THE BUNNY GAME is no game at all...

THE BUNNY GAME (2012)

 D.Adam Rehmeier
Autonomy Pictures

HD

Some horror fans pride themselves in searching the outer reaches of the genre for those films that will psychologically scar them. Recent years have seen the genre move to those outer edges in a reaction to a not so subtle seismic shift in our culture after 9/11, ten years of a war in Iraq, and watching our economy plummet while people blame each other. The horror film has always been a mirror to the anxiety of the society of the time, and with the viciousness of our current times it is no surprise we have ended up with films like EDEN LAKE, MARTYRS, BROKEN and of course the very ugly and controversial A SERBIAN FILM. Now we have another very unsettling film to throw onto the short list of movies that will lay a long and nasty scar on your brain. Adam Rehmeier's and Rodleen Getsic's searing cinematic assault, THE BUNNY GAME. 

But this one is quite different than even the other (some quite excellent) films mentioned, as it is as much an art film as a horror film. Shot in harsh black and white, and edited with near brilliance at times, this is a movie that is very aware of the artifice being used to bring it to the audience. The film-making on display is never less than completely assured, coupling with a nerve wracking use of sound design and loud and abrasive music all collide to make THE BUNNY GAME an experience that only a brave few will make it out alive from.

The story is really very simple. A young woman played by co-scripter Rodleen Getsic, is BUNNY, a woman who has found herself a prostitute. Whoring her way on the streets to survive. These early scenes, which make up roughly the first quarter to a third of the film, are deeply unpleasant and the perfect flip side to a movie like PRETTY WOMAN which makes prostitution look easy, clean, and never really dangerous. BUNNY is shown plying her trade in hardcore close up, sucking cocks but never for a second enjoying it. Soullessly getting roughed up, but taking it because it means enough money to get through the day. We see her in the shower in tears as she adjusts to getting past her last encounter and on to the next nasty John. Much of this is scored with super loud and abrasive death metal music just to add to the even more aggressive feel.

Soon she is picked up be a seemingly benign old truck driver played by Jeff Renfro. After a brief discussion of exchanging money for sex, he offers her some drugs and next thing she knows she has been kidnapped and her life is about to become a living nightmare.

From here on out the film is an aggressive onslaught of humiliation and torture. The Trucker systematically sets out to break her, emotionally, spiritually and sexually. Holding her captive in the back of his tractor trailer, stripping her down, shaving her head and playing an extending, extremely brutal S+M based game of total dehumanization. Oddly enough he never actually sexually penetrates her, but the entire enterprise is basically one long extended emotional rape of her very being. During some moments she has a rather disturbing rubber Bunny mask on that further dehumanizes her. All the while the Trucker laughs maniacally becoming a very demonic presence, leading the charge in this nightmare.

THE BUNNY GAME could have been just another torture exhibit freakshow for gorenographers to jerk off to. But instead the film-making on display sets it apart from that. There is real force of nature at work here. Seriously unpleasant stuff, but not without merit. Even if I had not known the back story why this was made I would look at this film and see there was more to what was on screen than simply an exploitation of a woman’s suffering. 

One thing that indeed set's this apart from the horror film of it's peers is that NOTHING on screen is fake. That very fact risks making this a bit of a geek show, but it also lends the movie a visceral, raw authenticity that makes it impossible to escape from. So when we see BUNNY being bound, gagged and tormented it is for real. When her head is shaved and she is force fed a whole bottle of vodka, it is real. In the same scene there are cars in the far distance driving by that are clearly not part of the film-making crew. Just people tooling down the highway that adds a very disturbing edge in that we are watching this bound, naked woman being abused and people are just driving past. The sexual scenes early on are not fake, and there are several scenes of things like cutting and branding that are not fake either.

