Ginî piggu 3: Senritsu! Shinanai otoko (1986)

...aka Guinea Pig 3

...aka Guinea Pig: He Never Dies

...aka He Never Dies

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Directed by:

Masayuki Kuzumi

Rick Steinberger, sitting at a desk and directly addressing the camera, intros telling us this is "reality captured on film," and makes sporadic visits to tell us all about the mental state of the main characters in this gory/blackly comic mock documentary short (with a run time of about 40 minutes). Poor put-upon Hideshi (Masahiro Satô) slaves away all day at an unrewarding computer job. His boss and manager put him down, he's slammed with paperwork, office stud Elvis Nakamura (Shinsuke Araki) is after the girl, Kyoko (Eve), he has a crush on and the job is so uninspiring and boring it's starting to effect both his physical and mental well being. Sometimes he spends days alone in his cramped one-room apartment, where he plays guitar, chain smokes, talks to himself, watches TV, draws faces on his feet and puts on his own puppet shows (!), throws a ball around, plays darts, etc. The voyeuristic camera-work looking into Hideshi's humdrum daily life is done in the style of stationary b/w surveillance cameras and is clever for the time. Already suffering from depression and thoughts of suicide, Hideshi takes a razor and slashes his wrist. Though it bleeds at first, it quickly stops. Hideshi also feels no pain at all. He also feels little when he sticks a pen through his arm, takes a butcher knife and cuts off his hand and even slashes his own throat. Somehow, he can't die. Immortality's a bitch when you're a disturbed suicide case, huh?

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Not satisfied with mutilating himself without a captive audience, an increasingly insane Hideshi invites Elvis over to his apartment. Elvis also brings along Kyoko, who waits in the car. Soon after Elvis enters, Hideshi sticks a triangle ruler through his head, cuts open his stomach and starts pulling out his organs (intestines, stomach, bladder, etc.) and flinging them all over the place. It all leads up to a rather silly and nonsensical conclusion. Don't expect the how and why of Hideshi's immortality to be addressed, either.

The gore effects, as usual for this series, are sometimes impressive. However, since this one's mostly played for laughs, the effects are more amusing than disturbing. Furthermore, there aren't as many gory moments of note here, as in other entries. There is some brief T&A, one part is put in slow motion and the music is stolen from Lamberto Bava's DEMONI (DEMONS). It's the third in the series and was preceded by GUINEA PIG: DEVIL'S EXPERIMENT and GUINEA PIG: FLOWERS OF FLESH AND BLOOD (both 1985). As far as I know there were three more official films to follow.

★★