What kind of movie is He Won’t Die?

It is the third part of the Japanese movie "Guinea Pig" series. The following is an introduction to this series.

The "Guinea Pig" series of underground films⑨ is a collection of short films shot between 1985 and 1990 by two Japanese producers, Satoru Ogura and Hideshi Hino. There are six films in this series, namely "Devil's Experiment" (1985), "Flower Of Flesh And Blood" (1985), "He Never Dies" (1986), "Mermaid In A Manhole", "Androids Of The Notre Dame" (1988), "Devil Women Doctor" (1990), the length of the films ranges from 43 minutes to 65 minutes. Since its release, this series of films has caused an uproar in Japan, the European and American markets, and has even been banned from public release in all countries. It can only be sold in the audio-visual market in the form of Home Video or DVD, so it has become an "underground film." reputation. In fact, it is very different from the generally independent, experimental and low-profit underground films, because since this series of films were put on the market, its sales in Japan have even exceeded those introduced in the same period. Hollywood blockbusters. For example, within two months of their release in Japan, "Flower of Flesh" and "Cellar Mermaid" became one of the TOP TEN sales of audio-visual chain stores. The performance of "Flower of Flesh" even exceeded that of Spielberg, who was introduced in the same period. The science fiction romantic masterpiece "E.T." At the same time, in the Western European and North American markets, since the series was introduced in the early 1990s, it has also been all-powerful in the audio and video market, and because of its high degree of realism, the FBI in the United States was involved. Of course, the result of the investigation was still "fake". Although most consumers of different skin colors hate and hate the ultimate "Snuff Pic." or "Gore-hound Films", the strange thing is that they hate it so much that they buy it so much that they can create such a phenomenon among movie fans. With large-scale abnormal consumer psychology, the "Guinea Pig" series of underground films can be said to have created a myth. For the discussion of this series of films, we will start with the title "Guinea Pig", which seems to be very different from the content of the film.

The International Chinese version of "Encyclopedia Britannica" explains the guinea pig (Guinea Pig) as: "A domesticated rodent of the family Guinea Pig, native to South America. It was domesticated before the Inca era, and the Americas It was introduced to Europe soon after its discovery and quickly became a popular ornamental animal and valuable experimental animal." ⑩It can be seen that guinea pigs are just domesticated animals for people to enjoy and conduct experiments. However, the strange thing is that although the "Guinea Pig" series of films uses "experiment" as the theme, there is no real guinea pig in the film. We see The "guinea pigs" arrived were living, bloody human bodies. The first episode of the series, "The Devil's Experiment," tells the story of three masked young men who committed various atrocities against a woman, including punching and kicking, in order to test "the limits of pain that the human spirit and body can bear." , needle pricks, noise disturbances, dirt attacks and the cruelest of all, eye gouging. Afterwards, the woman who was tortured and died tragically was thrown into the wilderness. The second episode "Flowers of Flesh" is also a story about kidnapping a woman and brutally torturing her. A perverted man wearing an ancient Japanese samurai uniform, painted with makeup and powder, anesthetized a woman and dismembered her as if she were creating a piece of art. After he was done, he was still overjoyed and actually revealed all the "arts" he had collected to the camera: a A large number of dead heads and limbs that had long since rotted and were covered with plants and parasites. Although the "soup" was changed in the third episode, which did not focus on kidnapping and torturing others, it still did not change the "medicine" and showed the same bloody "self-mutilation". An ordinary clerk who was quite unsuccessful in his career was so bored that he used various tools to self-mutilate in search of excitement. After discovering that he was actually "immortal", he was so happy that he immediately called his colleagues to invite him. , and performed a disgusting caesarean section in front of colleagues. Although the film ends with a joke-like scene, it still cannot dilute its strong bloody atmosphere. The fourth and fifth installments of the "Guinea Pig" series, "The Cellar Mermaid" and "The Virgin Robot", can be considered two of the more thoughtful works in the series, but they are still full of blood. The inspiration for the former "Mermaid in the Cellar" seems to come from Andersen's fairy tale "The Daughter of the Sea", but the Japanese have "alienated" this beautiful fairy tale horribly. In the film, an autistic and middle-aged painter who lost his wife went to the holy place in his heart - a dirty sewer in order to find some creative inspiration. As a result, he unexpectedly discovered the "mermaid" in his childhood fantasy. The mermaid was stranded and immersed in industrial wastewater for a long time, and her body began to rot. Out of pity, the painter moved the mermaid into a large bathtub at home and took good care of her. However, the mermaid was seriously ill and her body was getting worse day by day. The disappointed artist had no choice but to record her decay and death in paintings according to the mermaid's wishes. The whole process.

