Flower of Flesh and Blood

Oh, boy another torture film! So this time the director of Devil’s Experiment has a crazy fan who recreated the first of the Guinea Pig movies with another woman but I guess he was too cheap to use special effects and actually tortured and killed her (must have been a hell of a lot cheaper). The unidentified crazy person sent the 8mm snuff film to some cartoonist who decided to recreate the recreation so that the world could see how horrible people can be. I feel like I need footnotes before the opening credits start to roll.
(Check out the 7/8 post for full details of the Japanese gore fest).


Flower of Flesh and Blood (Chiniku no hana) 1985
Director: Hideshi Hino
Producer: Satoru Ogura
Screenplay: Hideshi Hino
Starring: Hiroshi Tamura and Kirara Yugao
FX: Nobuaki Koga

So we start off with the cameraman sizing up a woman in public, chasing her down and then knocking her out. The woman wakes up tied to a bed in a room with blood-splattered walls and some pretty nasty paintings. We see her captor with his back turned sharpening his knives. He is dressed like a samurai. The poor woman screams when she sees his face, not the razor or the costume. Perhaps its because he is also wearing lipstick? She hates transvestites? Lady, now is not the time for bigotry. Look at the knives!

Before getting into the hacking, our Samurai/Lipstick man drugs the woman and then explains to the camera that she will feel no pain, only ecstasy from the drugs. If she is feeling no pain, its harder to feel bad for the woman or even imagine yourself in her place. Since we can’t identify with the captive in any real way I guess this makes the movie not so much about the torture as it is about being horrified that this guy may exist (hence the frame story).

Once the action starts our hero hacks the woman up as she is lost in a drug haze. What is it about not showing people screaming? This would be so much more disturbing if the woman were awake. Come on, Guinea Pig people! Between hacking off each limb the Samurai/Lipstick man goes on for a bit about how the woman is a flower and her blood is like a flower blooming. Then flowers bloom along her neck when he chops her head off. Then her eyes are jewels when he scoops them out. The lipstick and samurai costume wearing crazy guy thinks that women are flowers that wear flowers and have jewels for eyes. These flower and jewel wearing flowers need his help in order to properly bloom.

Wow.

The gore here is much better than Devil’s Experiment. We’re talking at least on par with Slime City (which if you haven’t seen, you should go out and rent). All kinds of still-bleeding severed limbs, open body cavities, organs, rotting corpses, limbs planted in flower pots, chickens preserved in jars, teeth, grubs. All the goods. We even get a shot of the guy smoking a cigarette after hacking the woman up.

In the end we return to the city streets, follow another woman with the camera and are reassured in running text that the cops are on the case. Well that’s a relief!

I keep seeing references to a situation in which Charlie Sheen saw this nasty little bit of film making, mistook it for snuff, and contacted the FBI. I really hope that this is an urban legend. As good as the gore looks, it still doesn’t look completely real. Also, the end titles say that the Japanese cops are on it. They got it, man. They don’t need the FBI. Freakin’ busy body!

Next up: Mermaid in a Manhole! WTF?