All of this is possible because Rodleen Getsic comes from a performance art background. Most of her former work dealt with feminist and political themes. She also was very involved with things like political activism and was well known for her charity and philanthropic work during the Katrina disaster. It is this background that allowed her to take the punishment netted out in the part. But more importantly is the WHY she conceived the the film and role. It is my understanding that some where in her past she was indeed abducted by a sexual sadist and suffered greatly while held hostage. To wipe the experience from herself she conceived this project as a way to exorcise the demons. Getsic fasted for forty days to get to a physical place to play the role and they shot the for film for 13 days during which she committed to taking all the abuse as close to reality as possible. Including the very real violence. Once the shoot was finished she went away to a retreat for a month to rid herself of the emotional experience of the shoot and the memories it was based on. 

Some films are not meant to be enjoyed, or even be entertaining. Some are meant to be endured as they very act of making them were acts of rebellion for the filmmakers. THE BUNNY GAME is one such film. It isn't for everyone, only a select few will be able to stomach the horrors on display. Approach it with extreme caution, and understanding that what you are seeing is an act of extreme catharsis. It could damage you if unprepared. 

Andrew Copp © Review

BLEEDER, Nicholas Winding Refn's 2nd feature film

BLEEDER (1999)
D. Nicholas Winding Refn
Import DVD
1.85

After I saw the movie DRIVE this year I became a little obsessed with seeing other films from director Nicholas Winding Refn. I had previously seen BRONSON (2010) which I was very impressed with, and had caught up with his Viking epic VALHALLA RISING (2011) just before seeing DRIVE. But I had not seen any of his older films from when he was primarily still working overseas. So I took a plunge and placed a large order from Amazon UK (grabbed some other dvd's I had been looking for too) and picked up this one and his PUSHER trilogy. This was the first of that bundle I watched and I was suitably impressed.

BLEEDER is a street level drama about a group of friends and how their lives change when the core couple of the group become pregnant. Leo (Kim Bodnia) and Lea (Live Corfixen) have discovered they are going to have a baby, but Leo really lacks the maturity to handle the situation. He hangs out with his video store owning buddies Lenny (Mads Mikkelson who went on to play the villain in CASINO ROYAL) and Kitjo (Zlatko Burik) watching movies all night long, or trailing behind Lea's fairly dangerous brother, low level gangster Louis (Levino Jensen). Louis is not crazy about Leo anyway and he can sense that he is unhappy about the new situation. But as things progress, Leo begins to slip into a sort of psychosis, growing more and more reckless and dangerous, making bad decisions as if to purposefully cause problems for himself until it hits the middle of the film and a huge problem that will impact them all.

The second tier of the story is less tense, and what I suspect is more personal to the director. Lenny, who is obsessed with movies and practically lives at his job at the video story has fallen for the pretty girl who works at the greasy spoon diner around the corner. The problem is that he has no personal communication skills at all. All he can do is talk movies. His friends are used to him, but in the real world his is awkward, even backward to the point that he might even be suffering from Aspergers or mild Autism. His only connection to the real world is through what he knows in the thousands and thousands of movies he watches. So he struggles to connect to this girl, who is actually not too different than he is, because she loves books in much the same way.

The first part of the story grows increasingly tense as the characters play out the situations until it reaches the last act of the film and why it is called BLEEDER. It is not what you think, I guarantee it, and it is far more disturbing that you imagine, But it is thankfully tempered by the second story of Lenny's quest to connect with this young lady.

The movie is told with a constant roving camera, almost always on a steady cam, but never obtrusive, and like his later films, using modern music as a way to punctuate the proceedings and introduce characters and give them an immediate voice. This was Refn's second feature film but his vocabulary was already in place.As his acting company, almost all who were in PUSHER and return here playing mostly very different characters than in that film.

One thing that I will say I have found a little frustrating with his films is that they tend to be a little light on the female character's motivations. He simply doesn't write the most detailed females. His male characters are always fully developed and complex, while his females are always kind of by the wayside, or just plot mechanics to move things forward. With that said, BLEEDER is the one film of the bunch I have watched of his work that suffers the LEAST in this aspect with the two female characters being pretty close to fully formed here. Much more so than the women in BRONSON and PUSHER for sure.

Right now BLEEDER is the hardest of his films to see, but it is for certain worth the effort.

Review

© Andrew Copp

Trapped IN A GLASS CAGE (Blu Ray Finally!)

