Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

The tradition of Japan's underground Grand Guignol psycho-drama continues in Organ, a grotesque, gooey thriller of human organ pirates, deviant sex killers, and festering biology experiments. Undercover cops infiltrate the dank, underground operating theater of a street gang selling black market organs, but before backup arrives one of them is literally dissected in front of the other. The surgical victim winds up a human guinea pig in the doctor's private greenhouse ("He looks like that guy in The Fly," offers one visitor). His partner keeps his skin intact but loses his mind and becomes obsessed with tracking down the ringleader of the operation, the ferocious, one-eyed Yoko (played by the director Kei Fujiwara, costar of the cyber-punk horror classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man). That's the plot in a nutshell, but this hallucinatory film is almost incoherent, a grotesque stew of pus and blood and severed limbs. Like much of the new wave of Japanese horror, the violence is more conceptual than explicit, full of perverse imagery and deviant characters. Organ is messy in every sense of the word. It gets so knotted in excess that it often loses it's way in wandering story lines, horrifying flashbacks (it turns out that Yoko and the doctor are siblings with a terrible childhood secret), and wild dreams and fantasies. Perhaps that's the madness to Fujiwara's method: how can anyone keep their grip on reality in such a nightmarish world? The DVD features the complete and uncut print of the film (which was censored in Japan) and a 20-minute featurette with scenes from a bigger budgeted sequel Organ 2 (which became a big hit in Japan), narrated in English by director Fujiwara. --Sean Axmaker