Macabre…ish Horror Review: Grotesque
Trigger Warning.
Grotesque, 2009/ 1 hr 13 min
A mad man (Shigeo Ōsako), kidnaps a couple, Kazuo Kojima (Hiroaki Kawatsure)and Aki Miyasita (Tsugumi Nagasawa) and brings them back to his lair. He ties them up face to face so they can be tormented by the torture of the other. He first takes his time sexually assaulting Aki and then Kazuo.
He later moved them to a pair of operating tables where he ties them down and cuts off Kazuo’s fingers, leaving his thumbs, with a chainsaw and then strings them on a chord like a necklace and puts it around Aki’s neck. Then he uses the chainsaw on Aki, he cuts the fingers off of one hand, leaving the thumb and cuts off her other arm. He ends this torture by cutting off her nipples. He bandages his victims’ wounds because he wouldn’t want them to die before he’s ready.
And like before, he strings her fingers on a chord and puts them around Kazuo’s neck. This monster then puts one of her fingers in Kazuo’s nose. Afterward he tells him that he is going to torture him now, as long as he endures it, he won’t torture Aki anymore. He announces that he will be pounding nails into Kazuo’s testicles. These nails are like 8 inches long and with a mallet, he drives the nails deep into the table.
Afterward, he digs out one of Kazuo’s eyes and as he moves on his penis. Aki objects but with a butcher’s knife, the mad doctor continues one. Once the penis is detached, he announces that they win and he’ll bandage them up, he says he won’t let them die.
All cleaned up and in a sterile recovery room, he says they’ll stay until they recover their strength. As a thanks for the excitement they gave him. But Kazuo and Aki are chained to their beds. The doctor says he’ll liquidate his fortune and compensate them and take them to the police himself. He is apparently, a solid doctor and wealthy, even if he is a deranged sadist.
During their meal, the couple talk about having a future, even if they are disabled now. The mad doctor seems to be devoted to their care and recovery. Soon he announces that in 2 or 3 days they should be able to leave barring complications.
But it’s a trick. They wake up in the same place they started. Hanging in a plastic wrapped room. He says they excited him so much that he wants more. He says that since they’ve recovered their will to live again, it’ll be fun taking them all they way back to despair.
He insists that he hasn’t broken his earlier promises, he just wants more fun.
Starting with Kazuo, he wants to open his abdomen and pull out his intestine, he’ll cut it at the end closest to his anus. Then the plan is to make him walk toward Aki, with the end of his intestine tied to a hook and unraveling. Kazuo has to cut his intestines with scissors to make it the rest of the way to her. If he can make it to free her, the doctor will let her go. But it will cause his death.
If Kazuo can’t make it, the doctor asks if he should rxpe her again and chop her into pieces until she dies as an inducement. So he picks himself up and then the most painful and saddest trek across 15 feet of floor, I’ve ever seen. He almost succeeds but appears to die before he can because the doctor put a wire in her restraints.
So the doctor drags him away and turns on music and asks Aki to show him her last will to live. Aki raises from her catatonia with a palpable rage and spits in his face. Then she calls his mom a fat whore and laughs in his face. She tells him no woman, including his mother ever loved him. That all the sex he’s ever had, he had to pay for. And she ends this epic shade by telling him he stinks like a skunk. And while she murders his ego, he simmers with rage and it gets her a violent but quick death. He’s cheated out of his torture of her. But she makes sure he doesn’t go out unscathed.
This Japanese horror was written and directed by Kōji Shiraishi. This is an underground exploitation horror and it’s probably not for the casual horror viewer. While they do not show everything, they show way more than viewers usually see. It’s like Hostel but so much worse because there’s almost no break. Just horror after horror until it’s over. And the one break there is, makes the rest of the movie harder to watch.