Blood in the Drain, Beauty in Decay – Guinea Pig: Mermaid in a Manhole as Grief-Soaked Art Horror
As promised, Guinea Pig: Mermaid in a Manhole (ギニーピッグマンホールの中の人魚, Ginī Piggu: Manhōru no Naka no Ningyo), the 4th (5th or 6th) episode in the Guinea Pig series is now under review and it is certainly a better overall film than Android of Notre Dame (see Guinea Pig: Android of Notre Dame – Cruelty in Search of Meaning). Richer in metaphor, while still absurdist, Mermaid in a Manhole departs from those first two supremely hardcore snuff-like films. This one is more existentially unsettling, and psychologically tormented than Android or Part 3, which is coming up for review shortly.
Surprisingly, the original director, Hideshi Hino (Guinea Pig: Devil’s Experiment, Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood) does not consider this movie of his own to be part of Guinea Pig cannon. However, home video distribution company Unearthed Films co-founder Stephen Biro considers it the fourth in the series. I believe it does overall fit in duration, tone, style, all the way down to the opening and closing dark screen with pin print graphic vectored over the opening and closing sequences (a staple of all Guinea Pig films). But enough of this persiflage. On with the movie review itself.
We begin in a dark sewer. A broken grandfather clock resides in this dark sewer, metaphorically suggesting a loss of time, legacy, a death. Water sways to and fro, ominously. One can only wonder what is causing the sewer water to move so?
In the sewer: A Halloween dog mask. A red ball. A catcher’s mitt. Children’s toys and dead wormy fish. Many worms now eating dead flesh of a cat in the filth. An uncannily realistic dead baby with more worms over its mouth floats in a shallow watery grave.
Title card over the dirty rotten sewer. Then a splash of water, caused by what you’re left to your imagination… fade to black.
A clock ticks. A Japanese man artfully paints the same dead baby from the sewer. His house is filled with artistic attempts.
He leaves his house and the neighbors say ‘hello.’
“He seems so normal since he lost his wife.“
“It’s been a month ago now that his wife left him.” Dry exposition. But it leaves you wondering if she died or just divorced him. Was it due to a dead baby in either event?
The artist/painter opens a sewer grate with a sewer crowbar. I’m sure they have a name but I’m too lazy to search it. Okay fine, it’s called a manhole hook. Great! Now we know. So anyway, the painter opens the sewer grate and looks inside. We get an echoey point of view from inside like something or someone is looking back. “This is my secret place. All my lost treasures are here. All the time I’ve lost is here.“
He lights a candle and wanders the sewer. He reminisces about this sewer from his childhood in painting form, ‘cause he’s a painter you see, and back then there was fish, friends and dragonflies next to a beautiful, idyllic flowing river.
The artist finds his dead wormy cat. He names it Chibi. He holds it to his face with love and extreme grief. “You poor thing.” he cries. Then instantly drops it in the sewer water. “I am a painter. I have to paint Chibi.” He starts to paint frantically. But a splash alarms him from further down the sewer, just out of sight, in darkness. He points his flashlight to investigate the mysterious splashing.
A broken umbrella. A dismembered female manikin. But beside that is a long scaley tail in the dark. Leaning against the sewer wall with tail in the sewer is indeed a beautiful mermaid.
“You.” he says as if he recognizes her. Dead wife metaphor? Amongst the treasures he lost in the darkness. Perhaps. We shall see.
“I met you once when there was a river here. It was you then?“
“Yes, I am a mermaid. When the river got dried this is where I was stranded.” (I’d be checking for nauseous fumes or maybe you did really see a mermaid in the local river).
The artist confesses of the mermaid: “Your voice sounds in my heart. You’ve been down in this darkness all this time?” She nods seriously then longingly.
He begins to lovingly sketch the mermaid and regales her of his fond memories of her and the river that once flowed here.
“Everything I have ever lost I can find in you.” he tells the Mermaid.
