OCTOBER 13, 2013

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL, WEIRD
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (SCREAMFEST)

I recently read an article about people who accidentally leave their babies in the car, how they're not bad people or whatever, but victims of a strange tic in the way that our brains work when working through a routine. One likened it to driving to work (it's the most easily identifiable example) - you can get in your car and get all the way to work without actively thinking about any of it, because you've done it so many times. And that's part of the problem I had with horror movies after a while and also part of why I quit doing this every day: there were too many of those "drive to work" movies, where I could watch the whole thing and retain absolutely nothing about the experience, making writing a review next to impossible. Happily, there are movies like The Demon's Rook that, while imperfect, at least know enough to make an impression.

The coolest thing about the movie is how damn WEIRD it is, and also how it seems to be that way by careful(ish) design and not just a bunch of dudes making shit up as they go along and throwing things in at random. On the surface, it's not particularly complicated or unique: a guy comes back to his hometown and must battle an evil demon that has been wiping out the town - could be any random Stephen King novel, right? But when you add in the specifics, it truly forges its own identity, and the script by Akom Tidwell and James Sizemore (who also directs, stars, and performs a half dozen other crew positions) adds flavor at every turn - a mouse running over a piano, a kid asking a demon for pancakes, a guy performing an impromptu hoe-down with his friends because he's so excited about getting married... all these things keep the movie from ever being the slightest bit boring, a HUGE achievement when you consider it runs 105 minutes (longest movie I saw at the festival) and is the first film from just about everyone involved.

But the weird thing is, it's not very funny. In fact, no matter how ostensibly goofy the narrative gets at times, everyone plays it straight, never going for laughs or (worse) campy "so bad it's good" attitude. They're all fully committed to this odd little tale, and that's what makes it work as well as it does - nothing can kill a low budget movie like this quicker than everyone thinking they're comic geniuses, or having the attitude that if they laugh at themselves on camera, the audience will too. This also allowed me to forgive some of its missteps, such as seemingly going out of their way to find a kid who looked absolutely nothing like Sizemore to play his younger self, or curiously having nearly every character be an artist of some sort (there's like 9 scenes of people drawing before being distracted by demon carnage in some form or another).

Another thing I really appreciated was the FX work (also by Sizemore, who taught himself). Not only is it all practical (I will never, ever, EVER get tired of seeing an actor get squirted with real blood - and in this day and age, it's even more admirable and awesome), but there's an impressive variety to all of the demons, including the tree-like head demon villain and the one sort-of good one, who looks a bit like the freak from The Funhouse. It's like an indie Nightbreed - every demon/monster gets its own unique design even if they're not featured very prominently.

In fact, my only real gripe was the ending, which was more of a downer than it needed to be, and abrupt to boot. I understand that this was one of those productions where cast members would constantly drop out and the movie was shot entirely on weekends over a long period, so perhaps something happened and they had to come up with a new ending or something, but either way it just feels tacked on and unnecessarily grim. At 105 minutes I don't think it needed to be LONGER, but if that's what they indeed wanted to go with, I wish it could have all ended at the big massacre that we know has been coming throughout the film (we keep seeing posters for a big concert - no horror movie has such an event unless something big and violent is going to happen there). That sequence ends and then we go to the next morning, with some shuffling about before the action kicks in again, briefly, before just ending like a Hammer movie. Throughout the movie I was impressed by the first-timer's better than average direction and editing, so it's a bummer that it gets kind of clunky in its final moments.

On the other hand, they did such a great job of telling their story visually that we (meaning me and the folks I watched it with) didn't even realize that the theater had fucked up and cropped out a small portion of the top and bottom of the frame - including the subtitles for the demon language. There's a 10 minute sequence at the halfway point, where hero Roscoe reveals how he was taken by the demons, taught their ways, and managed to escape - all of which told in the gibberish demon language. We could always tell what was happening, and assumed that it was a creative decision to keep the audience from understanding exactly what was being said the whole time. It wasn't until the end credits that we realized the framing was off, as there was a still frame credit for all of the executive producers and the title "executive producers" was missing. So we got to see a scope version of the movie thanks to the Laemmle Noho 7 staff not understanding how to frame things properly (this is why being a projectionist isn't something just anyone should be doing without proper training). Luckily, the film showed twice and they got it right the other time, so it was just our crowd that got this unusual version, one that just sort of added to the weirdness (thanks to one of the producers I got to see the subtitled version later - it was mostly gibberish even in English, so if you were also at that screening, it wasn't exactly a huge revelation).

