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View Full Version : Guinea Pig: most overrated "snuff" film series ever?


Cuckoorex
08-15-2005, 12:38 AM
Here's the big spoiler/vulgarity warning, right off the bat. If you are really hellbent on watching this series of movies, turn back now.

The reason I was watching the Guinea Pig movies is because of the famous story that Charlie Sheen saw Guinea Pig at some party and called the feds because he was convinced that it was a legitimate snuff film. Now, I have a very morbid curiosity. Of course I have seen the Faces of Death videos, etc. So of course I had to see if Guinea Pig was all that it and a bag of chips. Imagine my delight when I saw that there was a whole series of Guinea Pig films!

So I put them at the top of my Netflix queue, and eagerly opened them up when they arrived...

OK, I've watched the first few Guinea Pig movies and I now know why they aren't on everyone's "must-see" the list; they're boring as hell. The first one has a few moments of "wow, it looks pretty real" as three guys torture a woman to death...and that's it. There's no plot, no attempt at a story whatsoever. It starts out with her already in captivity and it's just vignettes of various kinds of torture, some of which goes on far too long. I don't mean far too long as in, "oh, that poor woman," I mean far too long as in, "yes, we get it, she's got headphones on and they're blasting some kind of brain-melting sound into her ears." No need to drag that particular scene out for five minutes. Same thing with a later scene, where the three guys toss a bunch of entrails on her. She's unconscious throughout most of the scene, so it's just you watching various kinds of raw meat being tossed onto her while the guys giggle in the background...this goes on for several minutes, to the point that I was fast forwarding it, not because I was grossed out but because I was just plain bored. Finally she wakes up and screams her head off. That was kind of funny, in a way, because that and the sound part got the most reaction from her. She was screaming for both scenes, yet she barely made a sound when they were twisting her skin with pliers, or pulling her fingernail off. I guess she just really, really hates entrails. So it just ends with her hanging in what looks like a hammock that has been twisted up or something. OK.

Guinea Pig 2: The Android of Notre Dame actually made an attempt at a story. The results are far, far worse. The main character is a Japanese midget mad scientist type and he's trying to find a way to bring the dead back to life. Or something like that. His sister is dying of some unnamed illness and presumably he wants to prolong her life indefinitely. She, on the other hand, is secretly dumping out her medication because she wants to die.

Now, if you're familiar with the old EC horror comics like Haunt of Fear or Vault of Horror or Tales from the Crypt, you can guess the kind of stuff that goes on in this one. Some guys tries to blackmail the midget Frankenstein, so midget Frankenstein somehow tricks the guy into getting his legs cut off by a power saw. How? Damned if I know. They're just walking out from the house, and Tatto-san just pauses and smiles, next thing you know, the power saw is flying at the guy's legs and both of the legs are cut off below the knee.

Midget Frankenstein has been experimenting with reanimating the dead for a while, so he decides to make Blackmail guy into a living decapitated head. Eventually, he tricks blackmail guy's girlfriend into coming over, and of course she becomes the unwilling heart donor for midget Frankenstein's sister...who has already died. So he transplants the heart and brings sister back to life, and she, with very little emotion whatsoever, says, "Why did you bring me back to life? I had finally found peace." And then she just sits there while midget Frankenstein stews in silent rage.

Now, imagine everything I just described, but imagine that every fucking little thing that midget Frankenstein does is shown in detail. Meaning, we get to see him connect every fucking electrode, we get to see him typing on the goddamn computer, we get to see him flipping the motherfucking swtiches, etc., ad nauseum. We get long, lingering shots of sister in her sick bed, staring at a flower. Not just a minute for dramatic effect, no...we're talking several fucking minutes of this shit. I fast forwarded through most of this one, and I was still bored out of my fucking mind.

The third one, "Mermaid in a Manhole," it's like they must have done this one because they lost a bet or something. Here's the story: a loopy artist keeps going into the sewer to paint things, and there he finds a mermaid, supposedly the same one he saw when he was a boy. Because the mermaid is in a filthy sewer, she has an infection. The artist takes her up to his apartment and puts her in a bathtub and she tells him that he must paint her, it is his 'mission.' So he starts painting her, and the infection has become festering boils in her midsection. She's throwing up blood and blood is seeping out of her boils and all that. Boo hoo. She tells him that her boils have pus of five different colors, and that he must paint her using the multicolored pus from her boils. So he has to cut her boils open and she screams and drains the pus into jars for him. Then it gets worse, and the boils apparently are housing worms, which start emerging from her boils. He's trying to pull all the worms out of her, and they keep on coming. Remember the puking scene from Team America: World Police? How the puke just keeps coming and coming? Well, that's how the worms are coming. So now she's laying there in the bathtub and she's got this multicolor pus draining out and worms everywhere, and she looks like a cross between a bait tub and a bathtub full of Trix cereal. The loopy artist is going more and more crazy of course.

