Guinea Pig: Android of Notre Dame – Cruelty in Search of Meaning
The Japanese Guinea Pig (ギニーピッグ, Ginī Piggu) series are ‘the’ underground standard setters for what it means to be truly underground. It sent real shock waves and moral panics even amongst extremists in the underground scene, that an actual series of snuff films were coming out of Japan.
Let’s jump right into the 5th intimate installment of this series from 1988, Guinea Pig: Android of Notre Dame (ギニーピッグノートルダムのアンドロイド, Ginī Piggu: Nōtorudamu no Andoroido), directed by Kazuhito Kuramoto.
A bell tolls as we follow wires along the shiny, obsidian flooring, lit by neon blue lights. For whom does this bell toll (other than all of us), but a very old Japanese man, with an incestuously wrinkled forehead, who stands erect, in a coffin like straight jacket, black roses in his folded and bound arms, with electrodes reading his brainwaves.
He is a philosophical man in his twilight state, deciding what in life is truly important in the final summation. His philosophy: “I am in a dream for which I cannot escape. A light still flickers in my heart. The body became meaningless. The only thing that is important is happiness. The happiness of being together.”
Title Sequence. DOS in hacker black screens with blinking, green writing. Then a frog in a specimen jar, still alive. Then a rat. Then a prey mantis. Life is trapped. More ominous computer read-outs. Creepy ‘80s style. Like the kind from your old nightmares.
A Japanese computer programmer is the last of these trapped specimens on his computer. There is also a rat in a trap of sorts. Final computer analysis reads “Input more data!” We see the programmer is a midget. This is Dr. Karazawa.
A Japanese man calls the vertically challenged Dr. Karazawa from a novelty light phone (the kind they use to have when people had home phones, the kind they had whole novelty stores for in the ‘80s and ‘90s). This mysterious man knows a lot about Dr. Karazawa. He says he knows everything he purchased last year: food, supplies, and animals for laboratory purposes. He says he also knows he’s developing a supercomputer and that it is time to give his sister medicine. (This guy is pretty omnipotent for an expository opening call.)
“How do you know about my sister?” asks the midget scientist.
He receives no answer except an offer. The midget is skeptical. The offer from the man on the phone: a 21-year-old woman. Price: 10 million yen. Human trafficking for his experiments? Wouldn’t be a Guinea Pig movie without a human guinea pig, right? And indeed, “You’ll receive the guinea pig tomorrow afternoon.”
The midget is skeptical but resigned to accept all with a glance.
Dr. Karazawa then visits his ailing, possibly dying sister (she is not a midget, she’s actually kind of pretty) and offers her water and conversation. Her heart condition is getting worse. She is in horrible pain. He rubs her back and laments his helplessness regarding her plight.
The midget scientist opens a box, and a dead naked woman is inside. She’s been dead for five days.
We learn that the Japanese man on the phone is named Kato. While on the phone we see him smoking as his hot wife tries to engage him in stress relieving sex. But he’s Japanese so of course he’d prefer working. He’s got underground orders to fill, damn it all (pre-Bitcoin). He gives her a sealed letter and asks her to hold onto it and don’t lose it. Done. Chekhov’s letter.
Dr. Karazawa dresses formally in his bowtie and dust mask as he attaches miniature electro monitor suction cups all over the dead naked lady’s body that he purchased from light phone guy/human trafficker of corpses. He presses an electro monitor suction cup just under her teat several times gratuitously.
We see a full shot of the lady corpse and there’s a clear green plastic bubble over her vagina.
Medicine time again for sister. This time we see it from her perspective. She takes the medicine. Mixes it in the water. But we discover she doesn’t trust her brother. She dumps the medicined water into a nearby plant.
Back to work as midget puts a homemade metal mask with a large opening for the eyes and mouth and ears on his female corpse that requires electrodes. Then carefully Dr. Karazawa extends out the corpse’s ear and inner ear drum and attaches electrodes to it very delicately. This is very realistic looking. He plays a very macabre version of the tune from Close Encounters of a Third Kind with an electrowave synthesizer which the reanimated ear hears as signified by ghastly blood oozing from the ear. He smiles thru his mask.
Meanwhile Karazawa’s sister cannot sleep. Truly sick. Refusing her brother’s help.
