The Slit-Mouthed Woman

2005 **1/2

The first thing to point out is that this is NOT the same movie that JPX recommended, which is called Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman. The second thing to point out is that this is TOTAL PORN.

I assumed this was the ealier movie in the series but it seems it's just based on the same Japanese urban legend, except instead of killing kids this ghostly meanie goes after couples having sex.

Insert joke about waiting just a few more seconds here. Wait, forget I said "insert."
At first I didn't realize what I'd walked into. The story opens when a doctor and nurse break into a sealed ward at work and decide to get busy. First they engage in some noisy French kissing with the cameraman practically getting in as a third, so thorough are his efforts to let me know the actors' tongues were truly in each other's mouths. There follows an awkwardly long sex scene in the Japanese "pink" film tradition (think Cinemax): she's got her shirt off so there's lots of boobage, but the intercourse is so deliberately side-viewed the couple could have had actual Gretchen heads instead of genitals and I wouldn't know about it.

Fast forward three years and we meet the reporter assigned to the story of the mysterious hospital in which everyone vanished, an assignment conferred because the last reporter hasn't been heard from in three days. Annoyingly I can't find a picture of it, but I was immediately reminded of the Far Side cartoon in which a scientist has melted into a puddle on his lab table and his boss says "Jenkins, you figure out what he was working on, the rest of you get back to work!" Thanking her boss for dooming her and all her loved ones, she heads home for a light dinner and some breast-mauling sideways sex with her husband. As I sat there wondering if that noise was thighs slapping together or balls slapping skin, I finally understood that I'd been hoodwinked. This movie clocks in at a trim 63 minutes and boasts no less than five sex scenes. I would guesstimate the sex/ghost screen time ratio to be about 8 to 1, or higher.

However, however, however...

By this point it's a known fact that Asian horror uses and reuses certain imagery so often that it's bleached itself out. But dammit if I didn't actually find some of the ghost stuff kind of scary. I mean, they use it over and over because it works, right? Or maybe it's just been a while for me. I was totally digging the distorted sounds, the strange movements, and most of all, the love of the slow, slow burn:






Tell me that isn't chilling. You lie. It is. And as common as it is overseas, bizarrely enough Western horror still hasn't cracked this code (except for auteurs like David Lynch sending Bob at us over the couch). So there's that.

I can't recommend The Slit-Mouthed Woman because there's better horror and better porn out there. But if you're in the mood for a short goof or you're gorging yourself on a J-Horror marathon, it's worth an hour of your life.