directed by Hajime Tabe
Japan
48 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I have to say I think this might be my favorite Guinea Pig movie I've seen so far. All of them have had their own unique, individual (disgusting) charms, and in terms of impressive practical effects, Devil Doctor Woman isn't the best of them, but it's such a genuinely fun movie that I ended up really loving it.
We're introduced to the film by the "devil doctor" herself, an underground doctor and surgeon who takes care of patients with unusual illnesses. What does "unusual" mean in this context? That's what we find out over the ensuing 45 minutes, after the good doctor is thoroughly coated in blood and has gotten us as ready as we'll ever be for what we're about to see. The film is presented as an assembled series of "kartes" (basically just means "tapes") of individual cases, with the doctor usually stepping in or narrating to explain what's going on - like with He Never Dies, it's not quite found-footage, but it's also not not found-footage.
The "illnesses" in Devil Doctor Woman are things like an entire family stricken with a disease that makes their heads explode if they get upset, a guy with a human-face-shaped growth on his stomach that has a personality of its own, a guy who's slowly turning into a zombie, a guy whose tattoo has begun roaming around his body, etc.; but then there are also things shown on the kartes that aren't really illnesses per se but just records of random things happening. For instance: a human flesh buffet and a very short story about an unidentified internal organ that's just running loose on the streets. The doctor knows what to do in all these cases, although most of the time her "cure" is as unconventional as the illness.
And honestly I love her. The doctor (I do wish she had an actual name) knows her reputation, knows she's operating without a license outside of the purview of dry academic propriety, and embraces it. Yeah, maybe she's kinda killing people sometimes, but most of the time the illness would have been fatal anyway. She's just so unperturbed and has so much know-how no matter the situation; I think I might want to be her when I grow up.
As much fun as the actual movie itself is, watching the entire thing is almost worth it just to get to the end credits, which are a montage of nearly every person who worked on and performed in the movie getting hit in the face with a pie made of fake nails and blood. It's really obvious that everyone involved in this had a good time, and that's reflected in the genuinely funny absurdist humor running through the film. The Guinea Pig series has a reputation for being ultra-gory, but once you actually start watching them you find that a lot of them are seriously funny, too. I wish we could have seen the doctor return for several more V-Cin follow-ups to this, but if we want to see her actor again, at least we can watch, uh, [checks notes] Akira Kurosawa's Ran? That can't be right.
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