Back to her brother’s experiments, he then pulls the lady corpse’s eyeballs out and thru the tin holes in the homemade mask. Thru a wire connection to corpse, it is transferred to a video feed on VHS, and we see thru her artificially reanimated eyeball, homemade android styles.
Next the tongue is pulled out through a large tin opening around the mouth. Topflight practical effects. It may be a dead animal part masquerading as human but, whatever, it looks very real unlike the lab which is theatrical in use of uneasy green filtered lighting, Tales from the Crypt style comic book coloration to highlight the grotesqueness. The electricity is set to high, and the tongue protrudes and gurgles in saliva as it waggles on its own. Gross.
The multiple electrodes all over the corpse get too hot and melt off her dead hand accidentally.
He blames the corpse provider. He believes the corpse is too old. That’s why his experiment failed. He takes it out on a corpse. He cuts the ear in parts. He cuts the tongue in half. Then starts to stab the teat repeatedly with a scalpel like maybe 30 times as if masturbating furiously.
Dr. Dwarf takes his sister’s hand to replace the one he accidentally melted. Then the sister wakes up and she’s okay. Um, how did she know her brother needed a hand of the corpse he’s mutilating? No logical continuity there. She does however spit up blood from whatever ailment she’s suffering from.
Dr. Karazawa is in the backyard with his wheelchair bound sister and says: “Did you know the Hunchback of Notre Dame was an android?” This metaphor is about as tortured as his corpses, but I will digress. His sister ignores this raving cryptic comment. Karazawa confirms she’ll be well when his science is done. (Sure she will.) Now Kato, the human corpse trafficker gets arrogant after taking the 10 million yen and wants more. Coming to Karazawa’s home laboratory no less. He wants to up his game to full on blackmailer now that he got his peak wet. Classic mistake.
Kato meets Dr. Karazawa at the front door and he walks him around to his backyard. They walk together thru Karazawa’s backyard and randomly a projectile buzzsaw blade slices through both of Kato’s legs. Um, sure?
Kato wakes up and his head is separated yet living/animated away from his body. He’s the android inside the mind of the dwarf (the metaphorical Hunchback of Notre Dame?) Not a great allegory. Sloppy really. As sloppy as the green ooze coming out of Kato’s mouth.
The head of Kato screams. No sound. No vocal cords. At least anatomical logic is a thing here if not allegorical.
He spits green blood at Karazawa who proceeds to slap him as we see through the video transfer of his eyes to a video screen. We see his POV get slapped by the evil dwarf.
Karazawa cruelly presses a button that shocks his blackmailers head causing more silent screams. The phone rings. It’s Kato’s hot wife. She is his backup. Karazawa tells Kato’s head to tell him her address. Kato refuses so the doctor cuts his ear off and specifically one part of remaining cartilage that looks particularly painful that’ll make you wince.
Kato’s head wakes up and Dr. Karazawa has a picture of Kato’s wife Seiko. That makes Kato furious. Ooze pours from the holes in his head in anger. An android terminator style hand that’s attached to Kato’s nervous system reaches out to grab the good doctor in vain. He callously tells Kato he will implant a new memory into him.
We see Seiko on the phone nodding. “Yes. Yes.” Then we see Dr. Karazawa programming the rapidly melting corpse head of Kato with a headphone on speaking to her instructions. (I thought he couldn’t speak?! There goes that dim remnant of anatomical logic).
Seiko shows up and is oblivious to all sense of self preservation she strokes Kato’s melted corpse head causing him to spurt and contort as the android hand feels her tits. She likes it as weird as it all is. She gets off on this. Blood oozing out of his furious head.
Dr. Karazawa steals the letter Kato gave her earlier for safe keeping.
Kato’s head gets angry and strangles her with his android hand. We see her strangled through Android vision on the TV monitor. It’s a long, satisfying strangulation. Very well edited. It keeps the illusion intact. It remains absurdist and never silly. The fine line is never crossed.
Dr. Karazawa returns and finds Seiko and simply says “Oh.” Recognizing he has yet another corpse to help save his sister’s life.
He starts cutting open her chest now with a scalpel. There is not enough blood for realism here. But he starts digging around firmly inside her with his dwarf hand. He pulls out a bone from her chest. (I’m not sure it’s quite that easy bro). He starts digging around under a realistic ribcage. Sorry it keeps oscillating from no logic to realistic here. I’ll settle on calling it ‘surreal.’