In short, this is the sort of indie horror I wish I saw more often - it's not trying to fit into any particular hot sub-genre (it feels a bit zombie movie-ish at times, but it's a very small element), it's competently (and CONFIDENTLY) made, and doesn't try to make up for its shortcomings with horrible attempts at humor. It may run a little long, but ultimately I'd rather watch something like this for 9 straight hours before enduring another 80 minute Saw or Paranormal Activity wannabe.

What say you?

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APRIL 20, 2013

GENRE: CULT, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Earlier this week I had the displeasure of seeing Oblivion, a sci-fi film that stole ideas from any number of genre films (primarily one I can't say the name of without spoiling its central twist, though it also "pays homage to" Phantasm, of all things), but never found a life of its own. It looked nice, and the score, while also a "stew" of other, better scores, was enjoyable enough to listen to on Spotify once or twice, but at no point did I stop wishing I was just watching one of those other movies instead. Rob Zombie's The Lords of Salem, on the other hand, similarly cribs from any number of films and filmmakers, but Zombie puts his own stamp on it - I never forgot I was watching one of his films, whereas the only thing to learn about Joseph Kosinski from Oblivion it's that he's got decent taste in movies.

Of course, it's easy to keep Zombie in mind when he casts his wife in the lead role. I don't think Sherri Moon is the greatest actress in the world, but she's a lot better than she's often given credit for, as if it's ONLY because she's married to the guy that she gets the roles she does. Even though the budget is the lowest he's ever worked with, I still don't think the guys putting up that money would sign off on her taking the lead role if she wasn't capable of doing so, especially with a number of other female roles she could have taken instead to fulfill any sort of assumed nepotism. And she's solid here, playing a much quieter character than she did in the Rejects films or even his Halloween - it's only in a few moments at the end we see her indulging in the sort of "girl from a music video" type behavior she was originally known for.

She's also glammed down, sporting hipster glasses and unflattering dreadlocks in her role as a DJ from Salem, MA who receives a mysterious record, plays it, and begins to see things, feel sick, and eventually start using drugs again (she's in recovery at the beginning of the film). Supposedly helping her through this tough time is her landlord (Judy Geeson) and her strange sisters, played by Patricia Quinn and Dee Wallace. Yes, Zombie has once again cast his film with a gaggle of genre vets - Andrew Prine cameos as John Hawthorne, and Ken Foree plays one of her fellow DJs (Sid Haig and Michael Berryman also have super quick cameos in a flashback). But the real shocker is Meg Foster as the head witch, almost completely unrecognizable in prosthetics - only those eyes give her identity away.

At this point I might as well mention that the film has been considerably reworked; if you read the credits you'll see names like Udo Kier and Clint Howard being special thanked, due to their roles being excised. Barbara Crampton's role has been reduced to one shot during a montage of women hearing the strange record (I guess everyone in town listens to this station), and I have to assume that Haig and Berryman weren't hired to be anonymous dudes who never even get a closeup. I know Zombie had to trim from his script given the low budget (it's such an unusual film, I can easily see why he'd have trouble securing enough money to completely fulfill his original vision), but it seems it was further modified in editing - hopefully the DVD will have some of that material, but if not we can at least read his novelization (linked below) that is based on his original script.

Don't get me wrong - it's not an incoherent, Dimensionalized mess as a result. I never felt too confused as to what was going on (I assume SOME confusion is part of the design, given the heavy influence of filmmakers like Dario Argento and Jean Rollin), but it definitely feels a bit "cramped", with certain plot points never given much room to breathe. At one point the band (the Lords of Salem) is said to be coming to town for a show, but this subplot never really comes to life - Foree's character just says they're coming and then it's never mentioned again until Sheri Moon arrives at the venue on the final night of the movie (in a nod to Shining, we have titles for each day of the week, starting on Monday when she gets the record and ending on Friday when the band is supposed to come). And the fact that the song only affects women is not only unexplained, but it's never even clear that only women have showed up for the show - were Salem's men turned away, or did they just not care?