TRAS EL CRISTAL (IN A GLASS CAGE) 1986
D. Agusti Villaronga

CULT EPICS

1:85 Anamorphic

Blu Ray and DVD

There are a lot of movies anymore that claim to be the most disturbing movies of all time. Last year A SERBIAN FILM sexually assaulted audiences, brutalizing them to the point that criminal charges were filed at a film festival in Spain. While that film is everything you have heard and more, it lacks a certain poetry; a lyricism to it's violence. So while A SERBIAN FILM manages to violate you, and scar your psyche, it fails to engage your soul. But there is another film that hit the scene twenty five years about that was the sensation of the time, that did all these things and more. A film that was so shocking when it came out that almost all film festivals refused to play it, leaving only Gay and Lesbian festivals to embrace it, and even there it left audiences shocked and destroyed. But it was horror audiences who found the film through the underground critical writings of Chas Balun who praised the film in his DEEP RED magazine calling it the only film to scar him on a spiritual level.

IN A GLASS CAGE is a film that is so distressing that it is a film that almost has to be confronted as much as watched. But unlike a film like A SERBIAN FILM, this is not simple shock machine, no aggressive attempt to piss in the audience's faces and make them feel sickened and disgusted. IN A GLASS CAGE is an honest attempt to look evil in the face, to explore the circular nature of evil. And even more distressing, it is a really upsetting love story.

The film opens with a scene sure to upset the hell out of those more sensitive types. An old man named Klaus (Gunter Meisner from THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL) has a naked teenage boy strung up in an old stone building. From the old man's behavior it is clear the scene has been that of a sexual nature. Someone is outside of the building watching through the window. The old man takes a two by four and beats the boy to death. He then heads to the roof and throws himself off. But not before who ever was watching could gather the books and diaries scattered about that the man left behind.

The movie proper starts, with credits playing over scenes of young boys in Nazi prison camps, letting us know the scene we had just watched was happening in during World War two. Then the movie picks up eight years later and Klaus is not living in a villa under the care of his wife, maid and young daughter Rena. He is confined to an iron lung due to being paralyzed from his suicide attempt. His wife, who is at the end of her rope from caring for him is in need for a live in nurse. A Handsome young man named Angelo (David Sust) mysteriously appears, and though his wife immediately hates him, he takes the job. Klaus and Angelo seem to share a secret that connect them in the past, and soon Angelo is tearing his way through the family. He begins to sexually abuse Klaus, turn on and off the iron lung, and repeat his more terrifying experiments form the prison camps with children from the surrounding neighborhoods.

The film is a terrifying look at how evil spreads from one incident, i.e. a war, or a moment of unmitigated sexual abuse, and spreads through time like ripples on water. Klaus and Angelo are destined to play out their dance of evil together to the point it almost feels like a love story. But also playing into that is the character or Rena, Klaus young daughter who does indeed fall in love with Angelo, to the point that she clearly sees the awful things he is preptrating in her home, to her Father. That she learns the evil that her Father once was, and that she too will perhaps inherit the cycle.

But make no mistake, IN A GLASS CAGE is no fly by nigh shock machine, it is a measured, thoughtful and at times hauntingly beautiful film that happens to deal with some of the most hopeless and sad material humanity could possibly offer. Agusti Villarongo has fashioned a truly disturbing film, that is also deeply poetic, visually stunning and achingly heartfelt. It is disturbing because it is so damn HUMAN. Human in that it shows the worst the human animal can offer.

Cult Epics new Blu Ray and DVD is a significant upgrade over their previous DVD edition. While that edition was naturally a HUGE step up from the washed out murky VHS available for years, there was some sync issues, and subtitle issues on that previous edition and a distinct lack of extras. This new HD transfer is much cleaner with nice accurate colors (though the black levels seem a little lacking in detail at times to me). The Steel blues and grays are all very well accentuated. The extras include three of Villaronga's older short films and two fascinating and lengthy interviews that shed some light on his goals in making this now infamous film.  

Review © Andrew Copp