American Guinea Pig 4: Sacrifice (2017)
Mr. Dark
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Starring Roberto Scorza and Flora Giannattasio
Directed by Poison Rouge
I believe I’ve written here about the Texas Frightmare Weekend Penis Curse.
It goes like this: if there are 12 movies playing over the course of a TFW, and I see two of those, one will feature on-screen peen. I’m cursed. Every year, I manage to see one movie that has dong. Considering how rare that is in American film, that’s a streak well outside what would be expected. Several movies across several years, and one had a clown face painted on the tip. Complete with red clown nose. (Thanks, Circus Of The Damned.)
Sacrifice is the real crescendo, though. The cherry on top of the dick sundae. Maybe that’ll break the curse and next year will be johnson-free?
The lead actor’s ween should have it’s own line in the credits, and the producer made it clear there were at least two stunt cocks in the film as well.
All that willy talk aside, this was the secret screening this year. As I understand it from the producer’s talk after the film, it was a secret because fans of the American Guinea Pig series were expecting another film, Song of Solomon, but that isn’t finished yet. This was, so it was a surprise.
Oddly enough, Sacrifice is an Italian film. A first time effort by female director Poison Rouge, Sacrifice is a fitting entry into the Guinea Pig pantheon of gore-fests.
The story here is just enough to get us into the grue and excuse its existence, which is fitting for a Guinea Pig movie. Daniel is a young man with a troubled past. He returns to his childhood home where something bad went down with his parents. He goes into the bathroom, strips to his tighty whiteys, and starts mutilating himself.
His madness has a method to it, and that unfolds as the film moves towards the gruesome finale. I won’t spoil it here, but it leads to some extremely intimate acts of self-harm that you haven’t really seen on the screen before.
What’s more, producer Stephen Biro made it clear that at least some of the shots were not filmed with prosthetics. Yes, there are people in Italy who do this to their own penises for giggles, apparently. As he put it, two things run through your mind while watching: man, this is long, and I’m really glad that’s not a flathead.
Just like the good old days of the original Guinea Pig series, the focus here is on the gore and how effective it is. The realism here is a mixed bag, with some odd and unexpected results. A couple of seemingly simple things, surface wounds, look pretty face, while some of the more advanced stuff comes off and completely “Charlie Sheen calling the FBI” realistic. (Above and beyond the mostly-real penile violence.)
The other major problem with the film is a horribly miscast English voiceover actor for Daniel. (We never see Daniel speak, all dialogue is internal/voiceover.) Daniel is a tall, athletic, Italian man with a beard and bushy black hair. The actor doing the voiceover has a rather high-pitched voice and a thick British accent. It doesn’t match, at all, and is very distracting. I wonder if the original cut of the film had no dialogue at all, and just showed the events of the film without any commentary. That, honestly, could have made for a much more interesting film. A text plate at the end of the film clues the viewer into what Daniel was up to, so I’m not sure the narration was even needed.
That being said, the narration is there, it is what it is, and they chose a really poor match to voice the inner working’s of Daniel’s mind.
Other than those two complaints, though, this isn’t a bad movie at all. It’s definitely part of the American Guinea Pig series, so anyone looking for a compelling plot and character arcs will be sorely disappointed and extremely nauseated. This is for extreme gore hounds only, and even the hardcore Texas Frightmare audience was doing quite a lot of squirming.
If you’re into gore FX and either of the Guinea Pig series, you’ll enjoy this one. It’s a rollercoaster as we move from one horrific self-mutilation to the next, which is exactly what Guinea Pig fans are looking for. As all violence in the film is entirely self-directed, the film also dodges any complaints of misogyny or “torture porn” and hearkens back to the original series’ entry Man Who Wouldn’t Die.
Seek it out if you can handle it. Just be warned about the peen. So much peen…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjH8xhfqV4k
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
