Cheuuat gaawn chim

Wow. The film surprised me. I thought I would leave a comment because this film has so few reviews. This was a very romantic torture porn with a crazy woman who runs a restaurant and slashes her customers' or adversaries' calves and puts them up on meathooks as if Leatherface. But this is not The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and this is not Saw or Guinea Pig.

The film is worth watching for the visuals and great operatic music. The primary colors of blood and blue are saturated and the director makes what is boring about these types of movies vibrant. It is very eye magnetic.

I have found torture pornographies to be very dull and exploitative in a way that I do not like (e.g. Hostel 2), but this was different. And it is one of only three Thai horror films that I like. Check it out.

The English title of this movie (Meat Grinder) and the bloody cover with a woman feeding a person and eyeball should prepare you that this movie will not be an easy watch. It is dark and gritty and there's lots of blood and gore involved. You see our protagonist struggling with mental illness and her behavior being depicted as being part of an ongoing cycle of violence that she suffered as a child. And this ongoing cycle of violence is now passed to her daughter. So if you enjoy brutal Thai-splatter movies with a good amount of gore which is explicitly shown you might found yourself a movie here.

However the movie also has its flaws. It's probably personal preference but there's a weird blue and grey filter all throughout the movie which on one hand brings a nice contrast to all the red blood but on the other hand makes the movie look cheap and unrealistic. Also you are served with quite a number of flashbacks and scene shifting that got me wondering what is going on at times. Still I think this movie was a decent watch and I'm surprised that it barely has a thousand views here on IMDb. [5,4/10]

There are poor and unrealistic excuses for all the shown torture. All seems very artificial constructed for the sake of showing torture and pain. The worst is the story telling, which is chaotic nonsense. Add some classical music elements and there will be people who are delighted about this "piece of art". Even though the torture effects are obviously handmade, which highers the realism a little bit, there are no insects shown in that blood coated scenario. No flys, no ants, no cockroaches, not anything - just bloody pain with an artificial forced kind of poor story and characters who are very unlikeable. Like all the unrealistic things which are shown, the motives of the characters are exaggerated to the maximum to force the impression that those characters would have a good excuse for their behavior, but they are just very sick. The one and a half hour felt one hour longer than it played. I recommend this movie for people who have too much time and like gore, no matter what.

Revenge is often a dish best eaten cold. Just ask Fruit Chan, director of Dumplings (2004), originally conceived as one chapter of a three-part horror omnibus (Three… Extremes) before he served up more of the same dark satire, just in larger portions, which regrettably made the bloated feature-length even harder to swallow. Tiwa Moeithaisong's Meat Grinder follows a similar recipe, and now, having finally found an overseas distributor, ominously appears on our menus for the first time. Relying more on mood rather than over the top visuals, this is a return to the intelligent side of exploitation horror. Refreshingly marinated with an intriguing story to give it flavour, and coupled with lashings and lashings of gory mayhem, Meat Grinder is an absolute treat from start to finish. DW

Buss is a disturbed lady who kills people and sometimes makes them into food. Meat Grinder is the story of how and why she came to this pretty pass, and where she goes. By all rights this should be a real winner, it has a workable story, reasonable pace and some entertaining gore and yet it actually comes out somewhat stodgy, dull in places. The trouble is mostly in the storytelling, fractured yet centred it draws shards of past and present in claustrophobic swirl about its lead, not really letting the story breath for itself or gather up a compelling sense of rhythm or flow. If the central performance were a bit better there might have been compelling emotional momentum but unfortunately Mai Charoenpura is fairly one note as Buss, cold and stressed out but not all that affecting. As a result the film is mostly interesting for the sake of various grisly moments, nothing we haven't seen before of course but some good stuff all the same, with a generally twisted edge that gives it that all important punch. Stylistic tics at times detract from affairs, like random switching between colour and black and white, but at least the nasty moments aren't spoiled by coke head edits, speedy cam or incomprehensible close ups, we still get to see the good stuff. What we don't see though is very much in the way of actual meat grinding, the title seems to have been put in place to catch the eye rather than for any great relevance to the films content. It's actually a sombre story of a woman's plight and what happens when she finally cracks, and though it follows a fairly predictable woe is the plight of the Asian woman trajectory, its still dark enough to be watchable. I'm probably making this one sound much less worthy than it is, certainly others have had stronger and more positive reactions. It does all just about hang together (aside from unexplained and irrelevant scenes involving rioters), it has some classy moments and the story works itself out in appropriately twisted fashion, but I was a bit nonplussed overall by it. Still semi worth a watch, but a good idea to suspend ones expectations and maybe have some booze or other viewing aids on hand to ease the passage. Fair 6/10 from me ('cause I'm a gorehound at heart).