SYNOPSIS:
Three sisters grow up on a chicken farm in a small town in Gifu. The oldest sister, Yukie Sawada is engaged to be married, the middle sister Sachiko works at a beauty salon and the youngest, Mayu is on the track team in high school.
Their happy, carefree lives are changed forever when Yukie's ex-boyfriend Suzuki commits an atrocious crime with Mayu as the tragic victim. Half-crazed and bent on revenge against the Sawada family, Suzuki mistakes Mayu for Yukie and pours acid all over her face. Overwhelmed by physical and psychological trauma, Mayu sinks deeper into depression and isolation, unresponsiveto her sister's encouragment...
Meanwhile, chilling news of a serial murderer who preys on the alumni of Mayu's high school sends shockwaves through their small town...
MOVIE REVIEW:
Have we heard of the first? The first “Scissors Massacre” that is? No we haven’t, and to our best knowledge, we don’t think you would have either, since the movie was never released locally in cinemas or straight to DVD. So it is with much ignorance that we approached its apparent sequel, “The Scissors Massacre 2”, armed with only the assumption that one, a lot of people are going to die, and two, they will die at the hand of a very, very sharp pair of scissors.
To say that “The Scissors Massacre 2” is a horror is somewhat inaccurate, since there are few scares to be had here. In fact, for almost an hour into the film, there is nothing really frightening going on. Unless of course you consider the tragedy- which by the way, involves the stabbing of a mother of three girls and the disfigurement of a cute teenage girl with everything going for her, thanks to a case of mistaken identity.
First-time director Terauchi Kotaro takes his time to set up the movie, based as it claims on a true story in a remote Japanese village in the 1970s. It is a solid start, one that gets its audience to know the three sisters and their family upon whom tragedy will befall. When it does hit, you’d no doubt feel sympathetic for how that unexpected course of events has altered each of their hopeful, idyllic lives. The focus here is on Meyumi, the girl whose potential as a star on the school’s track and field team and budding romance with the team’s captain is suddenly stopped in its tracks after the acid attack.
Soon after the attack, the town is struck by a series of brutal murders involving a killer wielding a pair of scissors. It doesn’t take long before one figures out who that serial killer is, but rest assured we won’t spoil the experience for viewers who wish to guess. Yet viewers expecting a crescendo that the slow and steady build-up in the first hour promises will however be disappointed, for the movie never quite reaches any sort of climax.
Indeed, director Kotaro turns the last third of the film into a gorefest, forgoing the emotional investment that he had spent building up with the audience and his characters. Instead, viewers will likely be repulsed by the excessive amounts of blood and gore which the filmmakers have stinged little on. Oddly, Kotaro seems to be wary of the sudden change in tone of the film as well, since he intersperses scenes of fingers sliced or jaws spliced are with cutaways that reveal a more restrained approach.
Nor does “The Scissors Massacre 2” work for the crowd bred on flicks like “Saw” or “Hostel”. It’s unlikely that such viewers would have the patience to wait an hour for the massacre to begin or even be satisfied by Kotaro’s hesitation at delivering a bloody and vicious finale. And that’s a pity- for there is genuine potential for this to be an emotional horror film, but is ultimately undone by Kotaro’s odd choice at an unnecessarily blood-soaked climax.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
NIL
AUDIO/VISUAL:
The Dolby 2.0 audio track will suffice for a film that’s quite unusually quiet for what appears to be a horror movie. Visuals are clear, but look slightly muted thanks to the 1970s setting of the movie.
MOVIE RATING:
 
DVD
RATING:
Review by Gabriel Chong
Posted on 25 January 2010
|
