The New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) started on Friday. Due to my work schedule I am not going to see as many as I did last year, but there are a few screenings on the weekend I am pretty excited about. The first of those was The Butcher which I saw yesterday. I knew I could only see movies Fridays and Saturdays because of my day job, so I just looked at the schedule for today and yesterday. The first thing that jumped out at me was an image of a man holding a chain saw wearing a pig mask. I watched the trailer and could not have been more fucked up.

The movie is about a man, who with his wife and two other people, has been captured to be tortured and killed in a snuff film. He wakes up in an abandoned factory farm to find himself tied up with a video camera mounted to his head. The entire film is made up of shots from his helmet cam, and the torturers cameras. The cinema vertias style is more effective here than I think it is in Cloverfield for example, but there are times where it doesn’t exactly make sense. The film is very gruesome and would be probably terrifying if I could manage to be scared of movies. I used to be, I am not sure what happened. But my friend that I was with told me that she did not think she would be able to sleep for a week. One of the main points in the film is how casual the tortures are about the whole thing. They laugh and joke with each other and talk about their art. The thing is, I think it would have been a bit more scary if they were obscured a bit, but I guess it would have changed the whole context of the film. That being said, the film was super fucked up and if you ever get the chance to see it, I would. It screens one more time, next Saturday at the IFC at 950PM.

Do yourself a favor and watch this fucking trailer, but only if you think you can handle it. Holy fuck.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5JfIxtTS3c[/youtube]

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