American Guinea Pig: Bloodshock – 2015
Bloodshock is another part of the film series American Guinea Pig. It’s hard to not draw parallels to the Japanese film series titles just Guinea Pig and I think that the writer Stephen Biro and Director Marcus Koch is very aware of these movies and have got quite a lot of inspiration from them. In the first one – Bouquet of Guts and Gore it was pretty obvious to me that the inspiration was the second Guinea Pig movie Flower of Flesh and Blood. While this one is more similar to the first original Guinea Pig movie The Devils Experiment. I mean, compare the artwork for instance.
I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. You can clearly see the similarities and I think that is a conscious homage to the Asian Guinea Pig series. But that’s the cover art. Do the actual movies play out the same as well? I would say no, not at alt actually. There are both torture and experiments in both of them but that’s about it. In the Japanese movie, the premise is that someone found a VHS tape and that what was on there was some kind of government-sanctioned experiment. Trying to figure out how much pain, torture, and suffering someone can take. It was a long time since I saw it so I might get some of the details wrong.
Style
The style of the American Guinea Pig – Bloodstock is totally different even if there are torture, pain, and human experimentation. It’s filmed in stylistic black and white which in my mind is the perfect choice for the movie. It emphasizes the claustrophobic feeling in much of the movie. Maybe I get ahead of myself here…first some of the plot. Well, itäs pretty simple if I didn’t misunderstand. There is some kind of “doctor” holding prisoners and experimenting on them. Although, it doesn’t seem to be as many experiments as pain and torture. There is also some kind of fluid being extracted. It looks like blood but it might very well be something else.
I know I’ve seen some other movies where fear and pain are said to make the body produce certain hormones or enzymes. Maybe that is the idea here as well, I’m not sure. Once the “doctor” has done his experiments for the day the patient is sent back to a padded cell to face his pain alone. The fell of it all is that there is NO escape and the situation is totally hopeless. But…there is more than one patient. There’s also a woman in the connecting cell and they start o pass notes to one another. I’m not sure how realistic this really is but it works fine within the narrative.
A shred of hope
This shred of hope serves to bring even more hopelessness into the picture and you can almost feel their pain in the cells and when the experiments are conducted. I donät know, but I also think that what makes it stringer is that there are no actual screams of pain. There are very few lines delivered to and it makes it very effective. It’s like you don’t know if it’s in a dream or in reality. As it’s supposedly are to take place in an asylum, who knows what a sick brain can come up with for delusions?
It’s certainly agonizing to watch and I love the unpleasant feeling Bloodshock very effective build-up. In hindsight, you might actually see it as a sexual experience where the torture is a kind of foreplay and the orgasm comes at a later stage. Because there’s not only torture in Bloodshock even if that’s easiest to think. There’s also a love story and I think that the final liberating scenes are the final climax, at least in a symbolic kind of way.
