Living Hell (Iki-jigoku}
Hirohito Honda is Yasu, a wheelchair-bound young man who lives with his dad, siter and brother.
The film starts out in a family’s home where a grandmother and a granddaughter brutally murder a couple. In what has to be one of the most original death scenes I've ever seen, the grandmother takes a beetle of some sort, puts it in a glass, and presses the glass over a woman's eye, wheren the insect does something to fill the glass with blood.
The old lady is found at the home by police and deemed senile, and locked away, where she escapes and winds up with the granddaughter at their distant relative's home, which happens to be Yasu's.
The girl doesn't speak, and the grandmother, when she does, leads everyone to believe she isn't all there.
The gist of the movie is everyone has to go to work during the week, leaving Yasu alone with them.
While alone, the female duo proceed to torture the poor hapless bastard. No one buy's his story, since he is anti-social. So everyday that they leave, he is at their mercy, or lack thereof.
This movie touts itself as being The Texas Chainsaqw Massacre without chainsaws. To an extent the begining of the third act is. At this point the movie is great, and ingenius in the way they show Yasu's POV with a couple of continous shots of the mayhem. The room is lit just so that it really is creepy.
Then it indeed goes to Hell.
The overacting by a couple of the actors is embarrasing, reminded me of Bollywood, and the plot, holy shit, takes a "turn" that has more loose ends than a porn star convention. Sorry that was bad.
But seriously the middle and end of the third act negate the rest of the film and it is sad. I see this alot in Japanese horror films, but they've still cornered the market in terms of content and presentation.
This is a low-budget movie but doesn't try to be more than that, so you forget early on of it's limits. Established camera angles and settings are rather striking at times.
This movie is more of a dark dark comedy than a horror flick, and I think you're allowed to giggle at certain instances without being deemed a sicko.
But who here does't want that label?
