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✯ Kuchisake-onna 2
As some of you are aware, I found a random horror movie at Blockbuster one day that seemed like it wound be a fun rental. The English title was Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman. The title in Japanese, as I learned later, was Kuchisake-onna. It was only the other day when double-checking the name of the actress who played Sonozaki Wakana in Kamen Rider W that I realized there was a sequel!
... though technically the second movie is the prequel. ANYWAY.
The premise: A small town in Gifu, Japan. Mayumi is the youngest of three sisters; the eldest, Sachiko, is about to be married and the middle sister, Yukie, moved out to work toward her dream of owning a beauty salon. Everything sounds great! They are all happy!
Mayumi is super impressed to be in this movie.
Also, Mayumi has the hots for the captain of the track team. Which is great for her, since she is the fastest runner in the school and broke a few records. He seems nice! She sews him what she calls "gloves with no fingers" that everyone can kind of tell are just potholders. He gives her his uniform button, since he's a senior and is going away to college the next day. Awww.
Except that, oh wait, Sachiko's ex-boyfriend is fucking insane. Devastated and crazed by the fact that she dumped him to marry her husband, he ... flips his gourd. :'D Unaware of the fact that she gave Mayumi her bedroom on her wedding day (Mayumi wanted the biggest bedroom, since she was going to be the only girl left at home), he breaks into their house to teach Sachiko a lesson by throwing sulfuric acid into her face.
... Except that the person he finds asleep in her bed is Mayumi.
Her screams of agony awaken her parents, and mom comes to investigate only to get her face cut open by the boyfriend's switchblade. He demands to know where Sachiko went, and is very nearly shot in the face by dad and his trust shotgun to the rescue. Now that his plans are fucked to hell, he stabs the mother straight through her head (killing her) and gets his head blown off by a second shotgun blast. TRAGIC.
Then in a scene that is better seen than described, the dad makes some sort of terrible :'D face as he sees his youngest child writhing in pure agony into the hallway like a Ringu reject.
It's just thirty fucking seconds of this, seriously.
The scars on her face will never heal, and she will never be pretty. Now disfigured and dubbed "Mutant Girl", Mayumi doesn't have a whole lot to do other than penpal with her sempai in Tokyo and try to master the sewing machine.
Cue an hour and a half of this visage on the screen.
Of course, rumors go around, and unable to cope with the bills and the loss of business and the fact that everyone thinks his wife was cheating on him so he killed her and her lover, the dad drives off into the darkness one night after wishing Mayumi goodnight and kills himself.
Both older sisters move back in. They try to live a nice life, the middle working hard at her beauty salon job and the oldest with a part-time store clerk gig, but Mayumi is the one with the mask trying to go to school and deal with the fact that her BEST FRIENDS FOREVER are part of the mob spreading rumors about her family and face. She is also haunted by a vision of a woman she can see out of the corner of her eye and her only comfort is in writing to her ~*~boyfriend~*~ who is in fact seeing some hottie from Tokyo. Oh yeah.
Totally hitting that.
Out of nowhere, the news reports an incident. Two high school girls, Mayumi's grade school biffles Kaoru and Junko, are terribly murdered by a woman in a red coat. The Sawada family watching the news freaks, because holy shit Mayumi, didn't you go to school with those girls? Theirs is a joint funeral, and even sempai comes back from Tokyo to attend. It is the next morning when Mayumi asks to visit him (and says as much to big sis Yukie) that she learns he despises the rumors about them going out.
"You're like a little sister to me," he says. Clearly this is the best way to deter her romantic feelings she has been harboring since he gave her his button. "Anyway, Junko told me to give it to you." Even better! But he says that no, he doesn't like her and never will, but she's still pretty, so she should cheer up.
Yeah. He went and told the girl whose face was permanently disfigured with acid that she was pretty.
She believes it too. No, really.
And then he finds himself viciously stabbed with a pair of scissors until he dies. It is then that Mayumi realizes the woman in the red coat who has been haunting her? Is Mayumi.
The police investigate, and Mayumi denies having seen the "missing and presumed dead" college sempai. Yukie is immediately suspicious! You said you were going to meet him, little sister. But Mayumi continues to deny it. Unsatisfied, she leaves work early one day to go snoop around in her sister's room. She finds a blood-soaked sweater just hanging up neatly in the closet.
Apparently she just didn't have time to wash it in the last two weeks and hung it up in her closet anyway.
