Tumbling Doll of Flesh

Gore can be a really important part of a horror movie. It is to a horror movie what a good seasoning is to a dish. That being said, when you over season something, it becomes overpowering and inedible. This is the exact case for Niku Daruma (Tumbling Doll of Flesh), a 90s video nasty in the long line of Japanese films that infamously (and woefully) identify themselves with the misogynistic sub-genre of literal torture pornography. The only other film I've watched in that same category (solely out of curiosity) was Girl Hell 1999. Both films have no plot, are shamelessly anti-women, horribly shot, and have no rhyme or reason for their abundant filth. What makes me even more angry is that these are scene as pornography; something that people are aroused by. I'd be mortified and angry to think that anyone could be aroused by kidnapped women being dismembered and sexually assaulted.

F-

Business as usual for Japanese art house: let's make a Movie that half of the world can't go through because they passed out and the other half would watch it with one eye shut. Some censored pornography plus lots of chuped body part. Well done.

I've always seen this movie on lists of the "most disturbing films of all time" and I recently got the chance to watch it, so I went ahead and did so. Yes, this movie is disturbing I suppose, but not in a good way. I've seen most of the big players in the disturbing movie seen (Salo, Martyrs, A Serbian Film, ect.). Those movies managed to be disturbing while also having at least a little bit of artist merit to them, while this movie had NONE. It was boring as hell too. I really wanted to turn it off, but not because I couldn't handle the content of it.

Here's the plot: people shoot porno, porno gets to intense for girl so she quits, on her way out they hit her in the head with a bat, then they torture her to death. Now I'm fine with the idea of this plot, but the main issue here was that there were no CHARACTERS. In the other films I mentioned (except Salo) we get to know the characters before the awful things happen to them, so I actual CARE when this character I've gotten to know has horrible things happen to them. In this movie I didn't even know the girls name. I tried to analyze it for a deeper meaning... maybe a commentary on how the porn industry uses women as objects? Maybe, but I really doubt that is what the director was going for.

I'm giving this movie 3 stars of 10. One star for the minimum I can give, another for the special effects, and one more because it was technically disturbing. It did make me uncomfortable, but it won't weigh on me for days like Salo or Martyrs did.

Even if you like super extreme disturbing movies, I still wouldn't recommend it. Unless you have some kind of sick fetish and get off to this kind of stuff (honestly half way through I started to wonder if this was made just to arouse people with a snuff fetish, so I'll credit it for doing psuedo-snuff decently. It really felt like it was made for psycho's to beat off to), or just need to cross it off your list.

No plot to speak of, it might shock if more than a couple of yen were spared for special effects, but they weren't. Any porn before the bad special effects is rendered moot by the obligatory Japanese censorship, so it fails at porn & gore. Typical try-hard shock crap :( I'd have been disappointed if I'd paid for a copy of this!

The first half of it is just porn, the second half of it is torture porn. I'm not a moralist, yet I'm not a fan of this sort of films either. There's no story, there's no acting, there's no cinematography. It's not even shocking, because the props are so fake, it's laughable. 'Tumbling Doll of Flesh' is a frequent guest in 'disturbing' movie lists on YouTube, but it's not even disturbing. It's just overhyped and boring.

Yeah, I do realise that some people would be offended by this film, but it's hard to pick a thing someone isn't offended by these days. For me the most difficult part was trying not to fall asleep watching this. If you want to get 'disturbed', there's plenty of films that are more graphic or psychologically harrowing, or both. Maybe 'Tumbling Doll...' is one of the earliest pseudo-snuff films, so it kinda deserves a credit for it, but it still doesn't make It good.