Video Review: The Guinea Pig Series!

A Review of Guinea Pig: Devil’s Experiment/Guinea Pig 2: Flowers of Flesh and Blood/Guinea Pig 3: He Never Dies/Guinea Pig 4 Mermaid in a Manhole/Guinea Pig 5: The Android of Notre Dame/Guinea Pig 6: Devil Doctor Woman




It was sort of inevitable that I would do these. First of all, do not pay money to own these videos. They are all on the internet free if you look around.
The easiest plot synopsis I’ve ever written for a film would have to be for Guinea Pig: Devil’s Experiment. I can do it one sentence. Check it out. A bunch of men in a room torture a woman. You don’t even need subtitles for this one. This Japanese video started floating around in the 80’s, a kind of faux-snuff flick. Supposedly though, the early Guinea Pig videos had folks going. They were originally created by one Hidishi Hino, who was a “manga” or comic book artist. The films have no connecting storyline, they are essentially only connected by a certain pre-occupation with gore and blood, and loosely they revolve around the idea of one being used as a “guinea pig” for a kind of experiment of some kind. I think the general idea was to bring his comic art into the video realm. The videos got some press because a Japanese serial killer named Tsutomu Miyazaki was really into them. The Guinea Pig series also got some press because oddly enough, and this detail is mind-bendingly strange today in light of how strange he himself has become, but Charlie Sheen, I kid you not, Charlie “Winning” Sheen was sent a copy of one of the Guinea Pig videos. He thought it was a real snuff film apparently, so he contacted the F.B.I and since Sheen is famous it’s gotten some press. Here’s an article that alludes to the Charlie Sheen thing.
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/snuff.asp
Charlie Sheen and the Guinea Pig videos, all in the same sentence, that’s something else. The Guinea Pig thing was about twenty years before all the media attention to his drug and mental problems, it’s still a very odd detail.
The tortures they use in Devil’s Experiment are pretty severe. They burn her skin and then put what would appear to be maggots on the burnt area to crawl around. It goes on for about 45 minutes. The second one Guinea Pig: Flowers of Flesh and Blood is similarly minimalistic in terms of plot. In that a man in a samurai costume captures a woman, drugs her, and then he dismembers her. The blood actually splatters against the wall in that one. In the end the guy in the samurai costume has a whole collection of dismembered body parts. That’s also about 45 minutes in length. The later films actually developed more in terms of actual plotlines. These films have a reputation for being ultra-offensive, but that’s mostly only ture of the first two films in the series.
Far less disturbing because it is not in anyway lifelike is the third Guinea Pig film, He Never Dies. This guys girlfriend leaves him for one of his friends. He attempts suicide but finds he can’t die and doesn’t feel any pain. So naturally what the man who doesn’t die does is get his friend to come to his apartment, and then he cuts open his own intestines and throws it at the friend to delight in his fear. That one is more goofy, it made me laugh.
The other side of that though, for a very different side of the series is Mermaid in a Manhole. That one is actually a tragic love story about a mermaid an artist finds in a manhole who is afflicted by boils from an incurable sickness of some kind. The artist takes the mermaid back to his home and puts her in the bathroom feels impelled to paint the mermaid using fluid from her infections. Worms come out of her boils. This is not an easy film to sit through, although it isn’t as disturbing as the first Guinea Pig film simply because it is highly fantastic in nature.
The same could be said for the fifth Guinea Pig film, The Android of Notre Dame (now sold on the same DVD as Devil’s Experiment. In that one, a midget mad scientist type is trying to work on a cure for his sister who is dying of some unnamed heart disease. He is being black mailed by two other scientists who have a hook up he didn’t know about to his computer system, his sister dies, and of course, he does experiments on raising the dead with the scientists trying to blackmail him. When he brings his sister back to life she asks him why, since she had finally found piece.
The sixth film, Devil Doctor Woman was actually the fourth made, but released much later. It has a transsexual who is supposed to be a doctor and there are a number of comedic sequences in which she makes patients worse or tortures them or makes them worse. There’s a very random sequence showing a restaurant serving dismembered human body parts. There’s something about a zombie in it.
There is a seventh Guinea Pig film, but it is composed mostly of the gorier scenes from the other 6 Guinea Pig films. I think I can miss that one, having seen all the others.