Readicide by Kelly Gallagher

Books written about research in education tend to follow the pattern of describing a major issue that everyone is already talking about, presenting some statistics that make the problem seem worse, and then describing ways that teachers can, in the classroom, deal with said problem.  Gallagher does not stray from this pattern in even the slightest way.

I like that he presents clear classroom practices that promise to increase students' frequency and quality of independent reading.  I also like that these methods are all things that used to be more common in public schools and that he explains why we have gotten away from them and why we need to go back to them.  I've been talking to teachers in my school about the research Gallagher presents, and will be trying many of his suggestions in the coming school year.

Unfortunately the world needs more than that.

I do not like that this book is written for an audience of only teachers.  If we believe that there are problems in education in America that we can effectively address, we have to also recognize that teachers are no longer the decision makers in education.  We failed to hold on to that power decades ago.  Gallagher briefly describes some ways of talking administrators into supporting more pro-reading policies on a classroom level, but no place does he adress those administrators directly.  We do not need more books written to help teachers manage the shitty reality of our profession.  We need books written to empower teachers to improve the state of education outside of the confines of our classrooms and help policy makers (who are not teachers and do not read education research) and politicians understand what they are doing that is hurting the learning of our children in this country.  Your governor, your local legislature, and probably even your school board does not understand why the policies that they mandate do nothing to improve anything, and this book will not help them in any way.

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

I spent the entirety of this book waffling back and forth between hating it for being a clumsy wad of misogyny and loving it for being a well-crafted picture of a misogynist society.  The jerks who wrote it lured me through the whole thing.  Damn them!

I love the hell out of some classic sci-fi, but I am fully tired of books where every male character is a bro who struts around flexing and winning at big-dick competitions and every female character swoons, cries, and makes silly woman-decisions.  For frig's sake, the book was written in the mid-seventies.  That crap was well-out of style by that point.

I'll give Niven and Pounelle some credit for neat aliens, though.  I liked the aliens.

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

I remember this PBS series from when I was a kid. The shots of space and interviews with well spoken scientists stuck with me as I grew up and had a continued casual interest in physics and astronomy. While neither of these academic disciplines were ever my strong suit I still like to read up on the Hubble Space Telescope and whatever NASA is up to these days.

Sagan's companion to the TV series goes much further than what I remember. I did not expect the spiritual direction in which he takes the big ideas in science that he presents. The book presents the love of science that has driven humanity to continue to ask questions of the universe around us. I found this book to be as informative in its exploration of learning and inquiry as it is about the actual findings concerning the universe. It presents a truly awesome view of the universe that even delves into the way that we can use our knowledge of the physical world to live better social and spiritual lives. Good freakin' stuff!

I'm strongly considering pulling some excerpts from Cosmos to teach next year as part of a non-fiction unit.

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach

It is a well-known fact that I love the hell out of books by and about people who are bat-poop crazy.

Rokeach's account of his 1959-1961 social-psychology research using three paranoid schizophrenics all with Messianic delusions stands out, though.  Much of the text is copy of letters written by the patients to people who don't actually exist, and the rest is Rokeach's commentary that, towards the end of the book, begins to have serious second thoughts about the ethics and validity of what he is doing with these three men.  Throughout he does an amazing job of keeping his subjects human and not caricatures of mental illness presented only for our entertainment.  On the occasions when I laughed, it was at the humor and insight that the men showed, and not at their unfortunate situations.

Nice morally heavy stuff that includes serious discussion of how Madam Yeti Woman may actually be a hermaphroditic Great God Morpho married to a man named Doktor Dung.  Wonderful stuff!

Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire

Meh.  The easiest way to retain a reader is to set your story in an already rich, beloved, and iconic world.  Maguire's Wicked Years books are most interesting in that they re-imagine Oz from the perspective of an adult who understands politics.  I enjoy going back to a world that I loved as child and being reminded that there must have been some nastiness going on below the surface, so I read this and Wicked.  I think I'm done now.