The sounds effects are disturbing here on the other hand. Succulence of digging in the body. The clang of bone on metal tray. He’s basically performing open heart surgery on the corpse to replace his sister’s ailing heart. What a big heart he has! Hardy har har.
Now we see a fully lit, more realistic home lab. Not as cheap a set as earlier.
“Sister.“
She rises from her surgery.
“Why did you bring me back? Finally, I found peace.” {implied in death}. These actresses are very beautiful by the way. But that doesn’t save his sister’s character who dies due to a failed heart surgery.
Many decades later back to the very old Japanese man we see it was Dr. Karazawa. (I didn’t realize he was a dwarf in the opening bookend scene. He looked taller. Oh well).
Super old Dr. Karazawa waxes on: “I created God, the devil and myself. It’s many years later and I still hear the bells for my sister.” (Don’t we all?).
There he sits with his sister’s brain in his hands, a hundred years later, sitting in a church thrown, still seeking sanctuary from death through becoming an android.
Guinea Pig: Android of Notre Dame Uppers:
The acting is intense and well done by all the players. Only Kato’s facial expressions occasionally took me almost out of the suspended disbelief on a few occasions. But Dr. Karazawa was solid. A minute gesture and the story was told with minimal effort required. The lady actors all did a phenomenal job.
I appreciated the lack of music as I do with all the Guinea Pig series. Any serious music would take you out of the illusion of the pretention of these being real snuff films in any way.
I liked the final strangulation scene, as frantic and edited as it was. Well done.
The basic premise was okay, if not basic.
Guinea Pig: Android of Notre Dame Downers:
Poor use of allegory, analogy, and metaphor. Simply making the doctor a midget instead of a hunchback is not a real connection. There is no poetic licence that actually flows here as a retelling of the old classic novel.
The direction was uneven. As a small, dark, theatrical tales from the crypt style story it carried itself well, but the budget hurt this film. For starters you call the film Notre Dame, and you don’t have a church setting? No stain glass. The bookend story should have had a churchier vibe to fulfill the metaphor. I suppose the church is no place for a Guinea Pig film, so I’ll retract my opinion on this one point. But having a cheap, lab in the dark, opening scene, only to have an expensive lab and setting in the final scene was bizarre not to have the lab be the same setting, only in the daytime. One was a set; the other was like a real location. It breaks the illusion of reality, which by this point in the series had fallen to ‘black comedy’ status.
The overacting at times by the Kato character. I get that he only has his head to show his acting, and he was asked to make ‘grotesque’ faces but several times it came off as silly rather than realistic.
The lack of anatomical accuracy bothered me here as well. Not enough thought was put into this. Like if you’re going to make an android, why not just make a voice replicator so when you cut his larynx it, which is as, if not more believable than the eyeball showing video quality imagery on VHS.
Overall, Guinea Pig: Android of Notre Dame was a mixed bag of enjoyable, cult fun, dark humor but uneven in its realism, at times reaching absurdist levels of comedy which, while well acted, with the occasional highly real torture scenes mixed, broke anatomical logic as consistently as it had very real scenes interspliced together. It’s uneven in tone and purpose for a revenge story.
It is recommended for the cruelty and dark humor, but it is one of the weaker episodes of the series. It has some legitimate underground scenes, but it is by no means a masterpiece and carries the whole series further away from its bloody roots.
Until next time, I’ll be reviewing either the 4th or 6th episode in the series Mermaid in the Manhole (1986).
AKA: The guinea pig 2: Nôtoru Damu no andoroido, The guinea pig 2 ノートルダムのアンドロイド, ギニーピッグノートルダムのアンドロイド,Za ginî piggu: 2: Nôtoru Damu no andoroido
Directed by: Kazuhito Kuramoto
Written by: Yoshikazu Iwanami, Kazuhito Kuramoto, Satoru Ogura
Produced by: Satoru Ogura
Cinematography: Kazuhito Kuramoto
Music by: Kit Kat Club
Special Effects by: Natsuko Ariyoshi, Nobuaki Koga, Chiharu Hinosawa, Shigeo Ishizuka
Cast: Toshihiko Hino, Mio Takaki, Tomorô Taguchi, Yumi Iori, Misuzu
Year: 1988
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese (English Subtitles)
Colour: Colour
Runtime: 51min
Studio: Japan Home Video, Ogura Jimusyo Co.
Distributor: Japan Home Video, Unearthed Films
