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61%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #7,237
...out of 20,704 movies
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A scientist taints his mother's scientific experiment with his own drug that transforms pain into a pleasurable experience. Unfortunately for the three women involved in the experiment, the drug works a little bit too well.
--TMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: October 22, 2007
For my money, nobody in the world does extreme, sadistic violence better than the Japanese. Sure, we may have films like Saw and Hostel over here to whet our appetites for the red stuff, but this sort of thing is an entire genre over in Asia... and even the weaker ones from over there tend to make the aforementioned films look like children's programming. Splatter: Naked Blood is no exception to this rule, but the gore and violence is served up with a surprising amount of depth as well.
Eiji (Sadao Abe) is the leading man for this outing, and he just so happens to be a seventeen-year-old genius. Well, perhaps "genius" is too strong of a word, but he is working on a revolutionary pain killer called "My Son" that works by producing extra endorphins in the brain, resulting in a sort of natural anesthesia for the recipient. He decides that he's come to the stage in the development of this chemical where he must test it on live subjects, and luckily for him, his mother is also a scientist who just so happens to be researching drugs of an - ahem - more professional nature. She recruits a couple of test subjects for her experiments, and unbeknownst to her, Eiji slips in and injects a little bit of his creation into her chemicals so that he can see the results of his serum without anyone ever having to know that it was used. A genius plan, right?
Well, not entirely. You see, a problem arises when he - and more importantly, the test subjects - find out that his serum works a little too well. Not only does it kill the pain, but it also turns pain into pleasure... and the more pain that the recipient feels, the more pleasure they get out of it. This leads to two of the female test subjects going to grisly lengths to achieve the ultimate pleasure, but for some reason, one of the girls (Misa Aika) seems entirely unaffected by it. Eiji decides to investigate, and what he finds is that this girl is an insomniac of an extreme nature: she never sleeps, and hasn't since she started menstruating. She can also hear plants and animals talking, and she even has an "interesting" relationship with a cactus. Eiji starts to fall in love with this girl, and from there, things go from violent and sadistic to downright fucking bizarre.
This is certainly a difficult film to recommend, but I will say that I enjoyed the hell out of it. This difficulty comes from the fact that arthouse fans (yes, this ventures into their territory for quite a good chunk of the running time) will likely be put off by the large amount of extremely gratuitous violence, but at the same time, gorehounds will probably be disappointed by the sheer amount of mindfuck imagery and symbolism. If, however, you're one of the fans who can appreciate both ends of that spectrum, then Splatter: Naked Blood is definitely something that you should pick up right away.
So, this violence that I keep harping about... just how bad is it, anyway? Well, let's see: one lady puts her hand in a deep frier before chewing off her fingers, and then, she cuts off her vagina lips and eats those as an opening dish. She then cuts off one of her nipples and downs that as well, and for the main course, she plucks out her own eyeball and slurps it down. Oh, and this is just one scene - it gets much, much worse from there. The effects used for these scenes are surprisingly good, but I do have to express a little bit of disappointment in the cheesy sound effects that accompanied these acts as they did detract from the shock value a little bit.
However, with all of that said, I should again point out that the violence is not the focal point of the film. Sure, this is probably what most people will pick up the film for (I'll admit it, it's what sold me), but keep in mind that there's an actual story being told in here. The non-gore portion of the storyline is a bit slow at times and requires the viewer to put on the old thinking cap to piece everything together, but I will once again say that I enjoyed the hell out of it. The story is very reminiscent of Cronenberg's work without ever feeling downright derivative, and that is always a good thing.
If it sounds like your cup of tea, you'll probably enjoy this one as much as I did. If, however, you're simply wanting to get your fix of disgusting gore effects, you'll probably walk away disappointed; there's some great ones on display here, but you'll most likely be fast-forwarding through most of the film to get to them. 8/10.
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#1:
Ginose
- added October 22, 2007 at 5:56pm
Hmmmmm... A goreno-esque Cronenberg-esque Japanese
film? Sounds sexy.
I'll be picking this one
up soon.
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#2:
Tristan
- added October 22, 2007 at 8:09pm
Moi aussi.
This looks to be a good one.
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#3:
bradbunson
- added October 30, 2007 at 8:36pm
I thought the movie had good gore scenes, but
besides that it was too damn slow.
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#4:
grain of sand
- added October 31, 2007 at 6:31am
I'll need to get ahold of this and watch it stoned
out of my mind
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#5:
Ginose
- added January 16, 2010 at 9:16pm
This was pretty fucking excellent. It sort of
meandered about in between the real graphic m
oments, but the... eh... "twist"
reasoning behind the ending was, at best, a little
ridiculous. Either way, fun, gory and, in a
strange, wayward, soft-science sense, even a bit
intelligent... man that took some qualifying, but
I stand by it.
7.9/10
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