Grotesque [2009]
And you thought America had the market cornered on shallow torture exploitation. Grotesque is a 2009 Japanese “horror” flick that involves a couple being kidnapped and tortured to death. You may assume I’m oversimplifying for that one-sentence summary, but I’m really not; nothing else happens outside of that framework, and even at 73 minutes it’s stretched to more than twice the length it reasonably should be.
In the interest of completeness, here’s the slightly more elaborate story: a couple goes on a first date, gets kidnapped, and wakes up in an incredibly generic torture dungeon. A doctor comes to torture them. Over a few torture sessions, he stabs the man, cuts off everyone’s fingers (and one of the woman’s arms), cuts the man’s eye, fingers the girl until she squirts, jerks off the guy until he cums on the girl’s stomach (while she’s halfway across the room, mind you), hammers nails into the guy’s balls, and cuts off his dick. The doctor appears to have been satisfied by all this, so he allows them both to recover in what looks like a modern hospital wing, until two or three nights before he says that he will release them he brings them back to the dungeon. Here, he cuts out the man’s intestines, places them on a hook, and tells the man to walk across the room and cut the ropes off his girlfriend for her to live. The man doesn’t, the doctor cuts off the woman’s head (which then, in the film’s most incredible and astonishing sequence, bites him on the neck), and then he’s off again to grab his next victims.
Oh boy. What do I even say?
Technically, it’s just shy of direct-to-dvd. The acting, as to be expected, was horrific and unbelievable. Even the doctor- the only player with any significant lines- is so unmemorable that less than a day after watching it I struggle to remember what he looked like. The lighting, while attempting some form of ambience, just makes the visuals muddled and confusing; especially in cases of frantic action, the quick cuts and dim views made deciphering what was happening difficult (bordering on impossible during the more cluttered scenes). Not that there was anything particularly interesting to view; very few of the torture scenes were shown in any explicit detail, and when they were they suffered from the same editing problems as the rest of the movie. Still, these details are not the main failure of the film.
When the entire point of a movie is to shock, dismemberments and amputations no longer cut it (no pun intended). The audience for a torture film have seen those things so often as to be bored by what once passed for shock; to feel these deaths, to really care and to be invested, the audience has to be given a reason to feel for the characters. They have to be real people, worthy of our sympathies and concern. Grotesque makes facile attempts at this, but they never go beyond the superficial. When your deaths are uncreative and your characters pointlessly vapid and inconsequential, where can your interest even come from?
Perhaps most disappointingly, however, is that such a movie came from Japan, one of the current epicenters for smart, powerful extremity. The tagline promoted in the poster says, “Saw and Hostel were just appetizers,” which is appropriate not for its accuracy (even those relatively shallow films held more water than this) but to see where it draws its inspiration from. A film trying to shock, to be daring, to really push the boundaries of horror should be looking at Takashi Miike, not Eli Roth. It co-opts the immaturity of the worst American horror films but never attempts to bring gravity or power to it. Body fluids and limbs and screaming are brought in buckets, but they never serve anything greater and, therefore, never mean anything and lose all potential to shock. Vastly overestimating its content, Grotesque commits the gravest sin of extreme horror: it’s just plain boring.
The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) [2011]
I don’t like the term “torture porn”. It’s dismissive of films that go against the mainstream, and it belittles films that use violence as an aesthetic; as a supporter of many of the films branded with the term, I find it to be nothing more than a cheap, easy term critics throw around to show that their values don’t allow art to explore extremity. Even the most artless “torture porn” movies (Hostel, the Saw series) have something there, a reason for their violence, an idea and theme of some kind that exists in the back of the writer’s mind. They’re unsuccessful and exploitative, sure, but I never got the impression that their creators were getting truly sick pleasures from making them; at the genre’s worst, it’s still rather innocuous, the product of boyhood fascination with the human body and all things “gross”.
The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)? Torture porn.
This film was made for the gratification of one man named (stupidly) Tom Six, and any pretense of this being anything other than an exercise in nihilistic masturbation is absolutely laughable.
I’m experienced in graphic violence. I’m a student of Saló and Cannibal Holocaust and the new french extremity movement and I champion the August Underground series as true works of art. My reaction to the film is not one of knee-jerk repulsion at the joy of violent expression. The issue with this film is not that it is grotesque, or nihilistic, or sexist, or ableist, or hateful, or ugly, or damaging to the moral fiber of society. I’ve excused all of those flaws in past movies I’ve watched, and I was ready to excuse them in this movie if it would just give me a reason to. No, this film’s true crime is being fucking horrific, plain and simple. It’s bad. I would rather watch all two hours of Gigli on repeat for a week than have to sit through this 87 minute wad of shit again.
This movie is “about” (I use that term loosely, because you know as well as I the plot is not the pont) a man named Martin, a security guard at a parking garage who is obsessed with the orignal Human Centipede film, so he decides to create his own human centipede of twelve people instead of that movie’s three. That’s it really; it doesn’t extend much further beyond that. Oh sure, there’s a strange and pretty fucking offensive subplot about Martin’s sexual abuse at the hands of his father (including a dreadful scene where Martin’s therapist explains that centipedes are a phallic symbol, for whatever that’s worth), and there’s even familial drama between Martin and his mother, an abhorrent lady who despises her son. But really, what are those worth? Nearly the entire second half of the film takes place in a single warehouse as we watch the centipede take form, and any semblance of purpose beyond the inevitable torture and mutilation is beside the point.