Also making it feel a bit small is that they clearly didn't shoot the whole movie in Salem, but on sets elsewhere (Los Angeles, in this case). So whenever someone goes outside, we get a quick shot of them wandering down a very New England (read: gloomy and colonial) looking street which is actually Salem (I recognized some of the locales), but those moments are few and far between, and the shots are compact, like they only had permission to get a few feet on either side of the house and not much else. I mean, it's certainly better than the horrid attempt at passing off Canada as the town in The Covenant, but given the town's unique history and relatively untapped potential for film productions, I was a bit disappointed to see that Zombie and his DP just had Sheri and co-star Bruce Davison quickly walk down a few streets before grabbing a few generic establishing shots and heading back to LA.

However, all of this actually has a benefit - it lets the film be noticeably quieter than anything else Zombie has done, focusing on character over shock value. Not only does this allow those bursts of violence or insanity to really pop and resonate (unlike in Halloween, where we were numb to the brutal violence before Myers even became an adult), but it also lets us give a crap about the characters - something that has never really happened in his movies. I liked Brad Dourif a lot in his Halloweens, and of course Danielle Harris could be playing Hitler and I'd still find her appealing, but otherwise I hated just about everyone in those movies, and the Rejects/Corpses films were populated either by degenerates or people ruthlessly trying to kill those degenerates. But here, almost everyone - even the damn villains - are likable and charismatic, not to mention NORMAL. Davison's character in particular is like nothing I've ever seen Zombie try before - a normal, intelligent guy who is interested in finding out more about the "band" and in helping Sheri's character. Usually everyone in a Zombie film looks like they just crawled out of a gutter, but not here - the three witches just enjoy their tea and take pride in their scones like regular old birds. After the Halloweens I wasn't sure if Zombie had it in him to just make NORMAL people, but he proved me wrong here - he even keeps the F-bombs to a minimum.

He also keeps the violence to a minimum - there's only, I think, one on-screen death in the entire movie. Yes, this means that the movie can and will be considered "boring", but it's hardly surprising given the movies he was paying tribute to - Suspiria, The Devils, The Shining... none of these films are exactly wall to wall violent. Even when it doesn't always work (perhaps because of the budget? The moment where she first hears the record is severely underplayed but maybe they couldn't afford to do anything crazier because they needed to save the dough for when it mattered - i.e. the end), I had nothing but respect and surprise for the restraint he was showing.

It's also pretty creepy; there are some dumb jump scare attempts (a witch who appears in corners and such like something out of Insidious), but it's positively drenched with ominous atmosphere, and that bit of music is as haunting as "Tubular Bells" or the piano in Eyes Wide Shut (another film that might pop in your head while watching). Again, it's not too violent, but it's UNSETTLING, which is better anyway. That this was working on me in the most toxic theater in all of LA - an AMC inside the tourist trap ghetto that is Citywalk - made it even more impressive. When this hits Blu-ray, and you're watching around Halloween-time, it's gonna get under your skin if you can get past the minimalist approach.

Some of it feels pretty juvenile, however. The backstory of the town witches and their prosecution by Hawthorne is all fine, but near the end Zombie starts tossing in some of his music video imagery, like a Jesus painting turning devilish and Sheri dancing with a goat - it's like he remembered the desecrated Mary statue from Exorcist and decided to use it as a launchpad for an entire sequence. I also didn't quite get their music show - they do it at night and have guests, but they also play goofy sound FX and talk about each others' sex lives like it was a 2nd rate Howard Stern morning show ripoff. And why is it so popular? As with Halloween, it seemed like Zombie was trying to make a period piece and just chose to ignore it when the plot required a modern touch; no one has a cell phone until near the end when someone needs to call Sheri, and it's not until Thursday or Friday that we see a computer. I thought for sure the movie took place in the early 90s (the year of the Witch Trials being 1693, I thought it was a straight "300 years later" kinda deal) until the final reel when these things popped up. So it exists in a world where a local radio station can still pull in a huge audience and folks still "tape" things (Davison's wife records his broadcast on a 90 minute TDK cassette! They even sell those anymore?), but they have modern laptops with wifi too.

But that's a Zombie thing, I guess (Rejects also felt simultaneously like 1977 and 2005), and again - I like that he was able to inject his own personality in a film that was, by design, a love letter to other films and directors, all of whom had their own very distinct touches that make the usual copycatting that much easier to spot. Zombie's a smart guy and a die hard fan of the genre - he's not exactly trying to pass any of this off as his own idea, and if I were to interview him about it he'd probably gladly namecheck a few influences I didn't spot. I can't wait to read the novelization, because I'm sure some of the more obtuse story points make more sense, and maybe we can get a better handle on the supporting cast, but the film itself is a challenging, uniquely entertaining entry in his output, but retains the polarizing effect he will (hopefully?) always have in his work. Some folks call it boring, but to me a boring Rob Zombie movie would be the one I DIDN'T have 12 paragraphs of stuff to talk about afterward.

