Reviews

Imagine a film similar to "Hostel", but made in Germany by the true masters of splatter, from the director of Tortura, the special effects master of Dard Divorce and presented by the director of Torched. Happy New Year! Last year director Marcel Walz made a movie called "Tortura" featuring a group of psychopaths with a sadistic blood lust. They snip off a man's fingers, cut off his nipple, saw off his foot, wrap him in plastic and leave him to bleed to death in an alley. After that they abduct three girls, ripping out the first girl's tongue and forcing her to slit her own throat while they disembowel her. Then they peel the skin off of the second girl's arm and rip out her eyeball. Then, they force the third girl to stab the second girl to death. It was a very violent movie! And now with "La Petite Mort", director Marcel Walz takes torture to new heights with help from the master of gore himself, Olaf Ittenbach! In La Petite Mort, three friends, Simon, Nina and Dodo are traveling to the beautiful city of Mallorca in Spain for their summer vacation. Along the way, their flight gets delayed in Frankfurt Germany where they end up getting mugged. Depressed, they stop in for a drink at the "Maison de la petit mort," (meaning house of the Little Death, a metaphor for a sexual orgasm). A torture-for-profit place of business run by Lady Boss Madame Fabienne (played by the talented actress Manoush) who, along with her two crazy daughters, inflict acts of terror too unspeakable to mention by any decent human being with morals. That being said, I shall now mention some examples.

To start things off, one of the victims is silenced with a mouse trap on the tongue while another victim is getting stabbed in the arm with hundreds of needles. After that, Olaf Ittenbach kicks the gore factor into high gear as we witness a man getting his eyeball stabbed and cut out with a knife. Luckily for him now he won't have to witness his manhood being taken away as the killers graphically cut his penis in half and rip out his intestines! And if that wasn't enough for you, another victim gets brutally scalped until her brains are exposed like a Hannibal Lector lobotomy,leaving her alive just long enough to scream one last time before her throat is sliced open! Next on the menu, a woman's arm is shoved into a meat grinder, and she is forced to drink her own blood while her hand is being mangled into a mess of bloody ground beef. Meanwhile, another victim is beaten repeatedly with a hammer until brain matter is falling out of the victim's skull, similar to the bludgeoning in "Seed" but minus the CGI.

Without giving anything else away, La Petite Mort, needless to say is a must own for gore hounds and fans of Olaf Ittenbach's special effects! Presented by Ryan Nicholson, filmed in high definition on a hand-held camera in widescreen letterbox format and color corrected in a cinematic green tint, La Petite Mort adds a professional motion picture look to the underground gore scene. My screener came boxed and signed by Manoush herself! If you thought Tortura was very violent movie you may (or may not) be happy to know that Marcel Walz outdid himself with La Peite Mort! I can't wait to see what kind of sick, depraved filth he comes up with next!

It has finally happened. It took nearly 16 years for it to happen but it has now officially happened. An impressively long cinematic record held by Braindead since 1992 has at last been broken. Andrey Iskanov has created, (in my opinion) the most violent movie ever made. This is not an opinion, the film is over 4 hours of pure torture, consisting of the sickest and most explicit violence imaginable. During World War 2 a research laboratory was created by military police of the Imperial Japanese Army for researching epidemic prevention and developing weapons of mass destruction. Within these facilities a unit of chemical and biological warfare research team called Unit 731 committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by conducting torturous and fatal experiments on Soviet and Chinese prisoners with estimations resulting in around 200,000 casualties.

General Shiro Ishii lead experiments such as the vivisection, or experimental surgery of a living pregnant woman without anesthesia. The doctors impregnate her then infect her with diseases and remove her organs and fetus while she is still alive, simply to study the results of these diseases before her decomposition. After this Andrey brings us to the infamous teeth yanking scene that you may have caught part of in the trailer for the film. If not, you should know this, the victim's teeth are not just pulled out, they are painfully twisted and bent and hammered out of her gums one by one, as she screams and bleeds until every last tooth is removed from her mouth.

Throughout the film survivors of the incident such as Anatoly Protosov, a former military translator for the USSR, are interviewed and reveal insider information, such as the incident of authority figures being convinced that Ishii's testing facility was actually a lumber mill, causing Unit 731 to often jokingly refer to their test subjects as "logs". After several scenes of vile experiments are depicted, such as the one involving a kid's face boiling from exposure to x-ray radiation, or the scene where a woman is experimentally raped by a man with syphilis for research before the man is slowly gassed to death, or the scene where the researchers strap a woman to a chair, cut her forearm wide open and then shoot her in the neck, it is then that we see their "joke" being taken one step further as these "logs" are chopped apart with axes and thrown into the fire.

Even watching Men Behind The Sun 1 and 2 back to back probably will not prepare you enough to view Philosophy of a Knife. The film is presented without any restrictions or censorship issues towards it's depictions of excessive violence or graphic nudity and with this Andrey Iskanov enters into territories that neither Tun Fei Mou or Godfrey Ho dared to or were allowed to venture. For example, in one particular scene a woman is stripped naked and tied to a chair while a large cockroach is forced inside of her vagina in graphic detail. After several hours of the cockroach moving around inside of her, the doctors cut and peel off her entire face and the cockroach exits from her mouth. They then put her face back on her head and carry her off to the chopping room. As the experiments continue, a man's face is slowly burned off, a woman's forearm is cut open and sawed in half, and a screaming pregnant woman's unborn fetus is ripped out through her bleeding vagina with pliers, piece by piece, along with parts of her own organs and intestines. The next scene features a woman being hung by her arms and electrocuted with cables shoved in her mouth, as the doctors cut open deep, wide gashes into her biceps and face. After this, they pull out her tongue and cut it in half with a knife. Following this scene is a very long and graphic autopsy. Then another woman experiences a similar treatment but this time her back is cut open until her vertebrae is exposed and the electrical cables are forced into her open wounds. Which leads us now to that compression chamber that made Men Behind the Sun so infamous. This time we get an up-close-and-personal glimpse of a boy being exposed to so much pressure that his limbs cave in and his head bursts apart in an explosion of blood.

Gorehounds and historians are guaranteed to be both fascinated and disgusted by all the newly discovered evidence, interviews, photos and video footage of the actual atrocities that took place, presented for the first time in this film! Andrey Iskanov was actually investigated by the KGB regarding his research for the film. They searched his property and confiscated his computers, along with all of his evidence and film footage. He was arrested and taken to a Military base for interrogation and locked in a concrete cell without a toilet. He was given very little food and was made to sign consent forms for search and seizure of all of his property. The incidents at Unit 731 were hidden from the public for so long and even to this day, as you can see from Andrey's imprisonment, extreme measures are still being taken towards covering up the truth. It makes you wonder what else is going on today that we may never know about for years to come when someone else finally decides to risk everything just to make the truth known to us. In a way this makes Philosophy of a Knife one of the most powerful films ever made, it simply can not be ignored any longer. A must see! Highly recommended!