Plot-wise and character-wise Son of a Witch does absolutely nothing of real value.  All the characters feel stock, even though only a small handfull appeared in L. Frank Baum's novels.  The plot was meandering and largely pointless, each event acting to drive a dull protagonist with an overly fractured personality.  It feels like Liir is the center of the universe, though the universe can't seem to flow around him in any one direction for long.  The sequence in the Emerald City prison would have made a hell of a short story, but the rest is largely fluff.  I get that teenagers feel buffeted about and without direction, but Maguire overdoes it by miles.

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut rejects suspense.  I'm okay with that.  His books are good practice for being an old man resigned to the insignificance of one human life on a grand scale and the insignificance of all else on a local scale.  I'm okay with that, too.

In This Way I Was Saved by Brian DeLeeuw

What a twisted little book! DeLeeuw starts out with the tried and true practice of horrifying his readers with innocent children experiencing deeply disturbing events (something very common in most of our experiences) and moves on from there. I expected very few of the plot twists (except for the big reveal at the end, but it didn't lose much of the impact just because I saw it coming) and thoroughly enjoyed the unsettling mood. Good stuff!

Growing Up Latino edited by Harold Augenbraum and Ilan Stavans

Growing Up Latino is one of the original efforts within the literary realm to combine the works of various Spanish-decent cultures into a single volume.  The introduction clearly states a desire to highlight the commonalities between Chicano, Caribbean, Central, and South American peoples and literary styles under one term: Latino.  It contains works by all of the recent heavy-hitters selected to highlight magical realism, immigrant narratives, and descriptions of latino home life.  Much of this is an enjoyable read, and while the introduction is dated, it does show the progression of literary criticism around these authors when compared with more recent writings.  Enough of the short stories are entertaining outside of the scholarly intent of the collection that I'd suggest this to anyone into short fiction as pleasure reading.

The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin is another one of those writers who can do no wrong in my book. She is imaginative, culturally aware, and philosophically consistant. Her stories include characters from a variety of backgrounds and she celebrates differences between people without stereotyping. Also her stories are badass. She pulls no punches and seems to delight in pulling out the nastiest tendencies of humanity and making her readers accept them as part of our species flaws while encouraging us to rise above them. This book is a small part of the Hanish Cycle which I have long ago given up on reading in order or even fully understanding the overall plot arc of. It is awesome as it is, even if I can't quite see the full picture.

Spook Country by William Gibson

I do love a book with multiple story lines that seem totally unconnected until the last two or so chapters.  I love books like that a lot.  Gibson pulls his complicated plot off well.  I'm not convinced that future generations will connect as strongly to the explicitly 'oughties' technology references as I did, but Spook Country will make a heck of a period piece in a few decades.  Good stuff!

Also, dude is a friggin' tweeting machine.  I had to stop following him because he fully dominated my feed every single evening.  Check him out if you dare!  @GreatDismal

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

It would appear that my quest to read a less than awesome Kurt Vonnegut book must continue. Damn it, man, can't you write something that isn't enjoyable and poignant? What the hell? Why not just write a book that is only great? Do they have to all be awesome? Doesn't this get old to you?

This here is a satire of the American class system and Western capitalism. As usual it is hilarious, and honest, and well-conceived, and blah blah blah isn't Vonnegut just one of the best American writers ever. I mean, he really is. This book also rules. I liked it a whole lot.

Feed by M. T. Anderson

Amazon link

I can't wait to teach Feed this coming school year. This book is one of those examples of fiction that leaves the reader off-kilter and a little unhinged at the end. Very powerful, very visceral, and very well attuned to popular concerns about American culture. I look forward to seeing whether actual young adults respond to this young adult novel. This old fogey thought it was pretty excellent!

Yeah, YA dystopias!