What say you?

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MARCH 18, 2013

GENRE: FRENCH, WEIRD
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

The funny thing about The Iron Rose (French: La rose de fer) is that it's sort of like the horror movie version of one of those Before Sunrise/After Sunset/etc movies with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy - the movie has no real PLOT, it's just two folks wandering around, talking about their lives, and maybe exploring their future together. But it's in a cemetery, and while I haven't seen the newest installment of the series, I'm pretty sure Delpy never traps Hawke in a coffin and lets him suffocate, though I guess it's possible a random clown will come out of nowhere and put flowers down at some point. Richard Linklater's pretty unpredictable like that.

But actually they don't talk too much at length; they will walk in silence (save for incidental dialogue - "Come on" and such) for a while and then one of them will offer some sort of poetic observation, like noting the existence of a plant that takes 50 years to bloom and then dies. It's all very dreamlike and atmospheric (and romantic in a very odd way), but it's hardly a chatty movie, nor is there much of a plot beyond what I've already described. It's actually based on a poem, and Jean Rollin seemingly didn't add much to it in order to make a feature - the visuals and basic concept are pretty much all he's concerned with here, making it the most arty of his films that I've seen since the first (Rape of the Vampire).

Apparently, this was his first film without vampires in it, so kudos to him for going so far in another direction. There's no "monster" or even real supernatural element to the film; they get trapped in the cemetery but it's not specifically anything otherworldly keeping them there - maybe they just have a terrible sense of direction. But it definitely fits the horror bill; in addition to the generally spooky atmosphere (it's a pretty striking cemetery - they even talk about how overly exquisite the tombstones are, with one of them describing it as a waste of money) there are some scary bits scattered throughout, like stumbling across a bunch of tiny coffins filled with scattered bones, or falling into a grave. Rollin is clearly more interested in romance and ruminating on the life/death cycle than scares, but I could see a remake of this movie being made that also lacked a traditional villain and just had two people trapped in a cemetery and dealing with all of the inherently terrifying things that could happen in that situation.

He's also not very interested in traditional pacing or anything like that, as the movie's final 10 minutes mostly consist of The Girl (Françoise Pascal - the characters are not given names) dancing around the cemetery. It's not a very long movie, but it starts to drag a bit here, as the suspense regarding their "escape" from the cemetery is completely deflated, with The Boy not even in the picture at this point and her just having a grand old time. So like a few of his others, going in expecting a horror movie is a bit of a disservice; it's closer to a tragic romance than horror, really - it just USES horror staples (crypts! weird people watching you! clowns!) to tell that story (for lack of a better word).

I've liked others more, but of the ones I've seen this is the Rollin I'd most like to see on a 35mm print on a big screen, as opposed to a streaming version on my computer monitor (something's wrong with my Xbox adapter I think - I can never get full quality on there anymore). Again, the cemetery is just wonderful to look at, and the life a good 35mm print provides for a film SHOT on film (that a digital version never will be able to replicate, sorry, film haters - it's true. The best DCP in the world is still a simulated copy of the analog original - it's "Gus Van Sant Psycho"ing the film, in other words) would enrich that atmosphere and Rollin's usual striking visuals. Not to mention engulf you in the world he's created, something that's harder to do when you're watching a computer screen - your field of vision just includes too many other elements. It's fine for a story/plot driven film where the visuals are secondary, but for something like this, I'd recommend making the best effort to see it sans any possible distractions.

OK, what next? Horror-wise, apart from Lips Of Blood (which appears to be edited, though this one had a shorter runtime than reported on IMDb, too but I couldn't find anything about an edited version) all that's left on Instant are _________ Vampire movies: Requiem for, Shiver of, The Nude, and Two Orphan. Should I just go in order?

What say you?