Yukie brings this shirt to the attention of her (somehow pregnant though still living in separate houses from her husband) older sister. Yukie wants to bring it to the police immediately, but Sachiko tells her she had better not or else. Faced with biggest sister's knowledge that doing so would only smear their names in the mud for eternity and their lives and careers would be shot to hell, they ... have no choice but to sit on their hands on this one. Whoops. Unfortunately, months of her room being the only place to hang out have left Mayumi with a very sharp sense for when even the tinest details are off in her bedroom. She realizes someone was in her closet.
The important part is that the police, weeks later, still don't realize he's dead. I mean, goddamn, how much do you have to suck as a police force not to check the entire town and find a bloodied, hacked up corpse in the middle of a back road? Goddamn. While watching his mother bawl and beg on the news for any news as to the whereabouts of her hopefully still alive son, Mayumi removes her mask for the first time ever around her sister and puts on her game face
Or uh ... regular ... face ... goddamn why haven't those stitches healed?
... and pulls a giant pair of scissors from out her back. She and Sachiko just act like this is completely normal and go about drinking their tea as per usual, but ... suddenly Mayumi starts choking and coughing up blood!? Holy shit! Yukie is EXTREMELY unsettled and rushes to her sister's aid, but Sachiko ... not so much.
I'd call this her "Just as planned" face.
She very calmly and rationally explains as her youngest sibling is choking to death that she has decided the only option is to kill her baby sister. And she very calmly and politely explains to Yukie that she has laced Mayumi's juice with the finest of rat poisons to do so. The only thing to do is let her die, she says.
Her eyes are probably screaming "Fuck you" while she barfs up her lungs.
She collapses, seizing, and dies. Probably. Sachiko seems to realize what the fuck just happened and reaches out to touch her. Thank God Mayumi is a mutant girl, because she's not actually dead from rat poison. She was just biding her time! ... Apparently! She lashes out and cuts Sachiko with her scissors. IT'S A TERRIBLE SCENE made ... more terrible when Mayumi keels back over, dead as a doornail.
... probably for keeps, but you know what, I'll lay the odds at 25/75 for you. The 25 is for staying dead.
Completely insane at this point, Sachiko runs for a mop and bucket to start cleaning up the blood spatter all over the dining room table. She throws an old coat over the corpse to keep Yukie from staring in horror at what was twenty seconds ago their little sister and demands that she help clean. Their cover story, they decide as they drive the body off in the middle of the black night, is that Mayumi went to a hospital in Tokyo.
When they pop open the trunk of the car, we can all see that no one bothered to close the corpse's eyes. Well. That's. That's lovely, ladies. Thank you for being so kind to your kin. They dig a nice deep grave in their finest clothes and drop Mayumi's body into it. She is buried wordlessly, and they leave.
... Despite worrying so much that her sister being outed as a killer would ruin her career, Yukie is having trouble cutting customers' hair at the shop. At home, Sachiko just can't stop washing that goddamn table. She finds the singular drop of blood left and attacks it mercilessly, doing every good OCD-sufferer proud.
The sky goes ominously dark. Yukie looks out the window at work and sees the filthy face of her dead sister staring in from outside. Curious as to whether this is a customer or not, the boss opens the door and is shanked by a large pair of shears and dies on the doorstep of her own business. Now officially the dumbest person in the room, instead of screaming and running for her life, Yukie very slowly backs away and just kind of stands there waving her arms as her sister draws closer with her weapon at the ready.
Wait for it ...
Wait for it ....
... Well. So much for the five finger discount.
Yukie doesn't even have time to react to her new look before she, like her mother before her, greets death via blades in the mouth. Mayumi casts a disdainful eye over the rest of the patrons in the salon before stalking out, not unlike every zombie you've ever seen in every horror movie featuring zombies.
At home, Sachiko has received boxes and boxes of her husband's things. Guess he's finally getting to move in. She moves away to fix the skipping record player and turns back only to see her supposedly dead and buried homicidal sister in the doorway. Sachiko thinks that throwing books will save her, though it doesn't actually phase Mayumi at all. She deftly cuts through the barrage and sliced up her sister's shoulder.
And now, for the chase scene, a must-have for any good or decent horror flick alike.
But wait! Instead of running out the door to safety, she decides she better do something about the vengeful murderess. Probably a good idea. She takes a big ol' kitchen knife and runs Mayumi through. After Mayumi collapses, Sachiko runs off in terror. As for Mayumi? Well, it's kind of old hat for her to just get up from what should be a fatal injury and just keep cutting, so she goes with that route.