Teaching as if Life Matters by Christopher Uhl with Dana L. Stuchul

Amazon link

I am a sucker for hubris, especially when it concerns thing about which I care a lot. Christopher Uhl would like to suggest some foundational changes in the way that we educate each other as a species. He does this so that we can have a new paradigm in the very way that we conceive of ourselves and the cosmos around us. Also, he has some practical suggestions about how this work can be started in our classrooms today.

Uhl does a wonderful job engaging teachers where they are at philosophically and then taking commonly held principals (like encouraging students to ask questions) and taking them to the utmost logical extreme (like restructuring the way that information is gathered and spread in a classroom that has questioned the teacher's authority and found it insufficient) where many of us are no longer comfortable. Pretty heavy stuff, but an honest look at why many teachers believe in democratic processes, but do not enact them in classrooms. Uhl presents ways thinking and practicing that will make these democratic processes more attainable for the teacher, and less confusing for the student.

At no point does Uhl shy away from his political agenda. While I do not agree with the dude 100%, I respect the hell out of an education theorist who has the courage to admit that he or she has opinions and that those opinions do effect the way they think. Most of them pretend to be aloof, lying to themselves and their audience, and generally causing me to toss their book aside. Uhl admits it from the outset and reminds the reader of it at regular intervals. Nice work!

This is a refreshing bit of work with a bibliography that I plan on mining for further reading. I don't know whether or not it will change the human race and the universe in a fundamental way, but it has already changed the way that I do some things in my classroom. That's good enough for me.

Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert

The last book in the Dune series may very well be the best. Chapterhouse: Dune continues the story of human settlement in the cosmos over three thousand years beyond the original Dune. Herbert demonstrates humanity's capacity to learn and grow, as well as our capacity to lie to ourselves and regress. He continues themes of nothing ever actually ending, the struggle for survival, and the constantly shifting definitions of tribe. Herbert takes the ideas and motivations that drove characters from earlier novels and holds them up as flawed. I really enjoy that the history has not at all treated the heroes of the first four novels well. This is a wonderful book that serves as a fine disengaging point for a truly epic story arc.

Devil Doctor Woman

Here we go, the final Guinea Pig movie. I wish the series was half as good as the pictures on the boxes.

Devil Doctor Woman (Peter no akuma no joi-san) 1990
Orange Video House Presents
Director: Hajime Tabe
Producer: none listed in English
Writer: Hajime Tabe
Starring: Eve, Masami Hisamoto, Nezumi Imamura
FX: none listed in English

Devil Doctor Woman starts out by finally giving me what I have wanted for the last five movies: a blood geyser! Our host for the evening introduces herself briefly as the unlicensed doc who deals with cases no other doctor will touch and then she slashes open a doll and it launches gallons of blood in the air. It was beautiful. I nearly cried.

If the movie had skipped right to the credits it would have been perfect.

What follows is a series of shorts highlighting made-up diseases treated (or mocked) by the Devil Doctor Woman (who looks like a bad Elvira impersonator). There is a family with exploding heads, a man whose body leaks smoke, a zombie, a man whose right arm is trying to kill him, living poop, and this dude whose tongue sings like a pigeon (you can imagine how challenging the special effects were for the last one), and plenty more poorly conceived excuses to spray red liquid at the camera. While I can see how fun it must have been to make, the rest of us gore nerds know which of our home movies to keep hidden in our basements!

We end with credits rolling over members of the cast and crew hitting each other with “iron pies” as their names come up on the screen. These ingenious devices are composed of a hard rubber plate covered in silver painted rubber spikes with a fake blood filled balloon “hidden” in the middle. We even got to watch one not break. Come on, guys! Where'd the cancerous mermaid go?

Do not watch Devil Doctor Woman. While the rest of the series has some artistic merit, some decent gore set pieces, or at the very least some effort put towards entertaining, this last one is a waste of an hour.

I promise I'll never ask for a blood geyser again.

