Welcome one and all to another installment of Films For Fiends, where I, Hamtackle, review the most foul, violent, and disturbing films of all time. Tonight I bring you Guinea Pig: The Devil's Experiment by Satoru Ogura. This is a somewhat legendary film that was released in 1985, and it was rumored to be a re-enactment of a snuff film that was sent to the director. He apparently watched it before sending it to the Tokyo police, but it dominated his thoughts until he reproduced it for our viewing pleasure. It consists of very little plot and a whole lot of brutal torture, and gave rise to the term "gorno". So let's see if it's worth a violence boner.

The film is only 43 minutes long, and centers around a group of three guys who decide to carry out a horrible experiment. They will capture a random woman and torture her until she decides to accept death, then send the results to the police. Charming, I know. It is all shot very amateurish to add to it's authenticity, and begins with a clean-cut lady tied to a chair being slapped repeatedly by her captors. They dip their hands in water and coat them in salt for further brutal effect, and beat her mercilessly with a coin-filled sock. The only saving grace to the disturbing scene is that it is clearly fake, and the woman takes the beating like a champ.

I imagine this might be where most real women would check out in real life, but this tough gal endures a three man texas-style boot party followed by a thorough pinching administered by pliers without appearing very impressed. The thugs take her toughness as a challenge, but again fail to break her when they inexplicably decide to spin her in an office chair to the point of unconsciousness, then force feed her liquor. Not much of a torture if you ask me. I did this same thing to myself two weeks ago.

Moving on to psychological torture, the men play computerized static to her through headphones for twenty hours until she screams like a banshee then appears to go comatose. But still she persists. It is at this point that they ratchet up the violence, tearing out patches of her hair and peeling away her fingernails. For me it would be at this point that I request a bullet, but not her. I am starting to like this lady.

Now the men liberally apply scalding cooking oil to her tender bits, starting with the inside flesh of her arms, to sizzling effect. Cue the maggots. The foul worms are applied to her burns and go to town on the necrotic flesh, although the girl seems too out of it to properly digest the horror of the situation. Strangely, the captors then decide to giggle like retards while they throw rotting meat at their prisoner. Entertaining? Yes. Torture? No.

But then the trio begins to truly test her bounds. They cut her hands with a scalpel and batter them with a hammer in what is actually a pretty convincing special effect, and then shove a needle through the side of her head and out her retina. Talk about escalating the situation. The film ends rather abruptly with a shot of the dead woman suspended in some kind of net.

So overall, how was it? I spent most of this film wondering what all the fuss was about. The majority of the torture is rather mundane and not particularly disturbing, but the ambiance and tone of it is quite menacing and downright mean. But the gouging of the eye was definitely cringe-worthy, even for someone as desensitized as myself. Overall I felt like I was cheated out of the gruesome promises the film made on the internet, probably mostly due to the acting of the victim. I am a big fan of japanese gore films, and they are generally much more inventive and unconventional than american slasher flicks, but the stoic submissiveness of the japanese woman lends itself better to pornography than torture, I guess. At least it avoids the transparently dishonest attempt at redeeming morality that tarnishes films like Cannibal Holocaust, although it is more likely to lull a gore-hound to sleep than inspire frantic masturbation. But I understand there are like six other brutal short films in the Guinea Pig franchise, so perhaps they will still live up to my expectations, assuming I can track them down. Until then, my blood lust will be left wanting.

In an effort to further my obsession with all things depraved I have been trying to see the most foul and disturbing films of all time. Tonight I review the 1987 West German cult classic, Nekromatik. This is another flick that was considered distasteful enough to warrant being banned in several countries due to it's depiction of graphic violence and necrophilia.

The plot centers on a young man named Rob who works in Germany for a company called Joe's Cleaning, which specializes in the removal of bodies from horrible accidents. He lives in a small apartment with his girlfriend Betty, who shares in his horribly violent fantasies. We are introduced to Rob when his team arrives in a van to clean up a car wreck, and they pick up the various pieces of corpses and place them into bags. After a long day's work Rob returns home with a few keepsakes to add to a collection of body parts in jars, and carefully deposits an eye and heart into their own receptacles. We then see his girlfriend Betty, who is currently bathing in a tub of human blood.

Rob daydreams about a rabbit being slaughtered, which is shown on screen (with a live rabbit, I guess to maintain artistic integrity) and likens it to a human autopsy. But he is about to take his fantasies further when a new opportunity arises. A man is accidentally shot by a neighbor and the body is dumped in a pond, decaying badly before the cleanup crew is called. Rob decides to steal the corpse instead of disposing of it, and returns home to present the prize to his girlfriend. She is clearly pleased and immediately explores the corpse's junk, which must not be up to par since she channels her inner MacGuyver and fashions a dong out of a condom covered pipe that she embeds in it's decaying groin. But don't get the wrong idea, this is all very tastefully filmed, particularly the part where she licks it's hanging eyeball while Rob makes out with it. The whole thing is hilariously paired with a romantic piano sonata, making it the classiest necrophilic three-way I have ever seen.

While Rob works all day Betty begins forming a deeper relationship with the body, laying in bed and fornicating with it, even reading romance novels to it. But after Rob is unceremoniously fired for leaving his bloody clothes in a locker to fester, Betty is visibly upset and takes the first opportunity of Rob's absence to steal the corpse and leave him. Rob takes the most logical course of action, which is to put their beloved house cat in a plastic bag and beat it to death. He then bathes with the cat's blood and entrails. Thankfully the slaughter of the cat is clearly fake, unlike the slaughter of the rabbit seen earlier.

In an attempt to forget about his woes Rob goes to see a horror film, but ends up leaving the theater unsatisfied with the movie as his tastes have clearly progressed beyond what the rest of the world considers "shocking". He goes home and attempts to kill himself with an overdose of pills and booze, but is ultimately unsuccessful but has a graphic dream of being undead and having a woman present him with a decomposing human head... cue the romantic piano as the two gleefully toss the head back and forth and prance through a field.

When he awakens to find he has failed in his suicide attempt, Rob travels to a seedy part of town to procure a prostitute, who he takes to a stereotypically foggy cemetery to strangle and then posthumously rape after he has trouble getting an erection. He falls asleep until awakened in the morning by an elderly gravedigger, whom Rob attacks and decapitates with his own shovel.

Faced with this irreconcilable chain of events, Rob decides to attempt suicide again with strengthened resolve, and repeatedly stabs himself in the stomach while an obviously fake penis fires a comical amount of semen and blood into the air. All this while the cheesy piano plays in the background, and cut scenes of the rabbit being slaughtered are shown in reverse, making a funny attempt to add an artistic edge signifying that Rob's death is, in reality, his birth. The final scene shows Rob's grave, and the film ends with a woman thrusting a shovel into the earth to dig him up. Although you only see her feet, one can only assume it is Betty coming to claim her former lover.

I must say that I liked this film despite it's sub-par effects and hilarious pairing of piano with scenes of violence. And although the theme of necrophilia is certainly disturbing, and I have a serious distaste for any depiction of animal abuse, there is something charming about the character of Rob who is far from an all powerful killer with no conscience. Indeed he is a rather pathetic miscreant who is at the mercy of his demented mind, and has no one to share his life with once Betty rejects him in favor of a dead guy with a steel pipe makeshift wiener. Check it out if you are the type of person who can get a chuckle out of cheesy horror films from the vintage era of the mid '70's to the mid '80's.