The short story is, The Guinea Pig series began on the Japanese home video market in the mid 80's, intended as a series of shorts aimed at the extreme horror fan, so much so that the first volume was a faux snuff film of a woman being tortured. The first two volumes (the second being cruel torture but more cinematic and less raw) were hits and the series quickly completely abandoned the snuff approach and veered to narrative horror tales. While there was some minor controversy in Japan, the series didn't really reach any large acclaim, notorious or otherwise, in America until (I'm assuming a coked out of his brain) Charlie Sheen viewed a bootleg and turned it over to the authorities because he wasn't sure if it was an authentic snuff film (an urban legend- the snuff film market- that has never found even a shred of evidence that it exists in any way). Despite the FBI already being aware of the film(s) and having proven they were indeed hoaxes, the US media jumped on the videos and turned their ever condemning overhyped eye on them and profiled the videos very briefly, until some kid probably fell in a well or Hollywood star picked up a transvestite and the media moved on.

MERMAID IN A MANHOLE (1988, 57 mins): A recently widowed painter has mentally snapped. He goes into a drainage pipe that used to open next to a river he played in as a child, and while searching for inspiration there, he finds a lovely mermaid. She communicates with him telepathically, and when he observes that she is wounded, he takes her back to his apartment and tries to heal her. Her sores continue to spread and soon, due to her urging, he begins to frantically paint her before she dies.

Hmmmm? What is the best way to describe how they came up with this plot? Probably something like, "Lets get a hot girl and cover her with pus spurting, worm hatching tumors." It is very much like Splash combined with a old EC horror comic. It is an unpleasant bit of gross-out, surreal, but basic hammy horror fun. The flimsy story is just there to serve up the fx, the Harkonenlike boils hatching some creepy crawlers which is somewhat reminiscent of the HK horror classic Seeding of a Ghost. Its all very over the top, the drainage ditch has dolls and mannequin parts in it, you know, to enhance the mood, and the mermaid explains how 'there are seven different colors of pus in her tumors' so she tells the artist to slit them open and paint with it. On one hand its very icky; on the other, so outrageously unreal and fake, its easy to digest.

While it is very memorable and the sort of thing you want to show your friends with more extreme tastes, it is also weak in many areas. Like I said, the plotting is thin and not helped in any way by the pacing and acting. Even at under an hour, the story is so bare the short seems padded out and drags a little. And the acting is horrible; except for the gorgeous Mari Somei as the mermaid, and she doesn't have to do much more than look pretty and writhe around under tons of fx makeup. Lets put it this way, the guy playing the painter is so corny that during one of the "big surprise" moments in the finale, his acting was such that I was laughing at the scene. There are only two other actors in the film, his nosy downstairs neighbors, a buck-toothed woman and a skinny guy, and they combine both the pacing/bad acting issues of the film. Sure, it is not a piece of work meant to be high art or taken very seriously, but I still doubt the film makers intention was to induce giggles. But that's okay, in this case the giggles are sort of a plus.

HE NEVER DIES (1986, 40 mins): Hideshi is a bland loser, luckless with women, working at a thankless job, and not very good at it, subject to berating from his boss. One day Hideshi just decides not to go to work at all, and doesn't leave his apartment for four days. No one calls. No one comes by to check up on him. So, wallowing in his ennui, he deeply slits his wrist with a box cutter. The gaping wound bleeds a little, but much to his surprise the wound stops bleeding and has no pain- he even pokes his finger into it just to make sure. After shoving a pen through his arm, cutting his hand off, and slitting his throat, Hideshi comes to the sad conclusion that not only was he a loser before but now is a bona fide freak of nature that cannot even find escape in suicide. He calls up his work buddy, who does some gardening on the side, and asks him to bring over some pruning shears, a hatchet, and decides to play a little joke on his unsuspecting friend.

Unlike MERMAID, HE NEVER DIES intention is meant to cause the giggles and, of course, turn the stomach too. It opens with a scientist/expert narrator, a nod to the 50's b-movies that would begin with some starch suit professor telling you that the strange content you are about to see is true- "So beware, it could happen to you!". And, it all begins pretty normally, that is, until Hideshi abruptly interrupts the boredom of being locked in his tiny apartment by slicing into his wrists, from then on it is pure insanity. But, it is really nutty in a dark humored sense, like his reaction when he slits his throat, he spits out blood, and then disappointedly huffs, "This is nasty." Funny thing is, there is no attempt to really make Hideshi a sympathetic loser. Sure, he gets yelled at by his boss, but he isn't a good worker. Its not that he is gifted and underappreciated. Likewise, he does have a good friend. He isn't totally alone in the world, so that makes the rather cruel prank he plays all the more mean and uncalled for, though it does set up the final punchline which makes a clever stab at the Japanese cultures need to be tidy. I'll leave it at that.

The DVD: Unearthed Films

Picture: Full-screen, Standard, 1.33:1. Shot on video, it is a mixed bag. The transfers are as good as they are likely to get, but the source material itself is pretty weak, with the usual softness, muted color, and severe grain that a low budget video production will present.

Sound: Basic Dolby Digital 2 Channel, Japanese, with clear yellow English subtitles. Simple and decent. The synth score is fairly generic, MERMIAD features music that is what film composers call "a cat on the piano" dischord melodies. Once again, given the low quality that the sound has in the first place, the audio is as good as it is likely to get and is more than acceptable.

Extras: Chapter Selections--- Trailers for other Guinea Pig features, Devils Experiment, Android of Notre Dame, Mermaid in a Manhole, Flower of Flesh and Blood and The Making Of Guinea Pig--- Text info on the History of the Guinea Pig series. 17 pages giving a nice, informative overview of the series history, including cleaning up some rumors and muddy facts. It was really perfect until it got to the end where it overglamorized the series by saying they were "...films that as a whole say something more powerful about us as a civilization then almost all the movies ever made could." Hardly, the first few were callous fake snuff films, the rest have been nothing more than episodes fit for Tales form the Crypt only with more gore.

Conclusion: Definitely not for everyone, but a sick bit of horror anthology fun. The transfer is as great considering the low budget material; so for the twisted curious or the established Guinea Pig fan, it is worth a purchase.