Niku Daruma

No plot to speak of, it might shock if more than a couple of yen were spared for special effects, but they weren't. Any porn before the bad special effects is rendered moot by the obligatory Japanese censorship, so it fails at porn & gore. Typical try-hard shock crap :( I'd have been disappointed if I'd paid for a copy of this!

The first half of it is just porn, the second half of it is torture porn. I'm not a moralist, yet I'm not a fan of this sort of films either. There's no story, there's no acting, there's no cinematography. It's not even shocking, because the props are so fake, it's laughable. 'Tumbling Doll of Flesh' is a frequent guest in 'disturbing' movie lists on YouTube, but it's not even disturbing. It's just overhyped and boring.

Yeah, I do realise that some people would be offended by this film, but it's hard to pick a thing someone isn't offended by these days. For me the most difficult part was trying not to fall asleep watching this. If you want to get 'disturbed', there's plenty of films that are more graphic or psychologically harrowing, or both. Maybe 'Tumbling Doll...' is one of the earliest pseudo-snuff films, so it kinda deserves a credit for it, but it still doesn't make It good.

I've always seen this movie on lists of the "most disturbing films of all time" and I recently got the chance to watch it, so I went ahead and did so. Yes, this movie is disturbing I suppose, but not in a good way. I've seen most of the big players in the disturbing movie seen (Salo, Martyrs, A Serbian Film, ect.). Those movies managed to be disturbing while also having at least a little bit of artist merit to them, while this movie had NONE. It was boring as hell too. I really wanted to turn it off, but not because I couldn't handle the content of it.

Here's the plot: people shoot porno, porno gets to intense for girl so she quits, on her way out they hit her in the head with a bat, then they torture her to death. Now I'm fine with the idea of this plot, but the main issue here was that there were no CHARACTERS. In the other films I mentioned (except Salo) we get to know the characters before the awful things happen to them, so I actual CARE when this character I've gotten to know has horrible things happen to them. In this movie I didn't even know the girls name. I tried to analyze it for a deeper meaning... maybe a commentary on how the porn industry uses women as objects? Maybe, but I really doubt that is what the director was going for.

I'm giving this movie 3 stars of 10. One star for the minimum I can give, another for the special effects, and one more because it was technically disturbing. It did make me uncomfortable, but it won't weigh on me for days like Salo or Martyrs did.

Even if you like super extreme disturbing movies, I still wouldn't recommend it. Unless you have some kind of sick fetish and get off to this kind of stuff (honestly half way through I started to wonder if this was made just to arouse people with a snuff fetish, so I'll credit it for doing psuedo-snuff decently. It really felt like it was made for psycho's to beat off to), or just need to cross it off your list.

Business as usual for Japanese art house: let's make a Movie that half of the world can't go through because they passed out and the other half would watch it with one eye shut. Some censored pornography plus lots of chuped body part. Well done.

PSYCHO: THE SNUFF REELS is another sick, super-extreme Japanese gore film. This review will all be a spoiler - there is no story to the film. Also, there was no English audio or subtitles, but I don't think I missed much because of that... Two people are brought in to make a porn video. They do their thing for a while (of course, all the hardcore action is pixelated...) and then they take a break. When they come back, they tie up the girl and have some BDSM type of play, but the chick isn't really digging having dildos shoved in her ass. When they try to give her an enema, she flatly refuses. They take another break, and when she isn't looking, she's hit in the head with a baseball bat. When she wakes up, she's tied to the bed. Someone cuts her foot off and then her arm. They cut her tongue up with some sort of shears then cut a hole in her stomach and play with her intestines. The male porn actor then f!cks her in her gut wound. Then they smash her in the face with a meat cleaver. When that's done, one of the film crew hits the guy over the head and knocks him unconscious also. They cut his nuts off, and that's pretty much it.

This film won't really appeal to any normal person as entertainment. It is definitely sick and disgusting, and is the whole reason I sought this film out, so on that level I was not disappointed. The fact that there is no story at all makes it less enjoyable. I know it's supposed to come off as a snuff film, but it's obviously not real. The tongue scene is obviously fake as are the other gore scenes, but the special effects are decent and it is still VERY rough. Only recommended to fans of AUGUST UNDERGROUND or perhaps FLOWER OF FLESH AND BLOOD or DEVIL'S EXPERIMENT from the GUINEA PIG series. 6/10