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MARCH 7, 2013

GENRE: SLASHER, WEIRD, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: DVD (FRIEND'S COLLECTION)

Part of the HMAD "process" is to look around online (usually just the Wiki and IMDb pages for the film) and watch the bonus features for every film I can, because I like to know where they were coming from, if the movie was compromised, etc. Surely you can watch The Crow 2 and just hate it, but maybe if you know that Dimension had about 30 minutes cut out of it you can cut it some slack. However, some movies maybe shouldn't be researched, and should just be experienced without any knowledge about their creation. Ogroff The Mad Mutilator (aka just plain Mad Mutilator) is one such film - I suspect that if someone were to come forward with a tell-all book about its production, I'd tell them to keep it. I don't want to know*.

For example, early on a woman is tied up for a while by Ogroff, seemingly not wanting to kill her for whatever reason. He then goes off and kills some chess players that are just chilling in the woods, and then comes back and casually kill the girl as well. Why would I ever want to know the logic behind any of this, and ruin what, when in the right mood, is pure bliss? Even knowing the age or biographical information about the director would ruin things. Is he a 14 year old? An elderly man who had been raised by wolves? An actual psychotic? I don't want to know! Nor should you - you should let the magic that is Ogroff just pour over you.

At this point I should mention that I watched the film with my good friends Phil Blankenship and Jackie Greed, who have been invaluable and supportive of HMAD pretty much from the start. Phil of course has been the programmer for about 75% of the "Revival Screening" entries, and we can thank Jackie for just about all of the "Screener" copies since most of the studios tend to ignore me (can't blame em, really), and they only watched a few minutes of this a while ago before deciding they couldn't continue without me. It didn't take long for me to see their point - the movie seemingly begins somewhere in the middle, with a family on the side of the road in some isolated locale. The dad is seemingly just taking a piss, but the kid has wandered off and the mom is standing around near the car, so either the dude has a huge bladder or the car is actually broken down. And that would be fitting, actually - you notice the three genres at the top (four if you count French), but there's also a vampire in there somewhere, and it fits splatter and exploitation as well (not to mention is almost assuredly an independent production). Why not add "breakdown" to the mix?

But really, it shouldn't be considered any genre, as it creates its own. Ostensibly an attempt to cash in on the early 80s slasher craze, the movie is loaded with so many other things (including a bit where a girl seemingly falls in love with Ogroff) that by the time it's over the slasher element is a distant memory, since it ends with Ogroff on a motorcycle, swinging an axe and trying to rescue his lady from a priest that turns out to be a vampire as zombies wander around in hastily edited cutaways. Any continuity that exists between shots is seemingly accidental; things like closeups of someone inspecting a car's engine are inserted between wide shots of a different area entirely, and at one point a corpse seemingly regains the head that was chopped off earlier. There's a ton of gore, but apart from one pretty cool axe in the face, it's beyond cheap - usually you just get Ogroff swinging his axe (which he masturbates at one point) around at random, clearly not hitting anything, followed by an insert of said axe hitting what appears to be a pillow that has a blood pack inside of it.

Only the legendary Disconnected even comes close to hitting this movie's levels of WTF and endearing batshittery, but if I were to watch back to back I'd come away thinking Disconnected was technically flawless in comparison (Things would be another one to add to this mix). Ogroff wisely keeps dialogue to a minimum (6 or 7 total lines, and I'm not excluding incidental "No!" type stuff, because there isn't any) as the movie was quite obviously shot without any sound, and whoever was responsible for creating its soundtrack wasn't... how you say... good. Music just stops and starts at random, foley FX are way out of sync (and sometimes mismatched; a sledgehammer hitting a car door has broken glass sounds, later the sound of him hitting the actual glass is accompanied with a THUNK), and at one point we hear wild jungle sounds for a while despite the fact that the scene takes place in a French forest. The music is particularly special; imagine Carpenter's infant nephew fucking around with his Halloween II era keyboards and you'll have the right idea for most of it, but some 60s jazz drums get tossed in on occasion for good/confusing measure.

And an idea is all you CAN have unless you have an all region player, as the movie has seemingly never been released on US shelves, which is unfortunate (hey Intervision - get on this!). If you're all-region equipped, I highly recommend it if you have an affinity for this sort of thing. Now, I know what some might be thinking - yesterday I watched a movie that was just as inept (actually, not even AS inept), so it makes no sense that I'm championing this while damning that one. But here's the key difference - Bloody Jack lacked that je ne sais quois (hey, I get to use that term about an actual French movie for once!) that makes things like this, Things, and Disconnected so special. It's not just a bad movie - it transcends that term and becomes its own unique, wonderful thing that I'll never forget, whereas the Bloody Jacks of the world begin to fade before I've even finished watching them. I can forgive bad a lot easier than I can forgive being boring, I guess is the point to take away here, and after 6 years it's probably a good idea to start making a few of those instead of just aimlessly rambling all the time.

