The film is nice. I suppose that if I was wanting animation I would be disappointed; the crawling meat doesn't really do anything other than serve as a transition. And strictly speaking it isn't much of a gory horror film.
I like the three part structure (at least, as another reviewer outlined the film) and it does a good job of twisting "Don't Look in the Basement;" it captures the same kind of feel. And that is no slam, either -- the film had a kind of low budget 1970s American horror film feel to it, yet it somehow makes that feel something appealing in a way that my body (to use the film's terminology) recalls from watching those kinds of films when I was young in the 1980s.
For me, the movie had a useful feel to it; it also captures an image I agree with. It is hard to say what exactly he might mean when JS talks about our present situation embodying the worst aspects of both the asylum structures during the intro. Maybe it would help to tease them out in writing: on one hand, there is the libertine, who does whatever he wants and seems to take particular joy in blasphemy on the other hand, there is the vicious authoritarian doctor, who feels legitimate in enjoying torturing the inmates even if he ciphers that enjoyment through his medical practice.
Maybe the doctor is a radical application of the libertine, if you can get around the fact that the mechanism which the libertine operates under discounts/deflates/undermines the violence the doctor seems to find so erotic. I can't make that move, and that is where I think the movie leads me: at some point, I am prejudiced towards libertine, if just because that kind of enjoyment makes it difficult to encode the suffering of others as a cipher of my own desire.
That is the problem of the movie for me; I am so stuck in my liberalism, and I can't see how the authoritarian doctor isn't simply a radical, evil libertine: the "truth" of the libertine, if you will. Ther really is a difference between the two; I know that is a fact, if just because their enjoyment is so divergent (one only enjoys foreplay, and the other, only scopic sex). I guess that inability to see the doctor for the pathology he represents IS the problem, both of the film and our situation.
I like the three part structure (at least, as another reviewer outlined the film) and it does a good job of twisting "Don't Look in the Basement;" it captures the same kind of feel. And that is no slam, either -- the film had a kind of low budget 1970s American horror film feel to it, yet it somehow makes that feel something appealing in a way that my body (to use the film's terminology) recalls from watching those kinds of films when I was young in the 1980s.
For me, the movie had a useful feel to it; it also captures an image I agree with. It is hard to say what exactly he might mean when JS talks about our present situation embodying the worst aspects of both the asylum structures during the intro. Maybe it would help to tease them out in writing: on one hand, there is the libertine, who does whatever he wants and seems to take particular joy in blasphemy on the other hand, there is the vicious authoritarian doctor, who feels legitimate in enjoying torturing the inmates even if he ciphers that enjoyment through his medical practice.
Maybe the doctor is a radical application of the libertine, if you can get around the fact that the mechanism which the libertine operates under discounts/deflates/undermines the violence the doctor seems to find so erotic. I can't make that move, and that is where I think the movie leads me: at some point, I am prejudiced towards libertine, if just because that kind of enjoyment makes it difficult to encode the suffering of others as a cipher of my own desire.
That is the problem of the movie for me; I am so stuck in my liberalism, and I can't see how the authoritarian doctor isn't simply a radical, evil libertine: the "truth" of the libertine, if you will. Ther really is a difference between the two; I know that is a fact, if just because their enjoyment is so divergent (one only enjoys foreplay, and the other, only scopic sex). I guess that inability to see the doctor for the pathology he represents IS the problem, both of the film and our situation.