I can't tell you how that one ends, because I was so fucking bored with it that I ejected the DVD and didn't bother to watch the second feature on that disc. Troma films, in my opinion, are much more entertaining and do just as well as far as gore. Only the very first Guinea Pig movie had anything like a "snuff film" flavor to it, and that got boring, too.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go to Netflix and remove the other Guinea Pig DVDs from my queue. I'd rather watch a dog take a runny shit than watch more of these movies.

Liz
08-15-2005, 02:30 AM
Haven't seen the series myself -- I kept toying around with them on my own Netflix queue, but I had the feeling they were probably horrible. Thanks for taking the bullet.

In a similar vein, have you seen Cannibal Holocaust? Is this thing even worth going to the trouble of Netflixing it or having it imported?

Ranchoth
08-15-2005, 02:59 AM
Did you see "Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood"? It's the second one, according to Netflix—the first one being with the three guys vivisecting a woman—and it seemed nicely succinct. (I haven't seen the others, though, so it might be better, worse, or pretty much the same as the rest.)

Cuckoorex
08-15-2005, 09:16 AM
Nope, I didn't see "Flower of Flesh and Blood", but if it's three guys vivisecting a woman, I can only imagine it was an attempt to recapture the "magic" of the first one, except with the production values and art direction of the Android and Mermaid episodes, and quite honestly I don't want to waste another Netflix spot to find out.

Don't get me wrong, the gore was suitably disgusting and for the most part fairly realistic looking, except when it came to the rainbow-colored pus. It's just that even at its most realistic moments, the first one just didn't come across as authentic. For example, in the first scene: the woman is tied up and sitting in a chair, and at this point she seems to be unharmed. The guys form a circle around her and one of them steps up and starts slapping her across the face, always with his right hand, always on the left side of her face. You can tell that he is actually slapping her in a few of the shots, and in other shots it is probable that it he is not actually slapping her but the sound effect is in there. They occasionally flash numbers to indicate how many times she has been slapped. 10, 20, 50, 100, etc. Despite the fact that she has supposedly been vigorously slapped over 100 times on the same side of the face (and in fact they end the scene showing the guys filling a sack with coins and then starting to hit her with that, presumably for another 100 times), she only has a slight bruise on her face in the next scene on her cheekbone. In any case, she barely makes a peep. She just kind of goes, "uh." Now, maybe I'm missing something about the Japanese mindset here, as far as expressing pain or terror, but if you were to tie up just about any woman and start vigorously slapping her across the face, she would be screaming bloody murder, pleading for them to stop, and oh god please I just want to see my family again why are you doing this I don't want to die but no, even though, in my opinion, it would have been far more effective (dramatically speaking) for them to have her screaming, pleading or even fighting initially, and by the time we get to the third or fourth torture session, we see that she is a broken human being, unable to muster the strength to fight anymore. That would have been more disturbing and compelling, IMO.

Ranchoth
08-15-2005, 04:43 PM
Nope, I didn't see "Flower of Flesh and Blood", but if it's three guys vivisecting a woman, I can only imagine it was an attempt to recapture the "magic" of the first one, except with the production values and art direction of the Android and Mermaid episodes, and quite honestly I don't want to waste another Netflix spot to find out.

It's only one guy vivisecting a woman, and she's supposed to be doped up and semi-catatonic through most of it. Personally, I think it balances out nicely, not too long, not too short. But that might just be me.

Ike Witt
08-15-2005, 05:12 PM
Is there such a thing as an underated snuff film series?

NoClueBoy
08-15-2005, 05:35 PM
Is there such a thing as an underated snuff film series?

Star Wars - Episode 3

Hey, It's That Guy!
08-15-2005, 05:54 PM
Is there such a thing as an underated snuff film series?

The Passion of the Christ?