Cover Art

Credits

Director: Hideshi Hino Starring: Kirara Yugao, Hiroshi Tamura Screenplay: Hideshi Hino Country: Japan AKA: Za Ginipiggu 2: Chiniku No Hana

I'll bet if you're a horror fan, even if you haven't seen this film, you've heard of it. One of the most notorious, infamous films ever made, the "plot" is straightforward: the writer/director was sent a parcel containing a letter, an 8mm film and a series of photographs depicting a brutal slaying. After handing the evidence over to the cops, the writer/director, also manga artist and writer Hideshi Hino, decides to recreate the horrors he saw and read about – this is all explained at the beginning of the film, the text scrolling up the screen. Then the movie proper begins.

A young woman is stalked, as it becomes blatantly obvious, by two people, as she leaves the train station one evening; the stalkers have a video camera and record the event. She's chased, drugged and taken to an unknown location. She's injected with some form of pain-negating drug by a man dressed in a samurai helmet and an apron, who then proceeds to dismember, eviscerate and eventually decapitate her, before adding bits of her to his collection of body parts from previous victims.

That's pretty much the whole story. The film, which cleverly makes the most of being a V-movie (straight to video), clocks in at about an hour, and is basically an example of some pretty nasty special effects at work. There really isn't much more to it than that. Except for the rather fascinating history or mythology that's built up around it, of course.

If you're familiar with the Guinea Pig series, you may wish to skip the next couple of paragraphs. I mentioned the clever use of video before. Considering the fact that most people in the 80's in the West would have seen this film as a fourth or fifth generation dub – crackly, grainy, indistinct - it would have looked like what the media would have us believe a snuff movie is meant to look like. The "plot" certainly equates. Would have been no subtitles either, in those awful pre-DVD days (how did we ever survive?), and the film has no credits, which adds an air of verisimilitude. (NB If you own the Unearthed DVD of Flower of Flesh and Blood, go to the menu, select The Flower of Flesh and Blood. The menu you can see has lips on it. Hit the back button and you'll see a blood splatter appears. Select that and then sit back to "enjoy" the film in 'Snuff-vision' – it cuts out all of the expository dialogue and a number of point of view shots as well as the picture having been degraded to look remarkably nasty and snuff-like – it's an even more disturbing experience than the original, which is a nasty thought). So anyway, apparently (my attorney has warned me to say) a famous Hollywood actor (Ch*rlie She*n) saw a copy of the film, and, thinking he'd witnessed a real live (?) snuff movie, contacted the FBI, who then wasted taxpayers money investigating it. It's cruel the way they let people like that out by themselves…

Any terminal fuckwit who's watched that film and thought it was real must have had their brain swapped with dogshit, or been beaten around the head at birth with a pool cue. The blood and especially the flesh in some cases look dreadfully unconvincing – I'm thinking the arm amputation with chisel, for one. And, and this is the bit I couldn't believe – there's a chicken who gets a point of view shot. I don't think anyone who wants to watch a snuff movie really gives a rat's arse about what the chicken thinks. And why would somebody who has just killed someone on screen let their own picture be taken, thus placing themselves in a more than compromising position with the law? Why would a serial murderer rather decorously obscure the young woman's pubic hair (admittedly with her own internal organs) with the traditional Japanese coyness and reserve for such matters. People, people, people, come ON! Think! This is just as stupid as the morons who thought the actors in Cannibal Holocaust really died, and then had to be produced in court to prove they were still alive. Plus there's the fact that there's never been a single frame of snuff found, ever. I would have thought that the FBI would have had more important things to do, like investigating all that organised crime, and all those guns and drugs going into the country.

That aside, the story keeps going, and in a rather horrible and all-too-real direction. In August of 1989, otaku paedophile Tsutomu Miyazaki was arrested in Japan for the repulsive mutilation and murder of four young girls. It's alleged that one of the murders was carried out in a similar fashion to that depicted in Flower of Flesh and Blood, which is a pretty fucking repellent thought, as he owned a copy of the film, amongst 6000 other tapes, most of which were hentai or other violent films.