In the end, the mermaid died of extreme decomposition, and the painter suffered a mental breakdown and dismembered the mermaid himself. Afterwards, he was arrested by the police who refused to believe this "adult fairy tale" and charged with murdering his wife. The reason why the film has a certain ideological quality is that the director deliberately compared and switched a colorful painting about a "mermaid" full of fairy tale-like artistic conception from the painter's childhood with an oil painting recording the decay of a mermaid, in order to emphasize the impact of industrial civilization on the ecological environment and people. The alienation and corruption of the pure soul, the tragic death of the mermaid symbolizes the death of the pure beauty of human beings in industrial society. The latter "Mother Robot" makes a "cruel" exploration of the contradiction between science and human nature by telling the story of a dwarf scientist who uses organs obtained from experiments on living people to save his terminally ill sister, but is rejected by his sister. Due to the bad impact that the "Guinea Pig" series of movies had on Japanese society after their best-selling, especially its inducing effect on teenagers, the public began to accuse it of "excessive expression" of cruelty. Due to this pressure, the last part of the series was The movie "The Devil's Doctor" had to change to a "moderate route" and combined a series of bloody but humorous novels into chapters, completing the final chapter of the "Guinea Pig" series.

Why are real people replaced by "guinea pig" characters in the "Guinea Pig" series of films? This involves what Daniel Bell calls the break between roles and people in capitalist society. In the book "Contradictions of Capitalist Culture", Bell divided capitalist society into three opposing fields: the economic and technical field, the political field and the cultural field. He pointed out that in the field of economy and technology, all industrialized societies are driven by economic impulses and place individuals in a bureaucratic cooperation system. In this system, human behavior is regulated by roles. Therefore, individuals are treated as "objects". "Instead of treating it as a human being, it becomes a tool for enterprises or institutions to maximize profits. "In a word, the individual has disappeared in his function." In stark contrast, the cultural realm is characterized by self-expression and self-gratification. "It is anti-system, independent, and measured by personal interests." In this case, one of the contradictions of capitalist society is that "the democratization tendency of culture will encourage everyone to realize their potential." ’, which will also cause the ‘self’ to constantly collide with the ‘role requirements’ required by the techno-economic order.” Knowing this, we can understand the strange phenomenon of "objectifying" people into "guinea pigs". The "role requirements" of post-industrial society on people have turned people into thoughtless "objects" or playthings. This additional repression based on instinctive repression is the same as the extremely free self-expression advertised by capitalist modern culture. A profound contradiction arose. Therefore, the break between the two fields provides a group of extreme "artists" with a creative concept that can express themselves but inevitably carries the virus of capitalist "materialization". In this way, people are "materialized" as thoughtless It makes sense that the human plaything - guinea pig.

In fact, during the same period (the late 1980s and early 1990s), the Japanese were not the only ones engaged in such evil "film experiments" as "objectification" of people. The German Jrg Buttgereit also made a banned film series in 1987 and 1991 that was no less impressive than the Japanese - "Confused Romance". The reason why this "romance" is "confusing" is that it is neither a romance between men and women, nor a romance between men and men, or women and women, but a "romance" between women and male corpses. "! This film is on par with "Guinea Pig" in terms of bloodiness and perversion index. However, unlike "Guinea Pig"'s fanatical worship of sensory stimulation, the director may have inherited the strict rational tradition of the Germans in this "Guinea Pig" There is still serious artistic pursuit in "Forbidden Movies". For this reason, Butgoreg specially added a line of famous sayings from Western philosophers at the beginning of each episode. The first episode says: "Do people have to eat other living things to survive?" The second episode says: "I want to dominate everything!" Judging from the content of the two films in the series, it seems that these two sentences are the themes of both films. The first episode was completed in 1987 and mainly showed a young man and woman's fascination with corpses. The climax of the film is particularly "shocking", as it turns out to be a three-person "sex game" between a man and a woman with special "fetishes" and a highly decomposed corpse. In order to make this disgusting "spectacle" unprecedented in the history of human cinema look beautiful, the director ingeniously added a layer of filters in front of the camera lens, making this originally not "romantic" scene look like a dream. Colorful. With this scene alone, in the author's opinion, Breton can raise a banner of "dirty aesthetics" in "film aesthetics". However, the beautification of "necrophilia" seems to be somewhat different from the key words in the opening of the film. In fact, this is just the director's way of blinding the eyes. The clearly "key point" part of the film is a more than one minute recording of a butcher slaughtering a rabbit. A long shot of the entire process (in the second episode, it was replaced by the dissection of a live seal). These documentary scenes and expressive scenes are put together, and inferred according to the logical law of "positive-negative-combination" proposed by Hegel, one can draw the conclusion that human beings are a kind of creature that harms all living things (including humans themselves). A heinous beast inside), in other words, it has to eat "other" creatures to survive. After the reunification of the two Germanys, Butegregg did not "warm up" his desperate heart with the collapse of the "Berlin Wall". He intensified his efforts to release the sequel to the film "Trapped".

This time, the woman suffering from "necrophilia" in the previous episode hooked up with an actor who specializes in dubbing for pornographic films, and the two had a "human" relationship. It's a pity that the woman whose true nature is hard to change showed her bestiality in the second half of the film. She cut off her new boyfriend's head in a moment of extreme excitement and placed her preserved old boyfriend's long-decomposed head on the new boyfriend's bloody body. Then continue to enjoy the happiness of "being human".

While this episode continues the basic spirit of the previous episode, it also seems to have added a hint of fear of "extreme feminists" because "I want to dominate everything!"