2 out of 5

Director: pfft what?

Well, whatever edition of the Guniea Pig set the copy of The Making Of I saw came from – the 2002 Devil Pictures release or the 2005 Unearthed Media release – it suffers from a similar problem some of the actual film releases had – crappy subtitles that don’t feel complete and aren’t timed properly to the images.  This isn’t such a big deal in the films, as the dialogue is totally minimal and the “point” is more in the images, but for the making of, they keep you translations when directly asking someone a question, but behind-the-scenes moments, just conversations on the set, aren’t subtitled, and that actually seems more fascinating… because most of the interviews are fairly surface after the special effects guys explains a bit about the state of FX in Japan at the time, and the decisions behind some of the prosthetics used in the flicks… thereafter it’s just jibber-jabber about how much fun making Guinea Pig 3 was.

Which is also where The Making Of fails to make much impression, because it only covers the first three films, and out of those, mostly 2 and 3.  It would be nice to hear some background on why these films came to be, and we get a small piece of that with film 2, but… eh.  The most important thing I gleaned from this was indirect – the effect work in film 1 and 2 is still impressive to this day, and gets noticeably lame by film 3, and you can see some of why that is just through the visuals – painters on the set of 2 detailing a prosthetic next to its live example.  I can only imagine this took a while, and that it was done frequently.  Compared to some shots of film 3, where they’re rolling the fake skin on right before a take… the story is incomplete, which is why subtitles would’ve been nice.

Mmyeah.  So.  Not enough to merit the runtime.  Maybe there’s not a story between these films at all, but either it’s criminally disappointing that this making of shows that there’s no story, or it’s criminally disappointing that it doesn’t show it.