DVD Review: Jin Won Kim’s The Butcher
The Butcher (2007)
Studio: Vivendi Ent.
DVD Release Date: October 27, 2009
Directed By: Kim Jin-Won
Cast: Kim Sung-Il, You Dong-Hun.
Review By: Annie Riordan
Note to self: No more torture-porn flicks for a very long time.
I’m not entirely sure why I continue to watch the damn things. I’ve never been a huge fan of the genre. Gore for the sake of gore doesn’t interest or impress me. So I’m going to blame this stubborn insistence of mine to continuously expose myself to this sick shit on my ex-boyfriend, a huge fan of hardcore violent grindhouse flicks who found it amusing that I had to hide my eyes during the scary/gory parts and nearly vomited about halfway through I Spit On Your Grave. “I’ll show you” I thought after dumping him. I forced myself to watch the most vicious and violent films I could find and watched them repeatedly until the urge to vomit had passed. Within months, I had numbed and desensitized myself to a degree that shocked me. I watched Miike’s Audition without flinching and ate spaghetti dinners whilst watching Fulci. Nothing bothered me anymore. I was – I had arrogantly decided – a total hardcore, badass, steel-ball bitch.
But the appeal of torture porn continues to elude me. I watched the first Hostel with a “meh” and the second one with a bit more interest: yeah, it was the castration scene that won me over, I admit it. 2008’s Train was okay, but I’m just not into the whole In Your Face gore stuff. Gore is sickening, not scary, and I prefer a good, honest scare to a handful of guts any day.
Now here come the Koreans with their Hostel inspired Korean Snuff Film Massacre entitled The Butcher. There’s no attempt whatsoever to shine this fucker up with some Hollywood gloss. Set in an abandoned slaughterhouse, The Butcher is a vomit-splattered, pee-stained, blood-soaked hell hole of a film; grim, miserable and about as entertaining as looking at fresh roadkill for an hour and fifteen minutes.
A small group of snuff film producers are casually discussing the plot of their next film in front of their four freshly procured victims sitting ball-gagged and bound on the filthy floor before them. A guy, a girl and a young married couple listen in helpless horror as their fates are discussed with callous detachment, as though they are no more than lunch meat about to be arranged on a catering tray. None of the victims seem aware of the fact that the binding around their ankles is so obviously loose that slipping them and making a run for it is a very distinct possibility. No, instead they sit there in pools of their own blood, urine and feces, waiting their turns and unwittingly assisting in the project with the running cameras attached to their heads.
But when the young married couple are set up before the cameras, the tortured pleas of the husband get the attention of the Director. He agrees to set the couple free…but only if the husband can endure ten minutes of severe brutality without wimping out.
What follows is a harrowing montage of chainsaw slicings, gut spillings and eyeball gougings all shot in close-up, loving detail. By the time the husband is viciously sodomized by the slobbering retard in the pig mask, I was no longer sure if the nausea I was experiencing was due to the onscreen violence or the relentlessly jouncy-bouncy handheld camera work. There are very few moments of steady shooting to be found in this film, so if movies like Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity made you seasick, this one will have you hanging onto the side of the couch, slamming Dramamine like Tic-Tacs and trying to convince your stomach to come out of your esophagus and return to its proper position in your guts.
If torture porn is your thing, hey – go for it. But I can’t personally recommend this movie. It’s too bleak, too vile and too disturbing. When, at one point late in the film, I found myself momentarily rooting for the snuff filmmakers, I checked out, feeling dirty and violated. There’s not enough Anusol in the world to clean away the filth of this flick. In a word: YARF!
