version is much more graphic than the version we currently have. The Charles/Angelique tower make out scene, the Quentin/Tracy bedroom molestation scene, and the Gerard/Tracy truck molestation scene are more sexually graphic - and the horse trampling of Trask and the aftermath of Gerard's shooting are much more bloody. But honestly at this point I don't recall if Darren showed the longer versions of those scenes or if he simply showed the scenes that were completely cut.
When I saw the movie again a fews years later on TV, it seemed quite a bit tamer--but that could well have been due to CBS' standards and practices department. But then the VHS also seemed tamer than my memory of the initial release, and later on I learned about the apparent mistaken release of a non-PG version in Aug. 1971--which I had been lucky enough to catch!!)
Because of its graphic, bloody, and violent nature, I wasn't surprised that a lot of the stuff that I'd remembered from seeing the 97 minute version wasn't shown on TV, not even on TBS - but I was shocked when it didn't show up in the VHS and the VHS appeared to be exactly like the TBS edit. I was even more shocked when I wrote Marcy Robin to ask if she knew why they didn't use the version of the film that I remembered for the VHS but appeared to use the TBS version and she had no idea what I was talking about. And after I explained to her about the stuff that was missing, she was even more confused because she'd never seen what I was claiming had been in the film. It wasn't until a while later that it was uncovered that the 97 minute version had been mistakenly released in some areas of the country.