Week 12 (Sept 6 – 12) – Japanese V- Cinema: V-Cinema is shorthand for the Japanese direct-to-video wave of the 90s and 00s. These movies were often produced by major studios on very low budgets, but they allowed the filmmakers a great deal of creative freedom as long as they could deliver the “exploitable elements.” This proved to be a great training ground for young directors like Takeshi Miike, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata and more.
If you don’t know what Guinea Pig is, you probably shouldn’t.
Hino was born to Japanese immigrant workers in Northeast China, and his family left just as Japan surrendered to the Soviets. They were nearly killed en route, and when they arrived back on the mainland, he claims that his grandfather and father were both in the Yakuza. These memories have informed his horrific manga visions in books like Panorama of Hell and Ghost School.
Hino produced the Guinea Pig series to adapt his manga into film. These videotapes became infamous when the fourth film in the series, Devil Woman Doctor, was found among the thousands of tapes owned by Japanese serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki. Because of this controversy, the series went out of print, but the series has been reissued on DVD in the US, UK, Netherlands and Austria.
In 1991, the series made international news thanks to Charlie Sheen. Film Threat editor Chris Gore gave him a copy of the series, and after watching the second installment, Flowers of Flesh and Blood, Sheen was convinced he was watching a snuff film. He called the FBI, who soon learned that Japanese authorities were already on the case, having summoned the filmmakers to court to find out whether the movies were fake.
Maybe everyone would have been better off if they just kept watching, because at the end of each video, there was behind-the-scenes footage of how the makeup and FX were achieved.
Make no mistake — these are unrelenting and sadistic films. They’ll test your capacity to withstand gore. But this is perhaps the easiest in a very rough lot and absolutely overflowing with the requisite slime, body goop and questionable much for today’s challenge.
The Guinea Pig 6: Mermaid in a Manhole (Za Ginī Piggu: Manhōru no naka no Ningyo) is based on one of Hino’s manga stories.
An artist is trying to cope with the death of his pregnant wife through the work he creates. For inspiration, he often visits the sewers beneath Okinawa, places that once had been rivers where he once met a mermaid as a child. Now she is trapped in the sewers but agrees to let him paint her.
However, all the time spent in the muck and bile has given her tumors all over her body. The artist takes her back to his home and keeps her in a bathtub, giving her medicine in the hopes of bringing her back to life.
The more she suffers, the more she oozes blood and pus from nearly every orifice in her body, fluids that the artist can use to create art. Yet with each brushstroke, she’s nearer to the final curtain, demanding that he continue painting her all the way to the point of her death.
That said — she may not have been a mermaid at all, but instead his terminally ill wife — and the fetus that he removed after her death just possibly may have been their child. Yet where did the scale they discovered in the bathtub come from? And just what is moving in the sewers after the credits?
Mari Somei, who played the mermaid, is a real trooper for her work in this, being covered near head to toe in practical and oozing effects. The artist is played by Shigeru Saiki, who also appeared in Audition and several sentai shows on Japanese TV.
I don’t know where else I’d find a movie so awash in fluids. There are literal geysers of vomit, blood, bodily fluids and even intestines filled with worms and insects spraying out all over the bathroom tile. There’s a message here about love and loss or art and death, but really, it’s nearly an hour of watching a mermaid expire in a filthy tub. Only in Japan, right?
