Flowers of Flesh and Blood

Hey, do you hate your eyes?! Me too! Because apparently I just spent forty five minutes watching one of the most boring yet uncomfortable movies I’ve seen in a long time, and I know who John Waters is.

So let’s address the obvious: I’m not using video clips of this movie because I can see the platform standing outside my window with a baseball bat. But more importantly, this is such a deep cut that, frankly, you kind of have to watch for yourself to appreciate it. Bear in mind, I’m saying that knowing full well that you should not watch this movie. Nobody should. ...But you kind of have to to see what I’m talking about.

Flowers of Flesh and Blood is the second in the Guinea Pig series of exploitation horror films originally conceived by manga artist Hideshi Hino, who specializes in horror. More on him at some point in the future, but the series is a Japanese horror anthology similar to Faces of Death in that it depicts gore, mutilation and buckets of blood with little to no reason about how or why it’s being spilled. The Guinea Pig series has a helluva reputation in the Land of the Rising Sun, even being indirectly blamed for a real-life serial killer and having Charlie Sheen himself losing his shit and calling the FBI to get involved because he thought he was watching an honest-to-God snuff film. Granted, this was early 1990’s Charlie Sheen, and he wasn’t basically living with cocaine instead of blood at that point, but that’s still a level of street cred that modern horror wishes it had.

There really isn’t a plot to Flowers worth talking about; a man in a samurai helmet abducts a woman of the streets of mid-Eighties Tokyo, drugs her, and dismembers her while pontificating on the nature of life and death and the beauty of art in extreme acts of barbarism. There really isn’t acting to speak of as the scant few lines of dialogue are just okay at best and it’s mostly just forty-five minutes of this whackadoo dismembering a random woman he abducted before chopping her head off with a samurai sword with an almost sexual amount of intensity. Blood sprays by the gallons, gratuitous gore and viscera everywhere, and even a decapitated chicken. Fun times!

It’s a depressing fact to note that this isn’t even the most galling thing I’ve ever seen in horror and it kind of speaks to what a fucked up person I am that I can pretty much write this movie off as being entirely fake and not worth nearly the shock and urban legend status it received; aside from the gore effects being mildly entertaining, it’s a fairly boring watch. But it does have value in the sense that you can sort of appreciate that it just lays it’s cards on the table and presents bloody, drugged dismemberment for its own sake and has this cavalier attitude towards itself. “Hey shithead, wanna watch this? Betcha won’t, you fucking coward.” I’m pretty sure I’m on some kind of government list for having watched this thing, but I really can’t say whether it wasn’t worth it.

The Guinea Pig series is about as deep of a cut as horror can get. The series was so influential to gonzo-style horror that I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if modern horror luminaries like Eli Roth copied off its notes more than once or twice, and it actually has a weirdly compelling vibe about it in its experimental nature in declaring that there’s a kind of macabre beauty in horror and extreme violence, even though the guy controlling and presenting that violence is extra strength shit-hurling crazy.

Bafflingly enough, this movie in its entirety is on YouTube RIGHT NOW. I’ll link it if anyone’s interested, because it really is worth a watch. Galling and shocking and fucking wrong as it is, it’s still a piece of horror history that’s worth appreciating. Even if you appreciate it from a safe distance with a fucking telescope.