Guinea Pig 3: He Never Dies (1986)

directed by Masayuki Kusumi

Japan

40 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Trigger warning for suicide and self-harm.

After watching Frankenstein's Love, I was in the mood for more V-Cin. I didn't mean it this way, but this installment of the Guinea Pig series actually has a tenuous connection to Frankenstein's Love in that the main character is unable to die, much like Frankenstein's monster. I don't really know where I'm going with that, I just thought I'd bring it up.

He Never Dies follows Hideshi, a disaffected salaryman who, unhappy in his job and with no real purpose in life, wants to die. He cuts his wrist with seemingly no real thought behind it - it's just another thing he does aimlessly, listlessly, nothing better to do. But the bleeding and pain both stop very quickly, and Hideshi realizes that something is wrong with his body: no matter what kind of injury he inflicts on himself, he never dies. He doesn't heal - the stuff he does to himself "takes", and whatever damage he does is permanent, but it never brings him any closer to dying. We see Hideshi experiment with how far he can take this before he has the idea to invite one of his coworkers over and harass him with his newfound immortality.

I should mention at this point that this movie is arguably a comedy. I don't know if "comedy" is really the right word here, but I don't know what else to call a movie where you've got a guy with a plastic ruler sticking out of his head zombie-walking towards another guy who is wearing an Elvis mask and scaring the absolute daylights out of him. There's also something weirdly philosophical about all of this: it's only at the very end of the movie, when Hideshi has whittled himself down to just a head sitting on a table, that he seems like he's getting something out of life and having positive interactions with the people around him. Like he had to go through some kind of violent catharsis before he could realize that he wanted to live.

The main reason to watch this is the incredible gore effects. I think the last Guinea Pig movie I watched was Mermaid in a Manhole, and I distinctly remember thinking, at multiple points during the movie, "How in the world are they doing this?" It could be that the fuzz of 40-year-old film hides some of the rough edges, but to me, there was virtually nothing in He Never Dies that looked visibly fake (up until Hideshi was a disembodied head). The wrist-cutting scenes were uncomfortably realistic. There's a part where Hideshi cuts his stomach open and throws his guts at his coworker until we see his spinal column through his empty torso. It's extremely creative and a credit to the FX team that a "lowbrow" movie like this looks better than even a lot of horror movies shot today.

The only part about this I couldn't figure out was that for some reason it's presented in quasi-Unexplained Mysteries style by a white guy who, with classic "bad paranormal docudrama" panache, introduces the story of the man who couldn't die as one of a number of inexplicable phenomena (that are actually completely explicable). The white guy talks about the story as if it's a videotape that's been found and edited, but the movie itself is shot like a normal, professional film, not found-footage style at all, so it really doesn't make any sense. But then again, not much about this movie does.