A long-tailed salamander crawls along an upside-down sole of an abandoned shoe. Just like the mermaid crawls along his abandoned soul as a metaph… okay I’ll stop.
Suffice it to say he sketches this hottie Mermaid for hours as you would.
We get an excellent closeup of the Mermaid’s scaley bottom half. It is very real looking. Suddenly she moans in pain, and a bloody scarring is on her side abdomen. She undulates very sexily like she’s turned on. Good little tuna.
“We have to go home and look after the infection.“
Two men carry an enormous bathtub into his home.
The nosy neighbor lady watches the men bring the new tub in.
The mermaid is in the tub. He puts medicine in her tub. She tells him “You’d better paint me. It’s your mission.“
He replies “das ist wehr.” German translation ‘it is across the river.’ “I am a painter. I will paint you.” He concludes.
The Mermaid has a very intense look as she’s being painted. Very attractive. We scan down to her hot little tits. She’s hot, until we get to her gross pustuled cancerous growths in her midsection. I’ve never been so simultaneously turned on and grossed out at the same time.
He’s painting her and suddenly she groans in pain and grabs the pustule tumors that look like some seaside fish disease. She squeezes the nodes, and they bleed profusely.
He puts a white cloth over her stomach, and it instantly turns red. This is definitely a metaphor for losing his wife and baby and this is some mythological way of processing his extreme loss safely. She sloshes her Mer-tail in the bloody bathtub water. High realism for such an unreal thing.
The painter panics as he can’t wash the blood out. The blood just flows down the drain. Back to the sewer. Back to the darkness.
He offers fresh fish, but the mermaid just gets sicker. The nodes grow all over her body.
He stares at her with an open razor blade. “These pupps have 7 different colors.“
“I suffer so much. Please hurry.”
He draws the razor close to her body. He looks like he’s going to cut her up to relieve her of her pain (however THAT works?). This is the Doctor Channard school of healing I see.
He cuts just one of these bloody nodes and it shoots out yellow puss continuously sending her into an orgasmic tizzy of pain and relief.
She squeezes out this color from her pustule into a glass paint container. Her pain is his color pallet you see.
“Do it.” she says. He cuts another node. Another color. 7 containers later the mermaid is exhausted and looks much worse than even before if that’s possible (and it is!).
The painter paints his masterpiece.
The oozing diseases from her ravaged body are pouring from every sore.
Much much later we return and find the fish lady is positively multicolored looking like a sushi pizza with blue and green toppings and a sexy black eye to boot.
The painter continues painting callously. Fulfilling his “mission” as she dies slowly in his bathtub.
He needs to take a break. He’ll get her some more fish. But first more contortions and a burst from the pustules comes a new flurry of color and worms again all over her body. Break time’s over, I guess.
He tries to take the worms from her body. One worm is grossly drawn out slowly from an open pustule. These parasitic worms have been growing and feeding on the mermaid for God only knows how long. A very long bloody worm slithers out of the bathtub and onto the floor.
Now even larger worms the size of eels come out of the Mermaid. And she screams like she’s giving birth. A wyrm comes out of her mouth.
She’s dead. But he just keeps painting her corpse of course! The painting evolves to her dying face. A bloodier, fishier version of David Cronenberg’s Brundelfly. Only she vomits bloody worms instead of acidic glucose.
False alarm. She’s not a cold fish yet. So, she vomits copious amounts of worms as she heaves disgustingly.
“You have to paint me the moment before I die.” she whispers. (Only in Japan!)
The surreal exquisite death of pain and artistic expression flawlessly meld into a trippy writhing of the mermaid into her death spiral. He remembers the old innocent river he first met her. Now nodes burst and spray out in symphony of colors including her one enlarged eye that that pops out due to the pressure (sexual repression) from within.
From the innocence of the first time he met his wife by the river to the time she died in an explosion of pain and death due to maybe parasites or cancerous tumors has overwhelmed him.
“I have to look after you now.“
“No it’s too late. Kill me now.” she replies.
