If Takashi Miike, director of extreme horrors Audition and Ichi the Killer, were to collaborate with Canadian body-shock auteur David Cronenberg, the result might look something like Hisayasu Sato's Naked Blood, a downright weird film with some very nasty scenes of explicit gore.
Sadao Abe plays Eiji, a geeky 17 year old student genius who believes that he has discovered the answer to eternal happiness: his drug Myson, which triggers a massive increase in endorphin production when pain is experienced. In order to see if Myson works, he injects it into a trial contraceptive that his mother, a scientist, is about to test on three pretty volunteers.
Whilst Eiji waits for Myson to take effect, he follows the girls around with a video camera, recording them as part of his experiment. One of the girls, Rika Mikami, spots him trailing her and confronts him. Eiji explains that he is the son of the scientist who has been treating her; this seems like a good enough reason to Rika for the lad's strange behaviour, and the two become friends.
Then the film goes totally freaky, and not much else makes sense (unless you happen to be an advanced film student studying the history and psychology of Japanese Horror Cinemawhich I'm not!).
Rika reveals to Eiji that she is an insomniac who communicates with a cactus via a pair of headsets that can put you into a waking dream state; the other two girls begin to mutilate themselves in order to experience pleasure; we learn that Eiji's father believed he had found the answer to eternal life, and disappeared one day by walking into the sea; and Eiji discovers that Rika isn't quite the angel that she at first seemed to be.
Sato directs his film at a very leisurely pace, and and those looking for a non-stop splatter-fest will no doubt be disappointed by a film that shares much more in common with avant-garde and transgressive cinema than out-and-out gore flicks.
Don't switch off if you are a gore-hound, however: after a fair amount of chit chat and general weirdness, those seeking the juicy stuff will have their patience rewarded by some bloody realistic and truly nauseating effects, including really icky body-modification and scenes of self-cannibalisation. The make-up here is very realistic and unsettling; try not to wince as one girl repeatedly pushes a spike through her forearm, and the other hungry lass cuts off her 'beef curtains' for starters (without any horse-radish sauce), gouges out her eyeball for her main course, and removes her nipple with a knife for afters.
There then follows some more strange stuff featuring Eiji's mother, who has her stomach opened up like a kit-bag by Rika, the return of Eiji's father (who crawls headfirst into Eiji's mother's gaping abdominal wound, closing it up neatly behind him!), some cyber-sex, more blood-letting, and a suitably bizarre ending which see Rika riding a motorbike towards the horizon, spraying a liquid (presumably Myson) into the air as she goes.
A hard film to rate, since I didn't really understand what I was watching a lot of the time. However, given that it was never boring, and the impressive gore was well worth the wait, I think a 7/10 seems fair.
*The other film to feature deep-fat-fried fingers was the excellent splatter epic The Machine Girl.
Sadao Abe plays Eiji, a geeky 17 year old student genius who believes that he has discovered the answer to eternal happiness: his drug Myson, which triggers a massive increase in endorphin production when pain is experienced. In order to see if Myson works, he injects it into a trial contraceptive that his mother, a scientist, is about to test on three pretty volunteers.
Whilst Eiji waits for Myson to take effect, he follows the girls around with a video camera, recording them as part of his experiment. One of the girls, Rika Mikami, spots him trailing her and confronts him. Eiji explains that he is the son of the scientist who has been treating her; this seems like a good enough reason to Rika for the lad's strange behaviour, and the two become friends.
Then the film goes totally freaky, and not much else makes sense (unless you happen to be an advanced film student studying the history and psychology of Japanese Horror Cinemawhich I'm not!).
Rika reveals to Eiji that she is an insomniac who communicates with a cactus via a pair of headsets that can put you into a waking dream state; the other two girls begin to mutilate themselves in order to experience pleasure; we learn that Eiji's father believed he had found the answer to eternal life, and disappeared one day by walking into the sea; and Eiji discovers that Rika isn't quite the angel that she at first seemed to be.
Sato directs his film at a very leisurely pace, and and those looking for a non-stop splatter-fest will no doubt be disappointed by a film that shares much more in common with avant-garde and transgressive cinema than out-and-out gore flicks.
Don't switch off if you are a gore-hound, however: after a fair amount of chit chat and general weirdness, those seeking the juicy stuff will have their patience rewarded by some bloody realistic and truly nauseating effects, including really icky body-modification and scenes of self-cannibalisation. The make-up here is very realistic and unsettling; try not to wince as one girl repeatedly pushes a spike through her forearm, and the other hungry lass cuts off her 'beef curtains' for starters (without any horse-radish sauce), gouges out her eyeball for her main course, and removes her nipple with a knife for afters.
There then follows some more strange stuff featuring Eiji's mother, who has her stomach opened up like a kit-bag by Rika, the return of Eiji's father (who crawls headfirst into Eiji's mother's gaping abdominal wound, closing it up neatly behind him!), some cyber-sex, more blood-letting, and a suitably bizarre ending which see Rika riding a motorbike towards the horizon, spraying a liquid (presumably Myson) into the air as she goes.
A hard film to rate, since I didn't really understand what I was watching a lot of the time. However, given that it was never boring, and the impressive gore was well worth the wait, I think a 7/10 seems fair.
*The other film to feature deep-fat-fried fingers was the excellent splatter epic The Machine Girl.