He Never Dies

The box said that the two movies were a double-feature and I need something to get Mermaid in a Manhole out of my head. That was nasty! One more today (for an explanation about what the heck is actually going on please scroll down to the 7/8 post).

He Never Dies (Senritsu! Shinanai otoko) 1986
Japanese with English subtitles
Director: Masayuki Kuzumi
Producer: Satoru Ogura
Story: Noritaka Okamato
Screenplay: Masayuki Kuzumi
Starring: Masahiro Sato, Keisuke Araki, and EVE
FX: Nobuaki Koga


These guys love frame stories. He Never Dies opens with a white, English speaking doctor listing the many unknown phenomena of the world. A Japanese language translator speaks over him and the English subtitles dutifully translate back to English. The explanation ends with the introduction of this story of a man who could not die. We are asked to watch the following video and think about what we see.

Hideshi is a whiney office worker with a one-room apartment and a death wish. His work is boring, he is a failure with women, and he wants to die. When we first see him he is unable to slit his own wrists because it hurts too much. At work the next day Hideshi is contrasted with the suave and self-assured Nakamura, the womanizer of the office. Hideshi apologizes while Nakamura gets the girl.

Hideshi decides to never go to work again, but his bosses don’t notice after nearly a week and he is not fired. In desperation, he tries to kill himself again, only to discover that he can no longer feel pain, and cutting his own wrists yields only a small amount of blood. Then comes the painful realization: Hideshi is such a failure he cannot even kill himself.

Eventually Nakamura ends up at the apartment as Hideshi demonstrates his newest failing. The formerly confident Nakamura is reduced to tears and begging as his friend hacks himself up, pulls out all of his own internal organs, and eventually chops his own head off. Soon Kyouto, Nakamura’s girlfriend becomes worried about the two, goes into the apartment and is horrified by the mess, not, mind you, the gore.

This short film uses the signature Guinea Pig gore to set up odd comical situations between pretty standard characters. The acting is intentionally overblown, Hideshi has some funny echo effects added to his voice during some scenes, and Kyouto’s final reaction is to clean up the apartment as the severed head of her friend decides that maybe he is finally ready to return to work.

I loved the scene where Hidoshi looks at his own severed hand and voices disappointment in his own various failures. He Never Dies is a cute little film that doesn’t try to do much beyond mixing stock comedy characters with gallons of blood and buckets of organs. It’s funny and a little intelligent at a few points. I’d have to say it was worth the 35 minutes.

Almost finished! Tomorrow’s foray: Devil Doctor Woman. Please, no more movies with “devil” in the title . . .

Mermaid in a Manhole

The Guinea Pig folks finally got to me. Four movies into the series and I am grossed out. (For full details of the Guinea Pig movie series go on down to the 7/8 entry).

Mermaid in a Manhole (Manhoru no naka no ningyo) 1988
Japanese with English subtitles
Director: Hideshi Hino
Starring: Shigeru Saiki, Go Riju, Masami Hisamoto, Mari Somei,
Producer: Satoru Ogura
Screenplay: Hideshi Hino
FX: Nobuaki Koga


The idea behind the Guinea Pig film series is for Hideshi Hino and his palls to show of their gore skills. The fourth movie in the series demonstrates just how far they have progressed since Devil’s Experiment.

Mermaid in a Manhole starts with an artist going down into the sewers to find subjects to paint. In voice over we learn that the sewers were built in a dried up streambed. As a child the artist had played in the stream and he recalls these pleasant memories as he wades through the muck. He thinks about how he has lost much of what he loved to the sewers. During this sequence we get flashes of a dead baby in the water along with some other odd images of garbage and fish floating around. Eventually, after sketching a dead animal for a while, the artist finds a mermaid that he vaguely remembers from his childhood (no explanation given) propped up against a wall.