He cries uncontrollably.
He takes a giant butcher knife with a gleam in his eye. He begins to turn her into human sushi. Her blood, his paint. Through all these heinous parasites and blood, he pulls out a baby from the Mermaid’s belly, and he stares at his dead bloody son as the pixels get grainy with intent as a graphic choice. His world getting broken in this moment. (Truth creeping into his mythology at last?)
The neighbors enter the house of the painter to see why it smells of rotten fish.
They slowly ascend to his door. And what do they find?
The painter has chopped his wife and dead child to pieces saying, “My mermaid is dead.“
Whoa! Nice twist ending.
Guinea Pig: Mermaid in a Manhole Uppers:
The metaphor of the mermaid in the sewer is a rich one, that leaves us wondering where our dead still born children went? It’s enough to make you want to tear apart the whole God damned house, and open every pipe and sewer valve until you find where your little baby went? Are they okay down there? You want to hold them even in death to comfort them on their way back to where they came from. The feeling is so intense especially if the wife dies because of the child, and especially if stomach cancer kills her and the child too. It’s time to check out and start seeing Mermaids (I seriously get it). It’s a fugue state, an alternative reality. It’s Life of Pi time! It’s metaphorical realism as a defence mechanism and for self-preservation as well.
The lack of control over these deaths can be overcome by concluding the deaths yourself in merciful fashion. It’s a beautiful use of assisted death. Expediting what cruel reality does to us all anyways in the end. To soothe the savage nobility of the warrior classes’ lost pride. There is nothing more masculine and sadder than this outcome. Nor is anything more beautiful in this series.
Guinea Pig: Mermaid in a Manhole Downers:
I really don’t have any downers of serious note for this film. I think it’s a masterpiece of a sort. Not as realistic as Guinea Pig 1 or 2 (what is?), but it has artistic merit on many levels.
I cannot think of one as I sit here staring at my laptop screen. It is a beautiful release for those of us who have lost a loved one and a child (let alone both in the same event).
We wish we could take control and finish the job ourselves, rather than let nature ravage our loved ones with cancer. Mermaid in a Manhole provides the illusion of control. In saner times, we would be allowed to give a merciful option. I live in Canada and as much as I hate to admit it, this film made me consider the potential wisdom of allowing assisted suicide to a degree. I guess that is a kind of downer, so it’s appropriately housed here.
But this film excels in this series. It’s a stand-alone work. I can see why Hideshi Hino saw it as such.
OVERALL, I highly recommend Guinea Pig: Mermaid in a Manhole as an artistic achievement and near masterpiece in underground cinema. Hideshi Hino is a true genius of an artist. He evoked many things in this film. Hidden things. It is a tour-de-force experience. It is ambitious considering its minimalist budget and scale. And the twist ending forces you to reconsider the entire film, which beckons you to rewatch it, time after time. The audience is the Guinea Pig in this one, along with the Mermaid in the Manhole. God was in the midst of killing the wife and her infant. The Artist took that away from God and finished the job himself. A merciful instrument of expedience only.
AKA: ギニーピッグ マンホールの中の人魚, ザ・ギニーピッグ マンホールの中の人魚, Ginī Piggu: Manhōru no Naka no Ningyo, Guinea Pig 5: Mermaid in a Manhole
Directed by: Hideshi Hino
Written by: Hideshi Hino
Edited by: Ken’ichi Takashima
Produced by: Satoru Ogura
Cinematography: Naoki Hayashi
Music by: Kit Kat Club
Special Effects by: Shigeo Ishizuka, Nobuaki Koga, Chiharu Hinosawa
Cast: Shigeru Saiki, Mari Somei, Masami Hisamoto, Gô Rijû, Tsuyoshi Toshishige
Year: 1988
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese (English Subtitles)
Colour: Colour
Runtime: 57min
Studio: Japan Home Video, Ogura Jimusyo Co.
Distributor: Japan Home Video, Unearthed Films
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