Celluloid Nightmares (1999)

Muzan e, stated as a sickie from Japan, only available on terrible downloads and terrible copies. But let me tell you, it had a proper release on DVD in 2010 but is already OOP, it was maybe available for a few days. If you know your way you could catch a copy, otherwise you will be stuck forever with a bad copy. Luckily I found me a digital remaster on DVD, and have seen the downloads I can say, what an improvement. So far so good. But the flick itself isn't that sick as told. The mystery about this flick is solved now that it is available on DVD with interviews with the director. Still, it's a good story and I guess that Japanese people do have a n obsession with tampons because here we go again just like in Tampon Tango. But it's the other way, the tampon, a used one, is being teared out of a vagina and is being put into the girls mouth. Than a guy goes sucking out the blood out of her, well, you can guess it. One reporter goes searching what is going on in the world of porn, but get a VHS with some snuff on it, she wants to know if it's real and yes, she finds out but it goes wrong from there. There is a lot of blah blah in it and sadly for most people it won't have subs, on the other hand, private parts are blurred and even some faces are blurred. For me it's okay to see but I wouldn't classify it in the top ten of sickest flicks ever. Still, glad I have it in my possession as official remastered release.

The Camera-work on the film is complete crap, it looks like it was filmed on a second hand camera brought from a car boot sale in Tokyo, and edited on an old junk yard hard drive. The actors look like they've been pulled off the street or are out of work porn stars, The special FX consist of a fake knife, and some ketchup. Its filmed in some kind of basement, with lousy shots of a city street. In all, it serves only as inspiration to make your own low budget film, you could pick up some techniques, other than that, don't bother watching it.

I checked this movie out for the same reasons as most others, I would presume. I wanted to see what has been hyped as "some of the nastiest sh*t out there." But sadly I was once again disappointed, as I have been many times before when that line has been used to describe a horror/gore/splatter film. The storyline is nothing more than a reporter following up a tape with snuff on it and gets too close to the people involved for her own good. I was expecting a lot of gore, blood and guts in this one, but there was definitely not as much as the hype had led me to believe. As most Japanese produced films of this kind, this one has gone through pixel censorship, meaning it doesn't show all the really nasty stuff which is really why you'd like to see this film in the first place. (If you're one of the very few people who would like to see it simply because of the storyline, I'd suggest you save your money for something better.) If you're not used to this type of extreme film, I bet this could be "the nastiest sh*t". But if you, like me, have seen quite a lot in the genre, this film really isn't any special in terms of "extremeness". For the fans of this type of films, I'd highly recommend Men Behind The Sun, Audition and/or Ichi the Killer instead!

At the forty-two minute mark, this gets really interesting. Easily Daisuke Yamanouchi's best and most mature production. I didn't care at all for his "Red Room" films or "Blood Sisters", so I wasn't too enthused about this, either. A female reporter investigates the existence of "snuff" movies (visual records or people being actually murdered) and ends up being in one. Before that, she visits a porn shoot where a man eats a bloody tampon from a woman's vagina and drinks her blood. She interviews the actors as they break for lunch, establishing the fact that for performers in movies of this type, acts considered obscene by some are mundane jobs for others. The actress in this scene is clearly in it because she's an attention whore. After our intrepid reporter meets a shady character in a park, things begin to darken and she finds herself in possession of a videotape in which an attractive woman is kidnapped and abused. Just as a TV crew investigated the source of a snuff movie in Toshahiro Ikeda's "Evil Dead Trap" by identifying on-screen landmarks, so does this film's protagonist hit the road to pursue the source of her tape. She finds herself in a poor, rural area where she is attacked and captured. "Muzan-E" owes a great debt to "Guinea Pig", which owes a debt to "Videodrome", which owes a debt to the German "Pain" and "Violence" loops, which owe a debt to "Last House on Dead End Street", and so on, and so on. In other words, it's nothing original, but it is a toxic mix of extreme influences, and manages to create a disturbing mood, especially in its final section. The scene in which the reporter has her nipple ripped off is a keeper, as is the scene that follows. Yamanouchi's usually undisciplined style works to this film's advantage, and he shows restraint in the direction of the performers. The female lead is credible, and her ultimate state of insanity has a chilly edge.It is unfortunate that only this director's much more inferior work is available in English subtitled, US editions. His mixing of hardcore porn and grotesque horror works well in this effort. 'Tis a shame he has never made anything else that comes close to this blood-drenched, nasty piece of horror. It's heartily recommended.