This mermaid has some horrible tumors on her stomach, so the artist decides to take her home to take care of her and eventually paint her. As the movie progresses, the tumors get worse and worse. The entire middle and most of the end is comprised of the mermaid thrashing around squirting bodily fluids and worms (?!) onto the floor. There is a cool little segment where the mermaid realizes that the fluids from her tumors are different colors and that the artist should use them to paint her. The artist is torn between the desire to try to heal and the desire to immortalize her through painting. As her tumors spread, he must constantly paint over his masterpiece, to show her deteriorating condition. Themes of beauty being replaced by disease abound.

Nosey neighbors pop in and out of the movie to add some tension to the artist’s already disgusting predicament. They become increasingly suspicious of the fish in his garbage and the fact that he rarely leaves his house.

Eventually the mermaid is covered almost completely with tumors and begins to beg the artist to finish painting before she dies. The movie ends with a bit of a twist and some really horrendous scenes of gore.

It’s been a while since a movie actually grossed me out. I think the Guinea Pig folks finally hit on a successful experiment. Mermaid in a Manhole is disgusting! I can’t say it strongly enough. They forgo trying to make the gore look real and go straight for exaggeration. This mermaid oozes paint, blood, worms, and just about anything else you could think of. The lighting of the shots gets redder and redder and the set becomes cluttered with garbage and offal. The scenes of the mermaid’s death provide a truly horrid climax to some seriously artful nastiness. I don’t ever want to see a fish again.

This one is good (in a one-of-the-most-filthy-and-disgusting-things-I’ve-ever-seen kind of way).

Next up: He Never Dies. They made a gore comedy. I’m not sure if I support this or not.

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?

Android of Notre Dame

Day two of the Guinea Pig movie series came with the strangely named Android of Notre Dame (check out the 7/8 entry to see how I ended up in this mess). Listed by IMDB as the fifth Guinea Pig film and as the second in the opening credits. I’m going to try to resist spending hours seeking the reason for the two different numberings. It's not like we're dealing with Final Fantasy here.

Android of Notre Dame (Notorudamu no andoroido) 1988
Japanese with English Subtitles
Director: Kazuhito Kuramoto
Producer: Satoru Ogura
Screenplay: Kazuhito Kuramoto
Mitsuo Mutsuki
Yoshikazu Iwanami
Story: Kenji Tani
Satoru Ogura
Starring: Toshihiko Hino
Mio Takagi

This one has a plot! Or at least a premise. But, hey, it’s an improvement over yesterday’s offering.

Once upon a time there lived a little person. He was a doctor. The little person doctor had a sister who was dying because her white blood cells were killing her. The doctor needed to figure out the mystery of the missing link between humans and animals to help his sister out of her mess. To figure out this mystery he had to attach dead bodies to electrodes, bring those bodies back to life, and then get real pissed and hack the bodies into even bloodier pulps. Eventually he realizes that hearts are important organs. Then the doctor ends up in a church being kept alive by a computer. Wow.

Throughout the film we see a repetition of people dying, being brought back to life and then dying again after they or someone else realizes that their regeneration serves no real purpose. The first random dead body doesn’t work properly, the friendly neighborhood extortionist’s body (or at least his head) is only needed to lure his partner to the laboratory but he can never love her again (don’t ask), and the final dead body declares that the afterlife was more peaceful and promptly re-expires. I’m not exactly sure whether the message here is that humans shouldn’t play God (thank you Mary Shelly) or whether reanimated corpses are even grosser when you stab them to death all over again and that is cooler. Whichever it is, the twisted little doctor’s still living reanimated corpse narrates the story and is still going strong. Perhaps he is still performing his function? Maybe he’s the only one who likes to take scissors to reanimated corpses.

These Guinea Pig folks love to show us eyes being pulled out, ears getting cut off, and body cavities being ransacked. Android of Notre Dame includes some really nice slow segments of the camera exploring these crazy circuitry knots covered in blood and grossness. Most of the movie is made up of showing us every angle of various dead bodies hooked up to computers. There is very little talking, even less explanation of what the hell is going on, and the movie is better for it. We get the vague sense that the sister doesn’t actually want to be saved and a little back-story for the dead bodies. Just enough plot to excuse the gore.

