Dir:Hisayasu Sato (Rampo Noir)
Well this is not gonna be an easy review to write for more than one reason. First being that this is a strange movie and second being is that apparently I had purchased a Japanese bootleg version of this film so the subtitles are not very accurate in translation and for some reason the text overlapped making the subs extremely hard to read at times. So the general story of this film follows Eji, A young scientist who has created a serum named MYSON that is supposed to create eternal bliss and happiness but of course in traditional Japanese horror fashion the side effects come with grim and gruesome results.Eji is the son of two scientists and while his father passed away seeking eternal life his mother is currently working on a new female contraceptive to help control Japan's growing over population problem.The story starts off with his mother and three test subjects being given the birth control serum and Eji takes it upon himself to tape the experiments from a nearby roof top and then goes as far as to follow the subjects afterwards, His strange obsession with this experiment is not unwarranted because he apparently secretly switched his mothers serum with his newly created MYSON concoction. We then meet the three test subjects which I am not sure are given names due to the shoddy subs in this version of the film except for the main girl who is named Rika Kamiri , each of these girls have very strange behaviors as one is a model who has a perfection complex and is constantly finding things wrong with herself and is in search of being flawless and beautiful, another is a foodie who is obsessed with cooking and gourmet cuisine and Rika is a insomniac who apparently blames her menstruation on her sleeping ailment and also has a deep hatred for all things living yet talks to her cactus and links her self up to it and a dream machine in order to help her sleep. Eji starts to have a thing for Rika and follows her everywhere she goes and once he is spotted Rika and Eji start a odd friendship where she opens up to him about all of her issues with hate and her obsession with plant life. One day the foodie is at home cooking tempura and this is where we start to see the ill side effects of the MYSON injection as after she cuts herself while preparing the dish she licks the wound and seems to get some sort of euphoric feel from eat and then decides to deep fry her hand and eat her fingers right off the bone. Shortly after that the model is at home after a workout and notices a hair growing in a undesirable place and as she plucks it she likes the feeling enough she decides to pierce her own ears with sewing needles and seems to get off while doing so. Rika though shows no effects of the shot other than she is opening up more and more to Eji and seems to be giving up her hatred of all people as she grows closer to Eji. Later we see that the pain obsession of the other girls continues to grow as the model has pierced everything imaginable on her body and sits in her room carving herself up with delight and the foodie provides a truly disturbing scene as she slices a piece of her "lady" parts and eats it while seemingly having an orgasm and after a nipple nip she shanks her eye out with a fork to dine on that. At this point in the film we see a pretty big mistake in shooting as her hand she ate before seems to be back intact for the carving and eating here and how the director let that one slide without edit is hard to understand.So we are treated to more gore and such and this is where the movie gets even stranger but its hard to explain what happens here without giving up the entire end of the film so I will just leave the synopsis at this point , Let's just say the MYSON serum effects Rika in a bit of a different way, but in all honesty I don't quite understand the ending anyway and maybe that has to do with the subs but it could just be shoddy writing by the film makers as well as the ending really doesn't make much sense along with the story . Not much makes this film stand out from the pack of other J- Gorror films although the plot is not bad , it comes off more like a amped up Twilight Zone episode more than anything else which could be considered a good thing. There are several WTF moments thrown about including a sequence towards the end involving the Eji's Mother and his deceased father crawling into a open wound...I didn't get that one at all, Maybe it was supposed to be artistic? If you are a fan of J-Gorror/Horror you will probably enjoy this one as it is an earlier film in the genre but there are allot better out there and in all honesty I don't see this one having much staying power in my brain to be mentioned if I was asked about Japanese horror anytime in the future. As far as older J-gore goes I prefer The Untold Story (The Bunman) over this one and some of the guinea pig films. Actually that is what this film reminded me of was the Guinea Pig series, just a tad less gruesome but it would have fit right in with that series. This one was not bad but just doesn't really strike me as being memorable after awhile, But you could do much worse. If you wanna check this one out make sure you by the Naked Blood version because my DVD is Titled Painkiller and the subs really took away from the experience so much that I missed quite a bit of the dialog in the viewing and maybe upon a second watch with better subs I may have enjoyed this more because I really think I missed some important plot points in this one especially with the whole deal with Rika and her damn Cactus dream machine, but then again maybe not ...
so I am gonna give this one a more generous score just assuming that with better subs I would have enjoyed it
more. But from what I gathered is this is just your typical J-gorror with nothing really noteworthy in it's entirety .
3 out of 5
No comments:
Post a Comment