Brutal

As much as I abhor gore, torture and brutality I thought this a very arthouse flick. Great cinematography. Disgusting in nature and not pleasant to watch but worth it for a glimpse into an original style of film making.

A chubby misogynistic serial killer brutally kills a group of bound and gagged girls, reducing their remains to a red slop that he flushes down the loo. A female psycho despatches of her victims by repeatedly stabbing them in the crotch. These two sickos meet and discover that they have more in common than their love of killing: both of them have had their genitals mutilated, the guy's wiener just a stump, and the woman's holiest of holies sewn shut (and her nipples removed). The pair then stab each other. A lot.

If you've enjoyed extreme Japanese cinema such as Grotesque, Guinea Pig, All Night Long and Red Room, then Takashi Hirose's Brutal probably sounds like it will satisfy your hunger for more visceral violence, being an hour and seven minutes of unrelenting barbarity. Unfortunately, despite the virtually non-stop stabbiness with a smattering of blunt force trauma, the film is actually quite dull, failing to deliver the graphic nastiness that fans of Eastern excess no doubt crave. There's very little in the way of unsettling prosthetic gore effects -- just lots of unimpressive knife thrusting with plenty of blood splashed about. It all gets very repetitive, although the disfigured private parts are an eye-opener.

Even when the film is trying to deliver a message that reflects life and love through situations and characters, that message is not fully grounded. It is very clear that the film has only 3 chapters, chapter 1 is man, chapter 2 is women and chapter 3 is man and women, the film shows the suffering of love between man and women by ugly, nakedly, it's shows hatred acts for not being loved (or being betrayed) or being not satisfied with desire. The message of the film will not be supported by people because of the lack of humanity, the character is also dirty in every action, it only shows like the animals who enjoy revenge in life or crazy animals who have lost their mind! This is not art! What is the meaning for homeless scenes by the way????

I must admit that I had more expectations and hopes for this movie, but director and writer Takashi Hirose just failed to properly deliver on those.

Sure, the movie is visceral and have some scenes that will probably be offensive to some viewers and unnerving to others, if not downright sickening. But this movie, and lets just be bluntly honest here, was nothing more than about an hour of a lack of storyline and just watching random violence and mutilation. Sure, it might sound like fun in theory, but trust me after 15 minutes, you will be ready to slither on to another movie, because "Brutal" got real repetitive really fast.

The special effects in the movie's three segments were adequate. But mind you, they are somewhat on the low budget side, so don't expect to be blown away by mutilation and mayhem that looks fantastic. The special effects serve their purpose, but they weren't dazzling or spectacular.

As for the acting in the movie, well let's just be kind and say you know what you will get here, with a movie such as this, for better or worse. The acting performances where not outstanding, nor memorable, but they served the lack of storyline well enough I suppose, to go hand-in-mutilated-hand.

The movie's selling point is, of course, actress Asami. And whom are you kidding if you say that you probably picked up the movie because of her. I did. Of course I did.

"Brutal" is a Japanese gorefest movie that came and went without leaving much of a dent in the horror genre. I managed to sit through the entire 67 minutes of playtime, but I can honestly say that I wasn't overly entertained or impressed. And I know for certain that this is not a movie that I will be watching a second time.

I am rating "Brutal" four out of ten stars.

Conducting a rampage of extreme prejudice, a savage killer targets women as he tries to find a compatible woman to engage his fantasies in, eventually catching the eye of a female serial killer who's just as sadistic as he is forcing them into a deadly and dangerous showdown.

Overall, this was an exceptionally enjoyable piece of exploitation sleaze. This is one of the strongest aspects of the film and is given to us immediately at the outset of the film, which is the exceptionally brutal and challenging murder scene of the killer targeting several victims and graphically tortures them in wholly demented fashion as his rants about his intentions go unheeded. Its unflinching mentality makes for a truly immersive experience the first thing you see in a film, and to see how he carries out his work cleaning up after himself in the bloodstained aftermath immediately afterward tells a lot about his psychotic nature. That brutality is carried over and rightly topped by us following the woman around. Arguably going for a more brutal approach with her frenzied and relentless stabbing that's generally targeted at their private regions, the montage that opens her story offers us an even stronger glance at what to expect within here the focus on both disparate people come together is the focus here. The final confrontation that occurs, a full-on hard-hitting brawl with each other smashing objects, pummeling and cutting each other or stabbing the other, is an exceptionally tough and brutal sequence to get through as they lay into each with a rawness that's incredibly vicious and realistic long before it unveils the savage twist for their physical beings. This is all truly fun if not enough to overcome its minor flaws. The film's biggest issue is the fact that there's just so little info that the film simply feels short. While the idea is surprisingly effective in how it's realized, the lack of depth into each individual manages to somewhat undo the idea that each person is mentally deranged. There's something to be said for how two individuals come together, but the way it's handled here where they just come together as a stroke of luck rather than being drawn together due to one picking up the other to continue their individual rampages and then discovering what the other does for a living just comes off as a sloppy mechanism. As well as some questionable tactics designed to get a misguided attempt at nostalgia that's just distracting, there's not much else really wrong here.

Rated Unrated/R: Extreme Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and Nudity.