Pig

I really, really did try to like this movie. I really wanted to enjoy this as sheer brutality, something that simply tried to be as vulgar as rating systems would allow. There's just. No. Plot. It's just a bad movie, plain and simple. Sure, it's got all the earmarks of a pretty, technically well-made film, but if you don't have that kind of film school background, it's nothing but torture porn, and within the first 5 minutes, you realize that it's not even torture porn: just sexist, reprehensible and filth. I'm fine with a good bit of Saw or Devil's Rejects fun, but when you're just beating the sh*t out of women for a good hour and a half, it's not fun anymore.

What a damn shame.

PIG is not a movie you're likely to put on for the family after a big Christmas lunch, but as an exercise in unrelenting brutality it's certainly worth checking out for any fan of extreme cinema.

Even at only a little longer than an hour PIG seems a bit too padded. If this was a 60-minute MASTERS OF HORROR episode it would have easily been the best one, but a certain numbness sets in to the viewer around 45-minutes in after such a protracted exhibition of frenzy, brutality and madness.

Technically the film's much-ballyhooed 'single take' technique is certainly daring. And the performances are committed, if not always entirely successful in some instances.

All-in-all this isn't a perfect film. But Adam Mason and his team have gone and done a left-of-field experiment in grueling extremity. And for a vast majority of its run time it most certainly succeeds.

So...usually, before I get into what I liked and didn't like about a movie when I review it, I usually give a plot summary to show others what it's about. But, in this case, I cant give one because, frankly, there IS no plot

Now, I have good news and bad news about this film. The good news is that this film goes above and beyond the normal setting for films going "too far". The bad news? There's not much else to this film.

A thing that I have to praise this film for is it's one on-going shot that's used for almost the entire film. If you want to become a director, cinematographer, or pretty much anything else to do with film, you should see this film purely on that.

But, the major down-side to this film is that it's just plain boring at times. I'm not one of these conservative people who will hate this film because "It's too terrible" or "It will corrupt the kids" or anything like that. I mainly don't like it that much because it's just plain boring at times. Your waiting for the film to move on at points, but it never really does.

Maybe that was the director's intentions or the actors intentions (because you can tell that this film is mainly improv), but whatever it is, it's not something that you should really see OTHER than the technical stand-point.

As you will read in many other reviews here, the fact that the film is filmed in one continuous shot is very impressive, and Adam Mason should be applauded for this fact alone. The fact that he was able to get the film to run smoothly and all the special effects still worked is a marvel. However, that's where my appreciation ends. You see, Pig is an incredibly dull and boring film. It was marketed as being this incredibly disturbing and filthy movie with sadistic violence and deplorable scenes throughout. What we get is a whole lot of sub par acting, particularly that of the female antagonist in the movie. The film's portrayal of her being mentally disabled is extremely over the top, annoying, and frankly an offensive portrayal. The hur-dur dialogue and sounds that come out of her mouth are absolutely insufferable. The male antagonist is better, but it's like comparing excrement to expired food. One is clearly better but both are pretty awful. His performance is over the top, and not in a fun way. More of an embarrassingly amateurish way. The film is also an absolute bore, with there not being much of a plot at all outside of the 2 antagonists torturing a few people mentally in physically. Don't get me wrong either, I am a fan of movies such as the Guinea Pig franchise and other extreme cinema but here it is just dull. Nothing you see on screen isn't something you haven't seen before in countless other extreme horror films, or even many mainstream horror films. By nature, the fact that the film is shot in one take means that there are going to be some scenes where the actors do things that allow the special effects or set pieces to be set up while they talk or do something in the forefront. However, as I said before the acting is atrocious so really the only draw for the movie is the torturous acts commuted. And those aren't interesting either. So what we're left with is a movie that was shot in a cool way, but what is happening on screen is mediocre at best and unbearably annoying at its worst. A real shame.

A hypnotic headmashing experiment in single camera nastiness, PIG certainly lived up to and also confounded my expectations. I was expecting a standard redneck slasher film, which in essence it is, but the totally unhinged performances and the atmosphere of inescapable dread really hooked me in, and made me feel I needed a shower after it was over. Extremely technically impressive, almost completely improvised, and bringing to mind other experimental fare like the August Underground series, PIG is practically a video diary of murder, degradation, and crack-smoking madness. As unsettlingly brilliant as Andrew Howard's performance is, a few moments of pitch-black humour dot the proceedings, adding an interesting edge to an otherwise fairly archetypal character. The music can get slightly tiresome, I'd have liked to see it with no score at all except the radio excerpts. It's certainly a slog, but an admirable and affecting one.