Other than one weird little bit where the doctor explains to his sister that the hunchback of Notre Dame was actually an android (she nods, and seems interested out of politeness) I have no clue what the name is all about. We do hear bells at the end. Notre Dame is supposed to have bells. One time this dude wrote a book about a hunchback living in Notre Dame. Then some other dudes made movies based on the book. This is another example of a movie. Androids are cooler than hunchbacks. Never mind, it makes total sense now.

This one is good. Watch it (unless watching little people poke at dead naked women and then rip their sense organs out of their heads while cackling gleefully bothers you). We still need a “the” in the title, here. I think I see the connection between these movies.

Next up: Flower of Flesh and Blood. Any relation to that Poison song?

Guinea Pig: Devil's Experiment

The Swarthmore College Library was recently asked to order a series of Japanese gore movies (do we call them slasher movies? gore porn? what’s the buzzword these days?) for an upcoming film class. All are part of the “Guinea Pig” collection, supposedly banned in Japan and occasionally mistaken for snuff. Anna gets to catalogue movies for the library and was not psyched to see these reach her desk. She really didn’t want to even open the box for them, let alone watch enough of them to get the cataloguing information. Being the awesome wife that she is, she brought them home along with instructions on how to take down the cataloguing information. Woohoo! Japanese horror extravaganza for this nerdy teacher on summer break! I can’t wait to tell this story next year in the faculty lounge!


Guinea Pig: Devil’s Experiment (Za ginipiggu: Akuma no jikken) 1985
Director: Satoru Ogura
Unearthed Films (DVD credits)
JHV (DVD credits)
No production credits or notes given. No acting credits listed. An unidentified person supposedly found a video tape with this on it.

The first out of the box was The Devil’s Experiment. The rolling credits at the beginning and end set up the story of the video being made anonymously, found randomly, and then investigated by the police. This is the only narrative aspect of the movie. The rest is a 40-odd minute torture film interspersed with simple title screens that describe the next torture segment in one word. “Hit”, “Kick”, “Burn”, “Worm” (my personal favorite), and “Needle” (the climax) to name a few. I’m honestly not all that in to torture films. For me gore needs at least a cursory plot. Torture films that go for realism end up just disappointing me. I want to know why, damn it!

So I watched this video of these three dudes pretending to torture a woman who doesn’t seem to notice all that often (she’s sleeping through most of it) while eating my healthy soup and tasty sandwich lunch. Some of the makeup in Devil’s Experiment is decent. The hot-oil-on-inside-of-arm bit came with some pretty neat blistering and was followed up by a great meal-worm-dumped-onto-face-and-into-burns bit that was actually pretty gross. I was bummed when they forgot to put the burn makeup back on for later segments.

The final segment contains a few notable gore effects. Whatever they used for fake skin actually looks like skin (albeit skin stretched over a pillow, but still skin), and some of the blood-welling-up-from-wounds is pretty tight. The film’s last few minutes contain a few edits clearly made to cover up things that they couldn’t simulate (no shots of stabbing and thrashing at the same time, only stabbing up close, followed by thrashing from across the room), but that’s understandable for a homebrew movie. Sadly, the cover of the freakin’ DVD box shows what they do with the needle and then the movie ends. That’s it? I knew that was coming! Way to spoil the ending, fake snuff film marketers! Jeez!!!

I need music, editing, and blood geysers in my gore. Also, would it hurt to get actors who actually scream and thrash around a bit? Hasn’t anyone seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Screaming actors make movies scary. Especially when you have to make do on the gore. Devil’s Experiment gets a “meh” and nothing else (though it could use an article before “devil’s”. We have this word “the” in English. It’s a useful word).

Tomorrow’s lunch hour movie: Android of Notre Dame. At least the title sounds more promising!