What say you?

*The DVD did have a bonus feature that appeared to be a retrospective by some of its makers, but they were in French with no subtitles, so that was of no use. We did, however, watch the "Diaporama", which was a collection of behind the scenes stills that proved they did have a camera and a crew of at least two.

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MARCH 4, 2013

GENRE: ASIAN, PSYCHOLOGICAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

For the past couple years, I've watched movies that are both foreign and "unusual" (read: kind of fucked up) on my birthday, and I wanted to go all out this time because it'd be the last time I spend part of *my* day worrying about seeing a movie in time. Well, it's not as horror-driven as the others, but I doubt I could ever get more upsetting a movie than Strange Circus (Japanese: Kimyô na sâkasu), which involved a young girl who is being raped by her father before she starts enjoying it and wanting to take her mother's place permanently, with tragic results. And that's just the first half hour or so - it goes even further into WTF territory by the time it's done.

As you might expect, there are a lot of head scratching plot developments, and I'm not even sure I fully understood it all by the end. To keep things from getting TOO disturbing (relatively speaking), we thankfully never see the young actress during the sex scenes - it's always played by the woman playing the mother, as we're seeing it through her head where she has taken the mother's place. But as the plot goes on, we learn just how much of an "unreliable narrator" she is, on top of the fact that there's the possibility that all of it is made up by an author looking to score a best-seller. Oh, and the entire thing is wrapped up in bookends where the story is being told at some goofy circus/stage show, so when you add in the flashback driven narrative of the third act and all the plot twists, it starts to make Tale of Two Sisters look kids' show simple in comparison.

But man, what a flick. Even if I was risking an aneurysm trying to keep it all straight, I was enjoying director Shion Sono's vivid photography and the impressive set design, particularly the classroom that looked made out of blood covered sheets. Folks have been telling me to watch Sono's movies for a while now (Cold Fish seems to be the go-to request), and I have to say if they're all as nutty but enjoyable to look at as this, I won't be putting it off much longer. The story's pace got a bit sluggish at times (particularly when the movie first switches focus to the author and her assistant), but it never stopped being visually interesting, making it a lot easier to forgive. And considering how many twists and turns it takes (through multiple layers - it's a story about a story about a story, after all), that it clocks in at around 1:45 is actually kind of impressive (Cold Fish is 2.5 hrs long, which is the REAL reason I've been putting it off).

So how is it a horror movie? Well, like Audition, I think going in expecting one is detrimental, though in a different way. While Audition is very much a horror movie, it's best not to know that going in, and letting that element shock you like the characters in the movie. Here, it's a "how far will this go" tale of madness and psychological obsession, culminating in a gruesome, highly disturbing visual that firmly puts the movie in genre territory but hampers folks like me (even with my casual approach to spoilers) from discussing it much, and if someone asked I'd just tell them the movie was a psychological thriller. It's right gory though, I'll say that much.

I got to thinking after - it must be nice to make a movie like this without being vilified and hoarded by negative press right off the bat. A few years ago, Dakota Fanning made a movie called Hounddog where she was raped, and long before anyone had the chance to see it, folks crusaded against it, resulting in a VERY limited release (11 theaters, most of them dropping it after a week) and zero fanfare since. I can't imagine what this movie, which also has these elements but adds incest, would go through over here - it'd probably be edited down to nothing and STILL buried. But Sono seems to have been able to make the film as he liked and free of the sort of picketing and overblown outrage that would accompany something even half as taboo as this had it been made in the States. Not that folks don't have a right to piss and moan, but since the film is ultimately a tragedy and an account of how this sort of despicable act can affect more than just the victim, all of it is justified - none of it is meant to titillate or glorify the act, which is a lot more than I can say for a few "rape-revenge" type films (not to mention borderline comedic adult films like Taboo 2). I'd say those would be far more damaging and upsetting to a victim of rape or incest than this is, and if you get past the puzzle nature of the plot and usual Japanese "WTFery", there's a real, sad story at its heart. Highly recommended for those who can stomach its nature without getting on a soapbox.

What say you?

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