How would you reshape your body?

MODIFY (2005)

d. Jason Gary, Greg Jacobson
Comitted Films
Full Frame

Modify seeks to explore the lives of those who modify their bodies, from the simple to the extreme. But what it really does is bring the mondo film into the 21^st century. With the various montages extreme plastic surgery, slicing flesh, insane piercings, suspensions and implants of every sort, this is a gore show of the highest order masquerading as a serious look at a lifestyle documentary. 

The movie starts off with a small thesis that modification can be anything from tattoos, to extreme implants and piercings to body building and plastic surgery. We then spend some really unpleasant time with some surgeons who seem like nice people, but their comments are made moot because theyare played over a long montage of outrageously gory surgery footage. Scenes of breast implants, eyelids being cut off, liposuction, labia being construction, huge stomachs being removed and just flesh being cut, torn, sucked and rendered endlessly.

 "Here Kitty Kitty. It's time for my next procedure..."

The next big section deals with extreme piercing and body suspension. A theme that seemed to have really took hold in the era this documentary was made around 2005. I remember seeing the troop covered in this movie first on the extras of the movie HELLRAISER in 1999, but from then until this doc it seemed to exploded. With hundreds of suspension performers the lifestyle seems to have a permanent foothold these days. Though certainly not to the extent the gentleman in the movie claim where he says there are hundreds of thousands of people in American doing it. 

We meet a young man who has started modifying using his artistic vision as a sculptor and his biology background by doing implant work using Teflon and silicone. He also shows off his surgical tools he has sculpted himself. Seems that he is a real life version of a character from a Cronenberg movie.

Once the movie moves into the mid-section of the discussion of modification mutilation a lot of the interviews take a nosedive with man of the participants dropping in I.Q level. Up to the point 95% OF the interviewees have been very intelligent folks. But suddenly we get some people who claim to work the sideshows who say things like “I am a cynical nihilist, but I really don’t know what that means. I heard Flea explain it once though”. The opinions on what equals mutilation against modification seems to vary wildly from each person, but all of them seem to agree the line is drawn where people can’t really decide for themselves of it the modification will impair the lives of the person in some way.

"They may have not fully understood what she meant by a lace up the back dress"

We spend another uncomfortable amount of time with a fully tattooed dude as he pushes beads into the flesh of his cock in a bloody mess of a scene and then meet several other people who have sliced up their wieners into strange positions. Interestingly enough most of the modified people admit that their lifestyle is an addiction and openly discuss that thy feel that want it more and more. A doctor has a cockimamee explanation saying it is some defeating fear bullshit. But most of them seem to understand it is a endorphins rush combined with a need for something more extreme. A natural high. The extreme plastic surgery cases obviously have something bigger going on though. 

There is a short interview with groundbreaking modifying Fakir Moustafir who was the original person at the ground floor of the movement. He discusses a lot of the so called spiritual sides of things involved in this. He also goes into a rant about how if people are willing to modify themselves they are radical enough to take to the streets and effect change I the world and that is why society thinks they are dangerous. Which is why they try to legislate these sort of things. I think he is overstating things more than a little bit.

In the last third of the movie we get to see a tongue split into two halves, a cock split in two halves a a full sexual reassignment surgery all in the discussion of how modification is being legislated in weird ways. But this is more of the big time Mondo footage and some of it REALLY hard to get through. The tough split it especially hard to watch and actually doesn’t go a long way towards the discussion that the procedure shouldn’t be regulated. 

The discussion of religion comes down tot pretty much only Jim Ward of The Gauntlet only comes off not sounding like a prentious dufuss. Everyone else sounds like a typical artshool airhead with too lofty self-importance on the subject. Which is why it probably shouldn’t have even been asked in the first place.

Naturally it all ends with another music video montage of the best and the nastiest moments, with a song called “Unforgettable” playing. The sound bytes try to convince us that the bottom line is about having an open mind and not judge people. Which is all nice and good. But the bottom line is REALLY we just saw a major gore filled freakshow of modern day epic proportions that something like FOX wish they could get away with showing if the censors would allow all the bleeding sliced open breasts and split cocks on TV. 

Review © Andrew Copp

This man is your last stop as you leave hell

WARNING: Even for the material normally discussed and contained on this blog, the following pictures and video may be objectionable and disturbing. The following contains images of real death and embalming, so proceed with caution.


Orozco The Embalmer (2001)
D. Tsurisaki Kiyotaka Cinema Obscura S.O.V.

Widely considered to be one of the must brutal and in your face of the mondo-documentaries that has floated around the underground in recent years, OROZCO THE EMBALMER has gathered a reputation that's proceeded it. Mostly by gorehound death fetishists that don't understand, nor care enough to look beyond the guts being spilled on screen to see the spiritual, political or just plain human context they may be watching. All they want to see is bodies being ripped open and blood splashed all over the place. This movie delivers that in a matter of fact manner that puts films like FACES OF DEATH or even the turgid and offensive FACES OF GORE series to shame. But at the same time there is an exploration of a real person here, who does a very real job, in a very real place, that very much resembles hell on Earth.


