Film Review! The Bunny Game

Yes, I've covered Human Centipede 2, A Serbian Film and a succession of other banned films in the extreme horror genre, now it's time to get around to The Bunny Game by Adam Reihmeier. This time I was able to watch one of these films that isn't even available on DVD yet. The Bunny Game is not yet in general release. It was screened last night at Theatre7 in Las Vegas by Chad Freeman who does the whole PollyStaffle webpage that I used to write reviews for. Chad Freeman was telling me that the film was recently banned in the UK, much like Human Centipede 2 was for a while and the way A Serbian Film is in some countries. The plot line of this film is relatively simple. A meth addict prostitute is captured by a trucker who rapes and tortures her out in the desert. That's pretty much it. The film is called the Bunny Game because at one point the trucker forces the woman to wear this strange leather bunny masks. There are flashbacks of the trucker raping and torturing other women, but that's about it. It's a very difficult film to sit through, I would have to admit. It's a highly repetitive succession of images of violence and sexual violation. It was shoot with a micro-budget somewhere in California on black and white with a very abrasive soundtrack. I'm not sure why anyone would ban this film or films like it. I've scene the term "torture porn" to describe films like this and the Human Centipede films, but it wasn't like anyone was masturbating in the theater or anything like that, so while reflective of psychological sickness I'm not sure this film is psychological sickness necessarily. The impulse on the part of the filmmakers was more to create a film which can't be watched then a film that is an aphrodisiac. This film is hardly unique in being what it is. The first of the Guinea Pig videos from Japan back in the 80's is about 45 minutes of a captured woman being tortured, so The Bunny Game has definite precedent. It is also, unfortunately,quite realistic. The trucker in The Bunny Game tortures the prostitute on crystal meth binges which is much what Philip Garrido did to Jaycee Duggard for years and years. In that sense a film like The Bunny Game is unfortunately reflective of certain kinds of human behavior or human nature. I see very clearly from running this blog the number of people looking for images of rape and murder from writing reviews of the film Inseminoid and the documentary Snuff: A Documentary about Killing on Camera- that accounts for roughly a thousand hits between those two posts, without showing any signs of slowing down. They can ban these films if they care too, but they can't ban or get rid of what the psychological drives that they represent, really. In fact, I'd like to take a good look at the censors because they take this Human Centipede 2 type excrement more seriously than anyone else seems to. I feel like I'm repeating myself blue in the face by saying things like that about these films though. The censors are never going to listen to reason on these issues, so the best thing you can use them for is locating culture that deals with sensitive and by that nature important issues. But how is this film? The Bunny Game is alright. Watching it is kind of like sitting down to listening to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, but I'm one of those rare people that likes that sort of thing. The truth is that I found it difficult to sit through more because of the repetitive nature of the film then because I was shocked or repulsed by the content.