Great filmmakers can be divided into two major categories: Hollywood directors who keep doing artful work for a popular audience despite commercial demands and peculiar creators with no inclination to appeal to common sensibility.
Suppose the former never ceases to amaze moviegoers with visual treatments and emotional attachments to the story. In that case, the latter doesn’t care whether or not a movie gets positive approval as long as it fulfills their artistic hunger.
It is not uncommon for a much-loved film to receive negative, often condescending, reviews from well-known critics. Directors almost always make such movies from the latter category. Critics, too, can be wrong like everyone else.
Hideshi Hino, the writer and director of “Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood,” most certainly belongs to the second group.
The infamous horror film contains scenes of the killing and dismemberment of a woman so realistic that some people were led to believe they were recording actual events.
The film was once (and still is) considered too disturbing, unsettling, provocative, and bloody that only an insane audience could appreciate the beauty in terror.
10 /10 Fictional Film, Real Investigation
Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood was based on a manga by the director himself. The plot involved a man who kidnapped a woman before killing and cutting her body to pieces.
The 42-minute long movie was said to give Charlie Sheen a real intense goosebump; he thought he was watching a snuff film, so he reported it to the authorities.
When Japanese and American investigators watched the movie, they believed the violent scenes had happened in real-life somewhere. Anybody who watched it probably felt the same way, too.
9 /10 Production Limitation
To say that realistic-looking scenes resulted from production limitations doesn’t sound quite right, but it was what happened.
Hino wanted to make a story-driven movie, which was unsurprising considering his background as a manga author. Still, the producer had to restrict the creative department due to budget issues.
Part of the restriction was that Hino could only shoot the entire movie in one location; every shoot must be a long take with minimal cutting.
Under such conditions, the director himself was not convinced if he could make an exciting film, but he did.