By Simon Thompson
The original myth of the Pied-Piper Of Hamelin is something that has both fascinated and scared me in equal measure since childhood. The basic premise of a rat catcher blessed with a magical pipe to lead rats away from villages, is stiffed by a group of townspeople, so decides to lure the village’s children to a dark fate instead, is a story template from which many urban myths and horror fiction both in eastern and western cultures have been borrowing happily for centuries.
Without the tale we wouldn’t have many of our favourite slasher villains such as Freddy Kreuger and other similar movies, such as the subject of this review, Carved The Slit Mouth Woman which, while tense and bloody on the one hand, is also a frustratingly uneven movie.
The plot of Carved The Slit Mouth Woman tells the story of a suburban Japanese town whose peaceful, almost picturesque, existence is rocked by the emergence of a supernatural serial killer. Known only as the Slit Mouth Woman, she, after luring the town’s people (with her victims largely being children) kills them the in the most gruesome and genuinely disturbing ways possible. It’s up to Yamashita (Eriko Sato) a divorced school teacher and her co-worker Matsuzaki (Haruhiko Kato) to put a stop to this malevolent force before it’s too late.
The visuals and cinematography of Carved The Slit Mouth Woman are where the movie really shines. Director Koji Shiraishi’s use of bold colours, such as a shot of an almost pink sky encircling the town, as well as the use of washed out blues and sepia tones for many of the interior locations, gives the movie a distinct and eye-catching look, heightening the surreal imagery and uneasy atmosphere that Shiraishi is trying to create.
The juxtaposition between the mundane pleasant suburbia and the gruesome goings on is a time honoured horror tradition for a reason, and Shiraishi and co-writer Naoyuki Yokota’s decision to set the film in a small town shows that the writing duo completely understand what makes this story element such a good set-up for a horror movie in the first place.
Where this movie suffers, however, is with the scripting itself. While Eriko Sato and Haruhiko Kato give perfectly decent performances in their respective roles, most of the characters, apart from the eponymous antagonist, come across as cliched and thin, with Yamashita’s character arc in particular feeling muddled and sloppily resolved.
Instead of leaning into this with a sense of irony that a Takashi Miike or Shinichirou Ueda would, Shiraishi and Yokota want you take these characters 100% seriously, which I found an issue with because all of their decisions and dialogue are about as hard to figure out as a McDonald’s word search. This problem really rears its head in the final act, which just becomes an exercise in ticking off third act horror cliches until the credits roll.
Carved The Slit Mouth Woman is a perfectly serviceable way to spend an hour and 30 minutes if you’re in the mood for a nice slice of does what it says on the tin J-horror, but if you want something which has a semi-similar set up, yet executed in a far more interesting way, go out and watch Satoshi Kon’s 12 episode masterpiece Paranoia Agent instead.
Carved The Slit Mouth Woman is available as part of Arrow Video’s J-Horror Rising Blu-Ray set.
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