Ever since I was first introduced to the wonders of Aisian horror, I've been eating as much up as I can get my hands on. It must be the darker side of me that likes to get grossed out. Or perhaps I'm just subconsciously bored with their tame-by-comparison North American counterparts. Thus far, my limited forays into Aisian horror has, for the most part, revolved around the likes of Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike - the most famous and available of the genre's directors. Along comes Hitoshi Ishikawa's The Big Slaughter Club. It's crazy, I'll give it that. There's also a fair number of campy bits. But there's also a lot of garbage mixed in.

Going to college by day and working as a prostitute by night, Hiroe is an otherwise normal girl who likes to do go shopping, have fun with the girls and that sort of surface stuff. When at work, Hiroe finds some oddballs with sick and twisted fantasies they want her to take part in. One such customer has a thing for lots of make-up and he wants Hiroe to do the same. One thing leads to another and Hiroe accidently ends up impaling the pervert on the hanger of a hat rack. Left with a dead body, Hiroe calls on her friends to help her dispose of it. But no matter how hard they try, how deep they bury the body, how many bits they chop the body into to, the man won't die. In fact, he takes exception and starts going after Hiroe and her friends.

By the time the end rolls around, I think there's supposed to be some sort of deep social message in there, but I doubt you'll really care to stop to figure it out. Chances are, if you liked The Big Slaughter Club it probably had something to do with the campy schlock and an arm flying through the universe towards some sort of nirvana than anything else. I saw The Big Slaughter Club at an enthusiastic midnight screening. When I'm tired, I'll laugh at almost anything. I've dubbed it the Saturday Night Live Syndrome. Try and watch the show during the day and it's not funny. But on Saturday night at midnight, nothing could be funnier (Except the over-used cheerleader skits from years past. Sorry, Will Ferrell but I always hated that skit.). Even with this hypothesis, there's too many lulls in The Big Slughter Club.

Ishikawa has worked side-by-side with Takashi Miike, the current master of Aisian horror. Heck, Miike is the master of horror - period. I haven't found anything scarier or more disturbing than Audition or Ichii the Killer in a long time. Hitoshi wrote Miike's Dead or Alive: Final in 2002. The Miike influence is obvious in The Big Slaughter Club. Through all of the bloodied camera lenses, flying body parts and blooy inards, the movie still has something to say. It's not much, but it separates the film from being the pure schlock you might expect from a carefully concealed Trauma DVD arriving in Tuesday's mail.

©Movie Views; October 5, 2003