Splatter: Naked Blood

I promise not to dwell on the topic of weird depictions of self-mutilation in films for too long, but since we're on the subject let's talk about Splatter: Naked Blood.  As I was reading the previously mentioned Asian Horror book (see the my last post if you don't know what I'm talking about), I came across the description of a title that just sounded too weird to pass up.  The title in question is one Splatter: Naked Blood, a bizarre Japanese horror film from 1996.  Splatter concerns the scientific misadventures of a bright but misguided young man named Eiji who develops a painkiller that transforms pain into pleasure.  At this same time, Eiji's mom, a scientist in her own right, is testing a new contraceptive on three young female test subjects.  Unbeknownst to mom, Eiji injects his newly invented painkiller into these three ladies to gratuitously nasty results.

Reading about the absurd and gratuitous subject matter alone convinced me that Splatter was just too bizarre to pass up.  The film's pedigree, as described by writer Andy Richards in Asian Horror, also promised exquisite weirdness and perversity.  Richards describes Hisayasu Sato, the film's director, as follows, "Sato was one of the major players in the Japanese sex film industry of the eighties and nineties, with over 50 movies under his belt...Splatter: Naked Blood is, in part, a remake of his pinku eiga from 1987, Genuine Rape, which also explored the boundaries between hallucination and reality."  Now I realize that a headline like "From the director of Genuine Rape..." would not normally be a selling point, but I was intrigued by the idea of seeing what kind of depraved horror film that somebody with such a storied and sketchy filmography would be capable of creating.  Plus, in Asian Horror the author later goes on to casually mention that Sato also directed the 2005 zombie comedy Tokyo Zombie.  Tokyo Zombie was a movie I watched a few years back and found to be generally enjoyable (albeit in a rather innocent and decidedly non-sleazy/sketchy way).  So there was the name recognition factor as well.

So my long winded story aside, I received Splatter a handful of days ago and had the opportunity to watch it today.  I have to say that it wasn't quite what I expected.  For a film called Splatter: Naked Blood, the beginning is surprisingly rather dull and utterly devoid of gore.  Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.  Even a movie that sells itself on its extremity and depravity doesn't necessarily need to feature non-stop blood and guts for me to enjoy it.  But even with that in mind I can say in honesty that even with its slim 75 minute runtime there are parts of Splatter that tend toward the dry and the dull.  And yet, when the film picks up and the blood starts to flow you are in for some of the most inventive, bizarre, and just plain fucked up horror movie moments you will ever see.  Which means that if you're a person who's into that sort of thing, then you gotta pick this title up, even if for just one watch.  If, on the other hand, you're the type to shy away from blood and guts, this will be an irredeemable piece of entertainment for you (but, then again, what did you expect?)

The most mind blowing moment of depravity in the film comes in the form of a moment of autocannibalism.  You see, one of the girls who was injected with the painkiller is a total glutton who relishes in the consumption of food in vast quantities (all of the personalities and character flaws of the three female leads are established succinctly in an early scene in which the three dine out at a restaurant).  Whilst cooking up some tasty tempura, her hand gets covered in batter.  She then proceeds to the next logical step of dunking her hand into burning oil, frying it, and then taking a delicious bite.  Watch a clip of that scene here.  The gal's cannibalistic frenzy continues later in the film as she slices off and nibbles on a nipple, until finally plucking out her eyeball and chowing down.  The special effects in these sequences are not necessarily the most convincing.  The eating of her tempura hand is especially rather fake looking.  And yet, in a case like this, the scenarios on display are just so outlandish and fucked up that you just kind of have to step back and (a) admire that someone's brain actually came up with these scenarios and (b) they had the guts to capture their weird ideas on film for posterity's sake.

The scene of autocannibalism in Splatter represents an instance of the human imagination gone wild and it's hard not to love it for that very reason.

P.S.- It would be tragic if I concluded this post without giving a shout out to the awesome Japanese action/comedy/revenge movie The Machine Girl, which did its own take on the tempura arm.  It was predictably hilarious.