It’s certainly been a while since the Japanese have given us a film to be shocked over, but it seems like Koji Shiraishi’s Grotesque managed to make the Brits all squirmy in their trousers. While a bland report from the British Band of Film Classification has outright banned the DVD rental and sale of the film, the reasoning of BBFC director David Cooke (via Twitchfilm) :
Unlike other recent ‘torture’-themed horror works, such as the Saw and Hostel series, Grotesque features minimal narrative or character development and presents the audience with little more than an unrelenting and escalating scenario of humiliation, brutality and sadism. The chief pleasure on offer seems to be in the spectacle of sadism (including sexual sadism) for its own sake… Rejecting a work outright is a serious matter and the board considered whether the issue could be dealt with through cuts. However, given the unacceptable content featured throughout cutting the work is not a viable option in this case and the work is therefore refused a classification.
Apparently the second film to be banned in the UK thanks to the BBFC in the last four years, per Variety, while the other, Murder-Set-Pieces (fyi, link auto-plays an NSFW trailer) was an apparent ode to German serial killers, bloodplay, rape and Las Vegas. The trailer (above, also NSFW) for Grotesque is a play on something you’d never see in the Saw trailers.
Mainly: gore.
It’d odd how, even to this day, gore remains something we can never talk about unless the door is closed, Mom is asleep and the lights are low. Even the Guinea Pig franchise is taboo, despite being one of the shlockiest video series imaginable. But whenever the camera is first-person, such as the 2007 Korean film The Butcher, something becomes horribly wrong. Instead of lauding a two camera set-up entirely in an abandoned warehouse with being a terse thriller, it becomes a gut-wrenching experience to watch. After all, this is the new Horror that we’ve forced upon ourselves when it just wasn’t enough to chainsaw the guy who raped and killed your daughter.
You need to microwave him, even when your daughter survived. Because it’s just not enough to eviscerate these days, but if you did that from a 1st-person perspective? Now that’s just grotesque…so I guess we’ll have to wait till the lights go down to replay that.
[Order the UK Version of Grotesque on DVD through YesAsia. For the Lulz.]
-John Lichman
August 19th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Damn Brits. They just can’t do anything right.
August 26th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
The UK version won’t be available anywhere now, but YesAsia sells the Japanese version too. No subtitles, but not very essential for this movie.