04: quick look: the butcher

sometimes you see a movie for the wrong reasons. sometimes you don't know why you see a movie, other times you have intent: there is something that you've heard or the premise is interesting to you.

i saw the butcher, and, quite honestly, i could have done without.

the reason i saw THE BUTCHER because of an interview with the director in giant robot. giant robot is a rather innocuous magazine that looks at asian culture, and while it's not afraid of gore or extreme cinema, i wouldn't think any movie written up in it would be so severe. at any rate, the director was asked to list of his favorite movies, he named my current favorite horror movie, INSIDE, as number one. he was also a korean director, and i have a lot of affection for the complex genre and mood hopping of korean films in particular. additionally, he said that one of the reasons he made his movie was in an effort to top inside. that was all i needed to hear. i was hooked. inside was brutal, to be sure, i liked that, and it's amazing sense of suspense, but it was the multiple levels of meaning that endeared it to me. 2008-9, for me, were years of what used to be called 'extreme' cinema, now called 'disturbing cinema'. i had come off of my love of asian horror, and asian extreme, looking for something new.

i was tired of the 'angry wet asian girl' and was looking for a horror that was distinctly LESS supernatural. ghost stories had grown boring and tedious to me, in the same way that slashers and serial killer tropes had before them. i wanted something new-- ambitious, audacious. sure there were some great shocking films coming out of asia, i had gone thru the favorites, THE VENGEANCE TRILOGY, SAVE THE GREEN PLANET, SAMARIAN GIRL, etc., i waded into euro horror with michael haneke's brilliant cinematic jab in the eye, FUNNY GAMES.

for all their shocking newness, there was something missing: closeness. sensuality. all of those films had a certain cold distance in their telling. along comes clair denis' moody cannibal/virus movie, TROUBLE EVERYDAY, a slow, lyrical art-house horror movie that is too busy bathing in the beauty of it's own blood to give a shit about an intricate plot. and it was lovely. i've honestly never seen that much blood on screen, and the body contact in it was shocking this was not gore at a distance, this is blood letting upclose and very personal. there was also martina de van's fantastic, claustrophobicaly personal chronenbergian body horror debut, IN MY SKIN, then i stumbled upon INSIDE, which, is a mean piece of work, a home invasion horror, that not only has a shocking premise, but it's fantastically structured, with layers of meaning, great production, and a deadly sense of tension. and blood. lots of blood. this group for me was a horror trifecta-- three great, shocking films that took horror in new directions-- two were directed by women, but all had strong female leads.

so i wanted to see if the butcher would compare. i should have known better. there are a couple of things that should have been a warning to me:

1) the title. honestly. i don't care for slaughter type horror. i've never been able to sit thru texas chainsaw massacre, nor do i care to. while i'm not afraid of gore, all gore is NOT created equal. call it torture porn if you like, people hanging on hooks is not my cup of tea. inspite of my love of the above mentioned asian extreme movies, all having torture scenes in them.

2)the premise. it's been done before, but people being killed for money/snuff films. i have purposefully stayed away from anything that even bears a whiff of snuff. there are faux snuff films, and in researching which horror movie to see next, you come across some titles. they ALL give me the willies. i don't like reading about them, and i sure as shit don't want to see them, fake or no, it just does not interest me.

3)the setting. in the last few months i've subjected myself to euro horror movies (frontier(s), calvaire, sheitan etc), almost all of them being revamps of texas chainsaw or deliverance. none of them, to my mind was worth the time.

i think you can guess that i did not like the butcher. was it artfully done? not. yes, the director throws a couple of... bones in there for those of us who are going to dissect the film. there are film references (the "star" of the film wears a pig's head, a nod to the 70's horror film, MOTEL HELL) the film's director makes a few of hand comments about how american audiences love gore, eyes and seeing are part of the film's set up, and how it was conceived, but all the same, the tension is uneven, the setting and use of handheld/shakey cam leaves little room for framing, thoughtful shot construction, or anything other than ham handed brutishness. i suppose that's all one can expect of a film called the butcher, taking an artform and shoving it into a meat grinder, but what comes out of the other end isn't gonna be steak, no matter what the cut, and same with the butcher. inside, or steak, it ain't.