{"id":356,"date":"2015-09-25T12:15:08","date_gmt":"2015-09-25T17:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/?p=356"},"modified":"2017-05-04T09:43:00","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T14:43:00","slug":"guinea-pig-devils-experiment-1985-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/?p=356","title":{"rendered":"Guinea Pig: Devil’s Experiment (1985) – Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"title\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There are some movies out there where the stories and legends surrounding them are more intriguing than the contents of the movies themselves. Maybe it\u2019s the film historian side of me coming out, but I love seeking out those movies. It\u2019s kind of like a quest to discover a piece of cinematic history. The movie itself doesn\u2019t matter as much as the fact that once I\u2019ve seen it, I\u2019ll be able to say, \u201cyeah, I\u2019ve seen that.\u201d As a fan of both horror and Japanese movies, the <\/span>Guinea Pig <\/span><\/i>series is one that I’ve always wanted to watch. It has reached a cult status in the splatter genre, and a legendary status in my mind.<\/span><\/p>\n

The <\/span>Guinea Pig<\/span><\/i> movies are a series of seven Japanese gore movies released in the mid-to-late 1980s. They are notorious for their extreme gore, but in addition to that, they are infamous for their connection to multiple controversies in the eighties and nineties. The movies have been blamed for the actions of a real life serial killer and have been investigated for being actual snuff films. One of the more famous stories involves the second entry in the series, <\/span>Flower of Flesh and Blood<\/span><\/i>. The story goes that actor Charlie Sheen saw it and reported it to the FBI thinking it showed a woman actually being murdered. The filmmakers had to prove that no one was actually killed in either of the first two <\/span>Guinea Pig<\/span><\/i> movies, much like the makers of <\/span>Cannibal Holocaust <\/span><\/i>had to prove their innocence years earlier. With a history like that, I think it\u2019s pretty easy to see why I\u2019ve wanted to watch these movies. If nothing else I just wanted to see what all the controversy was about.<\/span><\/p>\n

Does it sound like I\u2019m building this up a little too much? Was I setting myself up for disappointment (and you as well since you\u2019re reading this review)? Maybe so, but I\u2019ve now seen the first movie in the <\/span>Guinea Pig<\/span><\/i> series, and I have to say\u2026 yeah, it was a little underwhelming.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Before
Before the torture begins.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first movie in the series is <\/span>Guinea Pig: Devil\u2019s Experiment<\/span><\/i>. It was released in 1985 in an era where VHS was king and the \u201cvideo nasty\u201d was changing the way people watched movies at home in certain parts of the world. While <\/span>Devil\u2019s Experiment<\/span><\/i> technically doesn\u2019t fall into the category of a video nasty, it certainly seems to have made an attempt to push against the boundaries of good taste and how violence is depicted on video. It is about a woman who is kidnapped and tortured by a group of men in increasingly nasty ways. The movie is divided into a number of chapters where each segment is centered on a different torture technique or device.<\/span><\/p>\n

To call <\/span>Devil\u2019s Experiment<\/span><\/i> a proper movie seems like a bit of a stretch. There\u2019s no story, plot or characters to speak of. What I\u2019ve already written is all there is to it. A woman is tortured. That\u2019s it. She has no real lines and we know nothing about her other than she was apparently caught in a net in the woods and then taken to a room by some guys. She\u2019s unusually quiet in many of the torture scenes, letting out more whimpers than screams, so there\u2019s no way to learn anything about her. She\u2019s basically a prop. We learn even less about the torturers. They\u2019re typically wearing dark glasses and their faces are rarely in the shot anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"They
They start off taking turns slapping her.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