It is claimed that Martin is mentally disabled, which, besides being pointlessly offensive, makes no goddamn sense in the context of the movie; he’s smart and cunning enough to trick one of the actresses from the first film to come for an “audition” wherein he makes her the front of his centipede, something that I doubt I would have the intelligence or balls to pull off. That’s not the only completely asinine plot point in the movie, of course; how does he clean up all this blood before the next morning shift? Where does he put all these cars his victims leave behind? How is the parking garage so abandoned that no one ever catches him in the (long and tedious) act? How in god’s name does he (time after FUCKING TIME) administer a blow to the back of his victims’ heads strong enough to knock them out but not strong enough to kill them? Yes, yes, it all turns out to be one of those “just a dream” endings (which, ugh, jesus christ), but for that ending to even remotely work there needs to be SOME suspension of disbelief; you can’t leave a baby in a car for days on end and cut to the same shot of him sitting in the front seat and expect me to believe this is really happening.
The film is unrepentantly ugly, but never transcendently so; this is not the over-saturated cityscape of Seven, nor the lo-fi brutality of Cannibal Holocaust, nor the transcendent grime and filth of the new french extremity. It’s a black and white, barely-discernable clusterfuck of bad set design and worse cinematography choices, trying for evocative but ending up as messy and vile. Imagine Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Happiness shot by a sophomore film student obsessed with Tetsuo the Iron Man, and you’ll start to get the idea. This, ultimately, is what leads to the films’ massive, irredeemable failure. When you throw away plot, character development, depth, and dialogue (this film has nearly none, and I don’t believe the main character ever speaks), all you’re left with is the visuals, and those are an absolute failure. Tom Six threw away all the legs of the table his film sat on, hoping it would somehow stand on the flaccid stem of controversy and outrage.
Tom Six obviously loves his own films; his self-satisfaction exudes from every frame of this piece of rotted trash, and a later scene wherein a returning actress from the first Human Centipede gives a monologue masturbating Six’s ego stands out as more off-putting than any of the torture scenes the film so heavily wants to shock you with. Then of course, there’s the despicable framing device of the movie, Martin’s obsession with the first film in the series. “My movies are so incredible,” Tom Six seems to be saying, “Why WOULDN’T someone become a murderer to emulate their greatness?” Vomit-inducing.
And what of those infamous torture scenes, you ask? Well, they exist I suppose; teeth get knocked out, faces get stapled to asshole, a woman’s face gets bashed in so hard it becomes a hole, and there’s a particular scene in which a baby’s head is crushed under the accelerator pedal of a car that exemplifies the pointless provocation of the whole endeavor. “Why?” I asked, but I never got a sufficient answer. “Because I said so,” I feel would be Tom Six’s response. The most unnerving scenes in the film are actually those of Martin’s pet centipede feeding on other insects; the way its body curls around its prey is so fluidly horrific that I found myself hoping that bug got paid more than the human actors on display here.
Why any of them chose this job is beyond me; I suppose money is money, but there’s no way anyone was happy during the scene where Martin injects his human centipede with laxative and watches everyone precedes to have explosive diarrhea into each other’s mouths (of course balanced with excessive vomiting of blood and fecal matter). This movie is porn for Tom Six to jerk off to at night. Every scene feels filthy not because of what’s happening, but how it’s shot; there was no artistic impulse in the creation of this, just Six’s urge to get off by putting the sickest things he could come up with on screen.
Here’s a hint Tom: the great extreme movies of the past have stood the test of time by virtue of something besides their own extremity. Extremity for extremity’s sake only works when what’s created can truly get under that viewer’s skin, giving them a true experience. You’ve got a twisted mind in you; maybe get your hand off your dick while writing the script next time, and you could come up with something actually mediocre for once.
The Purpose of This Blog
As an avid fan of violent movies, I’ve often found myself defending my favorite films from people who consider them pointlessly gratuitous, or even people who consider extreme violence in film somehow morally wrong or socially damaging. Our arguments always seem to end up on the question of whether or not these films constituted art, and if so, how? How can gore and dismemberment and fetishized torture scenes constitute any artistic vision, much less one worth defending? I have looked around the community of film scholars and fans, and I have not seen this discussion happening nearly as often as it should be (at least not in an intelligent, organized way). So, instead of whining about it, I decided to do something.
This blog is my view on the nature of violence in movies, in particular how it relates to their artistic vision as opposed to their entertainment value. Each post will discuss a particular movie, and how I feel about its usage of violence; you could consider them especially focused movie reviews if you wish, or small interpretive essays. There will be no ratings, just the words; I’m assuming if you read them you understand how I feel about the work.
I will be focusing (obviously) on movies that feature violence heavily and show it graphically, and where violence is a major theme. I will be looking at movies I consider both successful and unsuccessful, popular and obscure; so long as a movie is suitably graphic (and/or historically important to graphic violence as a means of expression on film), I will get to it eventually (unless I die). You are welcome to leave suggestions for future movies, just don’t feel distressed if I don’t get to your movie for a very long time.
I am not a professional film critic, nor am I a film maker. I am just a person with too much time on their hands, a love for extreme movies, and a lot of opinions. No judgements I make are pretending to be definitive, and if you take issue with a stance I have on a particular movie, feel free to send me a thoughtful message with the reasons why you disagree. So long as it is respectful, I will respond.
That said, I hope everyone who reads this blog enjoys it. Thanks!
