The Butcher (2007)
1/2 (out of 4)
Here's yet another violent, gory mess from South Korea. This one here is about a couple nut-jobs who decide to make a snuff film so they take four people hostage, torture them and eventually kill them. The killers have video cameras and they're taping the whole thing but the gimmick of this film is that the four victims have cameras mounted to their heads so we can see their point of view. THE BUTCHER is a very weak and very bad entry into the torture/porn genre, which is coming up from various countries around the world. It's funny to see how hated these films are by many yet it seems they keep turning them out. I'm really not sure where to start with this mess but I found the entire gimmick to be rather boring, ugly and it just never added up to anything. I say ugly because the way the camera was shot just gave me a headache and it became very annoying after a while. I don't mind "found footage" films but this here was just an ugly mess and especially everything dealing with the POV shots of the victims. Even more annoying is how bad the camera-work was of the two killers. I'm going to guess the camera being off the torture was so they could cover up budget things but what's the point if you're not going to see anything? You never connect to the four victims so it's impossible to feel anything for them and there's certainly nothing there to the bad guys. All in all, THE BUTCHER is a very bad example of the genre and it falls miles short of GROTESQUE, which remains the king of the genre.
