The shadows gather around us once again. Take our hands and wander with us into the darkness where the monsters gather. We’re bringing you 31 horror reviews in October. Whatever you do, don’t let go of our hands lest you find out what truly goes bump in the night.
As a filmmaker, you know your horror movie did something right when Charlie Sheen sees it and thinks he watched a genuine snuff film. The Guinea Pig films are a series of six Japanese horror films. The first was released in 1985 while the sixth and final film was released in 1988. As you may have noticed, making six films in about three years is an extremely fast production schedule. As a result, these movies are short on narrative and rely on shock value to entertain viewers.
Despite the violence in these movies, it is the story behind the visuals that make them more disturbing. In the first film, Devil’s Experiment, the story is little more than some men abducting and torturing a woman which tests her threshold for pain. The second film, Flower of Flesh and Blood, is also an abduction story. A man wearing a samurai outfit abducts a woman and dismembers her – adding her parts to his collection. This is the movie that Charlie Sheen thought was a snuff film and forwarded the movie to the authorities for investigation.
Not all of the movies are so masochistic. The third film in the Guinea Pig series is about a man who realizes he cannot feel pain slicing himself and removing parts of his body.
The sixth and final film in the Guinea Pig series is the weirdest. A man finds a mermaid he saw as a boy in a sewer. She is dying from the effects of pollution so he brings her home and begins painting her portrait with the bodily fluids leaking from her wounds.
Are the Guinea Pig films worth watching in 2017? It really depends on what you hope to get out of them. As I mentioned before, these movies are severely lacking in narrative. They are infamous for their violence and effects but other films have gone further over the years. As a result, this series is kind of a tough sell except for their historical curiosity.