All this anonymity gives the movie more of a snuff film feel. In most movies the audience is (hopefully) engaged because they are interested in what happens to the characters. They should care about what happens to them. Of course, not all movies do this well, but <\/span>Devil\u2019s Experiment <\/span><\/i>doesn\u2019t even make an attempt. The way it\u2019s made makes the sole purpose of watching the movie about watching torture. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I don\u2019t necessarily have anything against gore or torture in movies, but I like to feel that there\u2019s at least a reason for it. Does it further the plot or a storyline? There\u2019s none of that here. Other than my reasons described in the first couple of paragraphs of this review, there\u2019s no good reason to watch <\/span>Devil\u2019s Experiment <\/span><\/i>unless you like watching people get hurt.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some people might want to watch this is for the special effects though. They might want to find out how good they must be if they convinced people that someone was\u00a0being murdered. Well, though they might have seemed pretty convincing on a low quality VHS in 1985, I don\u2019t think many horror fans would be fooled today. They\u2019re done well, but certain things give away the tricks pretty easily. Sometimes the cuts from shot to shot are a giveaway. Sometimes you can see one of the guys slapping his hand rather than the woman. Sometimes it\u2019s apparent that it\u2019s the sound effects that are really convincing us that something bad is happening.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"4\"
Some of the effects are more effective than others.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Also, the methods of torture themselves aren\u2019t as extreme as I expected. As I stated, the <\/span>Guinea Pig <\/span><\/i>movies are known for their gore, but there\u2019s very little of it in <\/span>Devil\u2019s Experiment<\/span><\/i>. The tortures range from pretty painful (like slaps and kicks) to extremely painful (like hot oil and various metal implements), but there\u2019s relatively little blood. There are also some torture methods seem kind of silly or just mildly annoying, like pouring maggots on the woman\u2019s mostly unconscious body or spinning her in a swivel chair until she throws up. I will say though, the last scene did make me cringe a bit. All I\u2019ll say is that it reminded me of a certain scene involving a broken door in Lucio Fulci\u2019s <\/span>Zombie <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Zombi 2<\/span><\/i>).<\/span><\/p>\n

In a way, making it all the way through\u00a0Devil’s Experiment\u00a0<\/em>was kind of a torture itself. If that was the point, if the filmmakers stripped\u00a0away all story and character and left\u00a0us with nothing but pain\u00a0in order to try and put the viewer in a similar state of mind as the woman being tortured, then I’d say good job. But I think that’s probably giving them too much credit. I think this was simply made to cater to a very specific audience who wanted to see violence for the sake of violence. So, that being said,\u00a0I can’t say I really enjoyed it. I’m not sorry I watched it though. At least I can now say I saw it.<\/p>\n

\"6\"
Setting up for the final method.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

RATING<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

4 – Pretty Bad<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
\n<\/code><\/p>\n

Is one scene of cringe-inducing torture worth sitting through the whole movie? Even at a running time of under 45 minutes, I\u2019d have to say no. I think I can only recommend <\/span>Devil\u2019s Experiment <\/span><\/i>to the most hardcore fans of torture (even though it\u2019s not terribly\u00a0extreme), or those who are extremely interested in watching what is, in my eyes, undeniably a piece of notable horror movie history. Everyone else should probably pass on this one.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

RECOMMENDATION<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Cannibal Holocaust<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0(1980)
\n\"\"<\/a>Cannibal Holocaust\u00a0<\/em>also got its filmmakers in trouble with the law. They had to prove that the actors in the movie weren’t actually dead.<\/p>\n

There’s a lot more gore in this than\u00a0Devil’s Experiment<\/em>, so if that’s your thing, I do recommend watching this. \u00a0It’s about a group of documentary filmmakers who take\u00a0a trip to the Amazon where they plan to interact with a cannibal tribe. They don’t return, but their footage does.<\/p>\n

A word of warning though, depending on the cut you watch, there is the possibility of watching some very graphic real life animal cruelty which is not something I recommend you do. There are versions of this out there that give you the choice of cuts to watch.<\/p>\n

Watch the Cannibal Holocaust<\/em> trailer.
\n<\/a>(Warning: Even the trailer has some violent images and brief nudity.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

DETAILS<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

English Title: Guinea Pig: Devil’s Experiment<\/em>
\nJapanese Title: \u30ae\u30cb\u30fc\u30d4\u30c3\u30b0 \u60aa\u9b54\u306e\u5b9f\u9a13
\nJapanese Title (romaji): Giniipiggu: Akuma no Jikken<\/em>
\nDirector:\u00a0Satoru Ogura
\nRun Time: 43\u00a0minutes<\/p>\n

Availability:\u00a0Available on DVD
\n(There are various region 1 releases of this with subtitles. You can generally find them on Amazon, but you might want to search Ebay for a better deal if can get lucky. It can get kind of expensive. The version I have is a double feature that also has the 5th movie in the series, Android of Notre Dame<\/em>.\u00a0There’s also a box set with all of the Guinea Pig movies.)
\n<\/span>
\nWatch the trailer
\n(<\/a>Don’t watch the trailer unless you want some of the effects spoiled.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guinea Pig: Devil’s Experiment is the first in an infamous series of Japanese splatter films released in the eighties, but is it worth watching today?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":371,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442,5],"tags":[166,167,165,47,170,168,169],"class_list":["post-356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-review","category-review","tag-devils-experiment","tag-gore","tag-guinea-pig","tag-japanese","tag-satoru-ogura","tag-splatter","tag-torture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=356"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lasttheater.cnjradio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}