Horny House of Horror (2010)

This unimaginative, technically inept horror film created for the Japanese home entertainment market fails to transcend the overcrowded sub-genre from which it hails. Fans of Japanese cinema shouldn't be surprised by the eminent lack of production values here and by how straightforward and predictable the narrative turns out to be. Casual horror fans might either be aroused or put off by the copious amounts of sexual themes and genital violence, but this comes only as very mild recommendation for undiscriminating gorehounds. Most people will want to steer clear of this one.

Bland salarymen as protagonists, baseball outfits,
gross-out humor, nudity aplenty and geysers of blood
with nobody at the helm: here's another typical entry
in Japanese gore cinema

When three everymen decide to celebrate their last days together (the protagonist being engaged to a domineering woman who disapproves of his friends and their unabashed love for baseball), they stumble upon the titular massage parlor and are quickly drawn in by its suspiciously low prices. Obviously, these are only meant to veil the actual function of the bordello, which is to mutilate horny men during the act of sex for the entertainment of some perverts watching the whole thing live. But the naive protagonists pay no mind, and are quickly drawn into a nightmarish world of deadly sex toys and ugly decors. Likewise, the viewer is caught in a series of increasingly ugly sets, increasingly annoying antagonists (most of which is Akemi's foul-mouthed lead whore), and increasingly unfunny antics meant to amuse only the most undiscriminating of toilet humor fans, with plausibility being a mere afterthought on the whole. Granted that the vast majority of men value their penises much more than I do, I still doubt that they'd risk death in order to reclaim their severed organ in hopes of reattachment. Seeing how this is the kind of pressing matter that the film addresses as some of its most dramatic issues, you should easily be informed as to the level of this effort.

That said, the film features an incredible amount of penile trauma and blood showers, with lots of gratuitous female nudity to entice viewers while they are repulsed by the lingering promise of castration. The focus here is put squarely on gore, rubber prosthetics and juvenile humor instead of any coherent attempt at creating an affective or engrossing narrative. While this should be just enough to delight fans of the genre, it won't be anyone else's cup of tea. Just picture this for a spell: a close-up of a girl's butt shot at an angle so as to barely hide her vagina from which a shower of blood violently spurts, followed by the severed penis inside her, all of this punctuated by the ungodly screams of the male victim. If you really, really want to see such stuff, despite the incredibly crappy technical framework of the film, then go right ahead: enjoy! By the way, it will be hard for one to interpret such an attack as feminist backlash against the patriarchal Japanese society since the female perpetrators are but slave agents working for a male crime boss. Obviously, if you can manage to identify with the dumb protagonists, then you might find yourself somewhat troubled by their ordeal, in which case you might actually find an angle from which to successfully enjoy the film. Otherwise, I'm sure you wouldn't even consider buying a ticket for such a title. And nor should you.

"Get a hard-on and I cut your dick": if you can appreciate
the deeper implications of such a prank, then please
rent the film...

Of course, the film also score some points for its unabashed showcase of nudity (male and female alike). For those who like her, I must mention the presence of porn starlet Asami in a typically raucous role, that of a veteran cock muncher equipped with a set of metallic vagina dentatae. Personally, I have a hard time enjoying her tomboy antics and her deep, raspy voice and I was much more attracted to the more dramatic, more sympathetic, but eventually more traditional character played by gorgeous Saori Hara, another porn actress. The luckless whore entangled in a world of intimidation and blackmail will certainly sound more appealing to most film-goers, but in the end, the joyous, mass-murdering cock-slasher would have a better dramatic potential, had her character been properly handled. At any rate, characterization is not the film's strong suit, nor is story structure, direction, production or any important technical area, the sole effective department being that of special effects, which manages to produce all of the functional elements of the film, namely the latex prosthetics and onscreen blood meant to gross out the audience.

Saori Hara (born Mai Kato) is a sight to behold. Unfortunately,
the same can't be said about the film's sets, cinematography,
graphic humor, art direction, acting, editing...

Personally, I bought a ticket for Horny House of Horror just to fill some time. And I soon found out that this was the film's main function too: fill some time. But seeing how I could've been doing anything else than watching this stuff, I also realized that time can be spent instead of filled, spent in order to reap future benefits and not just immediate thrills. That said, I quite enjoyed the opening cartoon depicting the function of Japanese whorehouses within society: instructive and lighthearted despite the adult material at hand. I should've left right after...


1/5 This cheap effort in button-pushing is recommended only for die-hard Japanese horror fans and undiscriminating gorehounds.