Orozco is an embalmer in one of the poorest, most crime ridden grottoes in Columbia. It is not uncommon here to see someone gunned down in the street, or for cars to run someone over and reduce them to paste in some sort of drug fueled vendetta. A life of crime is basically the only way to survive in this place and people die all the time.

Even the stray dogs have to take time to get plastered up to heal after street warfare in Columbia.

Hell, even the stray dog's are not safe. Orozco's business is booming due to this. But at the same time, he understands that the people he serves are poor and suffering, so he charges less than the city hospitals for an embalming and he makes his services affordable to the people he lives and works among. He also hires as assistants people from the neighborhood, including a local mentally handicapped man and that man's son who he has basically almost adopted as his own and is training.

Orozco finishes dressing a dead child for a funeral, while the parent waits patiently in the wings.

But don't let all this selflessness fool you - Orozco is one grumpy son of a bitch. The daily grind of cutting people open for little pay obviously gets to him. He is an old man now, the lines of a life that has battered the shit out of him are etched on his face. He barely seems to blink, and his mouth is always down turned in a frown. He applies his trade in a swift and aggressive manner, cutting into the bodies he is working on as someone would expect a butcher to attack a side of beef. Chunking his knives into the flesh hard and fast, tearing into abdominal cavities to release bloated gases, pockets of settled blood, and sack after sack of gorged internal organs that are simply in his way. He is not performing an autopsy, his job is to relieve the body of the artifacts that are going to start decaying soon that will prevent the body from being in a funeral service. He might even go as far as to apply make up if he deems it necessary for that particular person, though he has pretty strong opinions on that matter, expressing about one corpse "why paint this person up like a clown now, when that never looked like that when they were alive?" The brain is always removed and replaced with newspaper because that rots away the quickest and will smell immediately. It is all a daily grind for him: body after body, old men, women, and occasionally little babies or children. Sometimes he will notice things the hospitals or morgues have missed, such as an elderly corpse on his table he clearly notices had been abused while alive, but the cause of death does not indicate such. But he steps away from saying anything, claiming that to do so would only start trouble. Orozco was in the military when he was much younger but refuses to talk about it, as well as his time in the police. He clearly saw things that were quite awful, illegal things, murderous things. Things in which to spend his days among the dead is not terribly different.

A typical way someone ends the day in Columbia now and again.

The documentary crew visit one of the local hospital morgues to watch how they do their embalming, which is no more high tech than Orozco. In fact, in some ways it is just as savage. They take more time in the clean up, with more make up and prep for the funeral, but the actual cutting up and discarding of parts it is no different. Still, the embalmer has no problem talking shit about Orozco and his team. In a weird and out of place bit, the documentary director begins to talk off camera to the embalmer about the corpse and how it has a "really pretty hairy pussy" which kinda comes out of nowhere. Once that is said, though, it does sort of make you notice that a lot of the camera work has included crotch shots of the corpses which seemed a bit unnecessary. And very, very weird.


Which leads me to the movie's biggest detriment, the direction. The movie has a truly fascinating subject with Orozco, and the actual town in Columbia, but the direction itself is beyond sloppy, with many long, useless montages of life in the street (all set to the same droning, repetitive music) that just pad out the movie. There is one long aside of a drug addict allowing the camera to follow him to a corner in an alley to smoke crack, that has nothing to do with the movie at all. Then there is that weird sort of leering sexual asides the movie takes form time to time, the worse being the bit at the hospital morgue, where the camera seems to linger on a corpses genitals or breasts just a bit too long, which seems really fucked up.

The brain is removed to prevent stink of decay during any services the family may ask upon.

When I mentioned this on a message board someone mentioned that this film started life as an episode of the DEATH FILES series in Japan which is just a Mondo Death footage series (and one of the most brutal and outrageous). That series is just footage of dead people, usually at accidents in third world countries (of which there is plenty of here) or murder sites (once again plenty of that here). One of the most famous of that series was an off shoot called DEATH WOMEN which is just that, random footage of the corpses of women at accidents, murder scenes, morgues etc. Seems this director cut his teeth working on those series, and then make some short "art" films called JUNK FILMS which were basically more of the same. Orozco was originally intended to be more of this until he got a hold of such a fascinating subject and it become something entirely new. And that saves it. The focus on Orozco himself gives it all context and form, as well a lot of social dynamic as he explains how these people live and die.



Certainly well worth watching if you can stomach it. But be warned it IS as rough as you've heard.

Review © Andrew Copp