Ruptured Review: The Butcher

Country of origin- South Korea 
Year of release- 2007
Director- Kim Jin-won
Stars- You Dong-hun, Kim Sung-il

The film begins with a POW shot of a man pissing against a filthy wall. This pretty much sets the tone for both the look of the film, and its general attitude. This is due mainly to the fact that 95% of this film is told in a fairly shaky POW style that is pretty different from most found footage films, although it isn’t as well executed as the POW cinematography of Hotel Inferno. After the guy zips up his flies, he begins to walk through what is quite possibly the most broken down and decrepit, abandoned slaughterhouse I have ever seen, the building is so unpleasant I almost wanted to see the pissing again. He arrives in a small filthy room, where a young man, a young woman and a married couple are sitting ball gaged and chained to the floor. From here on in the rest of the film is told almost entirely from the POW perspective of the married man. All of the gagged and chained victims have cameras mounted to helmets on their heads, hence we see almost everything from their perspective. Shortly after this ‘The Director’ arrives to inspect the victims. He casually discusses their soon to be horrific fate with his cohorts, while the terrified victims beg for mercy.

Soon after this The Director gets a phone call from his mother, and a surreal scene ensues as the two of them have a perfectly ordinary conversation about going to church, all while the four terrified victims look on. Eventually the young woman and the young man are dragged away and a genuinely alarming scene follows in which the married couple hear their tortured screams and the revving of a chainsaw. Eventually the time comes for the married couple to be dragged away to meet ‘The Pig’, and this is where things get very unpleasant.

Considering this film is a 75 minute Hostel cash in, with a real time POW snuff gimmick I was surprised at just how well executed everything was. The POW cinematography was both engaging and immersive, the acting was good considering it mostly consisted of blood curdling screams and the effects were practical and nasty. However I felt that the psychological based horror of the first 35 minutes of the film was more interesting to watch than the extreme tortureploitation that rest had to offer. Although the second and third act of the film actually contained some of the most intense stuff I have seen in while, including a hideous rape, seen from the perspective of the victim and some brutal chainsaw torture from the pig masked lunatic seen on the poster. Overall this film is a vile and extremely intense experience that will likely shock and disturb most people, I give it a 6.5/10 for its sheer unrepentant ferocity and brutality.