American Guinea Pig: Bouquet of Guts & Gore
by Stephen Biro
I don't usually kill insects if I can avoid it. Even though I hate most of them and without being an Insectologist (that can't be the real word) I can only assume that they're too stupid to feel any real pain. But I still feel bad about crushing them and conjure up images of bug ghosts coming back to haunt me. This is the level of malicious intent I have for the most part in real life. Interest-wise, however, I have a special place in my heart for extreme violence and depravity. Something about pushing boundaries to the extreme and seeing how deep degradation and human destruction goes gives me the kind of satisfaction that some get from aromatherapy candles. In the end, I see it all as a pure form of entertainment that unfortunately isn't all that affluent in the horror world. The number of extreme shock companies/filmmakers in the world are limited, and while all the ones I know are amazing, they are only human and can't pump out ten films a year each.
This all leads to my excitement of hearing about American Guinea Pig: Bouquet of Guts & Gore. Like most enthusiasts, I get weary when I hear about American reboots of foreign films. I love a lot of them but there's always the heavy chance that they end up doing nothing but cheaply cashing in on some kind of classic. But with this one, I wasn't as concerned. The original Japanese Guinea Pig series is far from the most obscure set of films in the world, but aren't exactly super well-known to mainstream audiences either. Because of this I knew that no big studio would be making this simply to make a quick buck and anyone involved would hold the act of respecting the source material as a top priority. Thanks to a successful crowd-funding campaign, American Guinea Pig was finally made and released. And I finally got a chance to check it out and tell you all about it. That's how this works.
For those unfamiliar with the original material and who don't feel like going too in depth with it, I'll provide a basic overview for reference purposes. The Guinea Pig series is a collection of Japanese shorts that deal heavily with extreme gore. The first few were of the straight-up faux-snuff variety, whereas the later ones had more complex story-lines and intended humor added. American Guinea Pig: Bouquet of Blood & Guts takes its cues almost completely from the second and most notorious chapter of the Japanese series, Flower of Flesh & Blood. Where Flower dealt with a dude in a samurai helmet carving up a woman he has abducted, AMG deals with a group of snuff filmmakers filming a large man in a skull-fashioned mask cutting up a mother and daughter they've taken. It has the same playground as the original: victims being hacked up on a table. But it goes its own way with the gore.
As with the source material, there is little exposition, nor does there need to be with this type of project. There is a tiny subplot involving learning more about why one of the captors is partaking in the activity, but it is such a small thing that it barely exists. The little conversational acting that exists isn't great, but it's more forgivable than with most found footage films because 98% of the film is just the torture being perpetrated on the victims. Honestly, the small bit of information doesn't need to be there and only serves to divert us from the hyper-realistic project with the mediocre acting efforts. The negative elements are so heavily outweighed by the meat of the film, however, that it doesn't really matter. I didn't come to a Guinea Pig film for dialogue, I came to see some top-notch gore play out. And that's what I got.
The gore effects are quite impressive for the most part. Are there one or two pitfalls that don't seem completely real? Sure, a few. But only things that are damn near impossible to pull off and are essentially suspensions of disbelief by this point. Besides, real gore doesn't always look the way you think it's going to and can look fake itself, so I don't even feel comfortable making that call. For all I know it's fully realistic and for the most part looks genuine. Especially considering how realistic the effects are in general.
It is a difficult project to take on and stay interesting, especially with the Gorehound community. Both Flower and Bouquet have the overall theme of pushing gore and torture as far as they can, but the Japanese version is only forty-two minutes long.
While AGP is only seventy-three minutes it still has more time to fill with such a basic concept. You have to really be creative to keep things interesting. I LOVE gore, but it can get tedious if you don't give the audience a new concept to look at every now and again. American Guinea Pigsucceeds with this for the most part. It isn't wall-to-wall entertaining but ups the ante consistently enough to keep it moving along. When we tire of limbs being sawed off we get treated to hammer bashing, eye-slicing, and distortion of the human form as we know it.
While the acting isn't top-notch, I appreciate some of the little touches. To make it clear that this is a group making the pure definition of a snuff film, the main butcher is given instructions focusing on "turning him on", which sounds like clientele-based concerns; although it also takes on the feeling that the man doing the commanding is using the main killer as his own personal paraphilia genie. Either way, it works. The viewer also gets a small look into the production angle with the folks splicing the films together, which is fun.
American Guinea Pig isn't the most extreme film I've seen and, like the Japanese series, avoids certain taboo subjects that always are home to extreme cinema and more commonplace in other similar titles. No one is sexually assaulted or emotionally played with, no one cries or begs, it's all about the red stuff in a purely visual form. It's more wince-based than soul-crushing in a way. I'm never quite sure why a shock-based film that is all about pushing the limits would avoid any type of horribleness but since it's following the style of the original Japanese film, I'll take it as homage more than backing down. As with the inspiring Flowers, the victims are not all that cognizant when the brutality is going down, making the "tortured to death" concept lose some of its weight. While Flowers adds the implication that the victim has been given a serum that makes the pain pleasurable, AGP, leaves it at a simple blocking/paralysis agent, which is sufficient to the intention.
Technically, being tied to a chair, unable to move, while a bunch of lunatics carve me up, is one of the last situations I would want to be in... somewhere on the happy/unhappy spectrum between being handed an ice cream cone and being forced to roll my eyes through another viewing of Hard Candy. However, with the victims unable to respond we don't get the back-and-forth emotional torment out of which movies like Grotesque squeeze so many good times. Because of this, I will never hold this to the same emotion-punching league as the August Underground series, but I'm not disappointed by the film at all. Bouquet is old-school gore. It doesn't toil in waters considered previously unacceptable, but it is filled with plenty of pleasing horrid images and extreme concepts.
MILD SPOILER WARNING FOR THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH. The end is touted as being especially disturbing but serves as a messed-up setup that leaves you with a simple cutaway. This technique is effective in more linear dramatic films but in such a visual project as this one, it feels a little like a cop-out. The end certainly leaves you with a nice intense feeling and serves as a nice closer, but it's still an easy way out to something that could have been intensely memorable.
All-in-all, I really enjoyed American Guinea Pig it didn't completely slake my thirst for the extreme, but it was a lot of fun and succeeded at being the intended love letter to the shock-gore sub-genre. It seems that this is just the first in a whole series of American takes on the Guniea Pig concept which I am very much excited about. While I would like to have seen this first installment go the distance a bit more, I'm much more interested in seeing this new series tackle all different areas that can be explored. This is exactly the type of film I want to see people make with more frequency so I have new hope for the future. Good work guys, now go make more!
P.J. Griffin, HMS