Carved Review
Asian horror isn’t known as much for the slasher films as ghost stories and if this is any indication of what they expect out of them, I can understand why. I was interested in this movie for that very reason, but now I’ll probably be a little more cautious when it comes to the serial killer Asian movie.
The story is about an urban legend of sorts involving a woman who goes around killing kids in a white mask, the kind to protect you from bad air not a Halloween kind, that she takes off revealing her scar just before kidnapping them. She is then said to take them to her hideout, which all the kids know is an abandoned house somewhere with a red roof. Once their she takes out her signature scissors to cut the kids mouths to resemble her own. That isn’t the worst “legend” to ever make it to the screen, but that also isn’t why this movie wasn’t so good. Once you have a story, it is normally pretty good to do something constructive with it. In this particular era of slitty, I say that because she is apparently seen all the time for the last 30 years or so, three boys want to test the truthfulness of the story and go to the park at exactly 5:00 PM, that is where and when she is known to show herself…they never tell you why.
The boys are disappointed at exactly when exactly 5 comes around and she doesn’t show up, but a minute later while they are getting ready to leave she comes from out of nowhere brandishing her scissors and asks “Am I pretty”, just before she makes off with one of the boys. After this happens a panic arises all across the town and the main characters of the movie become more involved. There is a woman teacher, Kyoko, and she is on escort duty with a group of her students taking them home, that is what is required now thanks to the scare. She is walking her last student, Mika, home after she declines a ride home from her mother, she is a bit abusive, when slitty shows up and takes Mika practically right out of her hands. I couldn’t tell you if it was 5 o’ clock or not, but they didn’t seem to be in the park. Anyway, Kyoko ends up partnering with a fellow teacher, Noboru, to get to the bottom of the slit mouthed woman and rescue Mika, if she is still alive.
This is where I would usually rate the acting, but I’m going to base it more on the actual characters and not the actors. There a lot of people in this movie that didn’t just make sense. I know going into a foreign film that their cultures differ from that of my own in some ways and I’m fine with that, but these guys just didn’t seem to know what they were doing. I understand you have a kidnapping, you like to have your bases covered with a group of officers waiting around the phone to see if a ransom is offered for an attempted trace, but when it is a missing person who is taken by a rumored killer who has been around for all those years and has never once been known to call and ask for a trade…it just seemed a little silly. There are other things as well, but I’m not going to get into all of those. I’ll just leave you with that minor detail and I know that would could kind of go either way, but I just didn’t understand it.
There are some scenes in this movie that sort of defy reason in other ways. If you’ve got a problem with kids being physically abused, punches to the face and being kicked while their down, you’re probably not going to be a fan of this movie. It didn’t bother me that much, but I don’t think it is something you have to continually show. You can do it once or twice to set the tone and then move on. Then again I guess it is a movie about kids and their boogeymen.
The effects were so-so. The look of slitty was pretty good, especially when she opened her mouth as she took to mask down, but one of the biggest shots was CGI and kind of lost a bit for me. Some of the after wounded or murdered gags looked pretty good, but it really wasn’t a movie filled with the red stuff.
I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised going into this movie. I was surprised, but not in a good way. I’m okay with movies not making a whole lot of sense if they give me something I’ve never seen before or something interesting, I love Miike just for that reason. This one unfortunately does neither. Maybe if the script tighter and the directions seem to have reason, I could’ve enjoyed this one. Instead, I was given a movie that I figured out main principals of, in about the first half hour and was curious to see what they were going to do with it. The answer is nothing.
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