Review XCI
女虐: Naked Blood (1996)
What's a Halloween without a Japanese horror film? While looking up Meatball Machine (totally loved it when I watched it years back, though it was cheesy and weird) to get suggestions, I came across Satō Hisayasu's Naked Blood. The description seemed interesting enough, but what really hooked me was the "It's absolutely disturbing, but it was touching." What, touching? Guys, I'm down! I'm watching it! This is the last film I'm reviewing!
Eiji (Abe Sadao) is trying to fulfill his destiny of being a great scientist, as proclaimed by his father. He develops a serum that is able to turn pain into pleasure, and he's sure this will happen change the world for the better. However, he has to test the serum, which he calls "My Son", to see how effective it is on people. His mother, who is testing a new contraceptive on three women (seems like a small experimental group, but anyway), comes to his help, sneaking the serum into the contraceptive liquid. Now he's ready to see how great his creation really... isn't.
I was disappointed with this one. I mean, I guess I should have expected it to be absolutely awful given the horrible rating on IMDb, but I like gory nonsense sometimes. And this one was supposed to be gory, but honestly, it wasn't that bad. That's not say I didn't cringe. Let me discuss the three women in the experiment... The first is a woman who loves to eat (Hayashi Yumika; she's out to find the perfect, the best meal. The second woman is obsessed with her body image (Kirihara Mika), preferring to "starve and die" than get fat. The final one is an insomniac (Aika Misa) who hasn't slept since she got her period (which her doctor claims is a result of the "shock of menstruation". ... Okay). I don't want to give anything away, but at the same time, would you really watch this film? Probably not. Therefore, beware, spoilers! *breathes* Alright, we here? The woman with the self-esteem issues ends up mutilating herself in order to clear out every pore, every imperfection. It was... lame. It didn't look that cool, and we missed most of the gore for that one. It was more her just piercing her ear, cuts away to other scenes, and back to her sitting on the floor completely full of cuts and sharp objections piercing out of her skin. So scratch woman number two. How about the first woman? Okay, this is more like it. First the woman is at home cutting up some squid for some sushi (or something of the sort) when she cuts herself. Her cry is one of a sensual nature, and she starts sucking on her finger desperately. The serum doesn't make blood tasty, it only makes pain pleasurable, but whatever. The next time we see the woman, she's dipping the lovely battered squid into oil. But her hand is also covered in batter. Hmm... Fried hand, anyone? I think the hand was left undercooked, but the sound effects of her eating her fingers was pretty cool, I will admit. Now, the final scene with her in it. This one is infamous for being gruesome. She starts by first eating her labia (yum, yum), which looks super hard for some reason; then, she proceeds to eat her left nipple (the crunch sound seemed off to me - pretty sure it wouldn't be crunchy like her hand). Finally, she chops down on her eye after pulling it out with a fork. While I cringed, it was more the idea that got me feeling a little squeamish. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the optic nerve and tissue surrounding the optic nerve is not that rigid. It would have been cooler if it was stringy and she's pulling it out. All those connecting ganglion cells and all. But seriously, this is the most gruesome scene, and it wasn't that bad.
Wait, so what about the final woman? Well, she ends up becoming a serial murderer because the pain of killing others ends up becoming great pleasure. The idea was cool, but it was half-assed, and this little love thing with Eiji was... weird. It was forced on to the movie just so he could impregnate the insomniac at the end, only to be killed. That whole woman was... off. She had this idea that she could become one with a cactus in her room, and she'd use it to empty her heart and go into a "dream-like" state. While her one dream gives us the idea of her wanting to kill, I didn't get the cactus thing. I mean, maybe she's supposed to be the cactus, deadly to the touch or something, and it would make sense since, once she has sex with Eiji - or is about to have sex with him, can't remember - the plant flowers. Flowers are the sexual organs of a plant, and, well, she's about to undergo coitus. But that's lame. And this whole being at one with the cactus... It's shoved in your face. And no one would be like that, unless she really is crazy because of the insomnia. And, especially, Eiji goes along with this. Does he not know this woman is crazy? *sigh* It was just a bit too weird for me without being weird enough for me to think it was cool. And then that bit at the end? Well, two parts. First, the son makes out with his mother before saying goodbye. Is he really embodying his father in this scene? BUT WHY. WHY THE INCEST. It was pointless, and it was never hinted before. And I don't care for it! Then, right at the end, the woman is left with her intestines exposed, and her husband, who was dead or disappeared or whatever, says they can finally be together forever and proceeds to climb into her stomach, closing it up with his hands. Then in a few scenes later, she fades away, just like her husband. Obviously there's this play with eternity in the film. Eiji is called so for "eternity boy". Then the father says he wants to be with his wife forever. But see, the wife doesn't support this idea, hence why she's developing a contraceptive. "Contraceptives will save the world," is what she claims to the girls before they get the injections. And throughout the film, the son claims that his mother didn't support his father's idea. The idea might be of this eternal life by having children, passing along your genes. But in the end, the son ends up failing by indirectly killing two of the women through his serum. And, in the end, he dies himself. Is the director trying to say that pain is necessary for life? Is it being looked at in a religious way - I mean, there's vanity, gluttony, and then the killing... And using a drug to go against the pain of life. But this is a Christian view of things, and most Japanese are shintoists. I don't know enough about the belief system to put a meaning into the film, but honestly, screw it. It isn't even necessary. This film was boring and I didn't get quite the gore I wanted out of it. I didn't think it was that touching, even if it tries to put more meaning into the film than other horror gore films (I guess).
Skip this one this Halloween and check out Meatball Machine instead. At least that one had humour to go along with the gore...
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