Having learned somewhat from her mistakes, Sachiko takes to the streets, screaming for help and running as if her life depended on it. Protip: Her life depends on it. Just when help is in sight, when she is but a half an alley away from people... She gets Gaia'd from behind and Mayumi's scissors pierce through even the wall that Sachiko had collapsed upon.
Now that's fucking metal. Someone throw up the horns here.
She doesn't stop stabbing until the inside of the wall glistens and lights up like a sky full of beautiful constellations. So beautiful... ! Sachiko manages to turn around and get one last look at baby sister.
... this is in fact the image on the DVD cover.
For the first time since the night before she died, Mayumi begins to speak. "Sachiko-oneechan... Am I pretty?" With her split open face, she turns to face the only witness to her crime -- a small child -- and charges.
... wait a minute, when did her stitches come out?
So begins the tale of the kuchisake-onna, who asked the same question of her every victim before brutally murdering them with her scissors, known for her face mask and long coat.
ALL IN ALL, I liked this movie! I liked the first one too, of course, but I liked seeing how this prequel rolled out. I got super bored of seeing that mask all the time, and I had hoped to see more of the scarring all the time, but eh. I LIKED IT, too bad! It will stay on my computer for as long as I desire ♥
... though technically the second movie is the prequel. ANYWAY.
The premise: A small town in Gifu, Japan. Mayumi is the youngest of three sisters; the eldest, Sachiko, is about to be married and the middle sister, Yukie, moved out to work toward her dream of owning a beauty salon. Everything sounds great! They are all happy!
Mayumi is super impressed to be in this movie.
Also, Mayumi has the hots for the captain of the track team. Which is great for her, since she is the fastest runner in the school and broke a few records. He seems nice! She sews him what she calls "gloves with no fingers" that everyone can kind of tell are just potholders. He gives her his uniform button, since he's a senior and is going away to college the next day. Awww.
Except that, oh wait, Sachiko's ex-boyfriend is fucking insane. Devastated and crazed by the fact that she dumped him to marry her husband, he ... flips his gourd. :'D Unaware of the fact that she gave Mayumi her bedroom on her wedding day (Mayumi wanted the biggest bedroom, since she was going to be the only girl left at home), he breaks into their house to teach Sachiko a lesson by throwing sulfuric acid into her face.
... Except that the person he finds asleep in her bed is Mayumi.
Her screams of agony awaken her parents, and mom comes to investigate only to get her face cut open by the boyfriend's switchblade. He demands to know where Sachiko went, and is very nearly shot in the face by dad and his trust shotgun to the rescue. Now that his plans are fucked to hell, he stabs the mother straight through her head (killing her) and gets his head blown off by a second shotgun blast. TRAGIC.
Then in a scene that is better seen than described, the dad makes some sort of terrible :'D face as he sees his youngest child writhing in pure agony into the hallway like a Ringu reject.
It's just thirty fucking seconds of this, seriously.
The scars on her face will never heal, and she will never be pretty. Now disfigured and dubbed "Mutant Girl", Mayumi doesn't have a whole lot to do other than penpal with her sempai in Tokyo and try to master the sewing machine.
Cue an hour and a half of this visage on the screen.
Of course, rumors go around, and unable to cope with the bills and the loss of business and the fact that everyone thinks his wife was cheating on him so he killed her and her lover, the dad drives off into the darkness one night after wishing Mayumi goodnight and kills himself.
Both older sisters move back in. They try to live a nice life, the middle working hard at her beauty salon job and the oldest with a part-time store clerk gig, but Mayumi is the one with the mask trying to go to school and deal with the fact that her BEST FRIENDS FOREVER are part of the mob spreading rumors about her family and face. She is also haunted by a vision of a woman she can see out of the corner of her eye and her only comfort is in writing to her ~*~boyfriend~*~ who is in fact seeing some hottie from Tokyo. Oh yeah.
Totally hitting that.
Out of nowhere, the news reports an incident. Two high school girls, Mayumi's grade school biffles Kaoru and Junko, are terribly murdered by a woman in a red coat. The Sawada family watching the news freaks, because holy shit Mayumi, didn't you go to school with those girls? Theirs is a joint funeral, and even sempai comes back from Tokyo to attend. It is the next morning when Mayumi asks to visit him (and says as much to big sis Yukie) that she learns he despises the rumors about them going out.
"You're like a little sister to me," he says. Clearly this is the best way to deter her romantic feelings she has been harboring since he gave her his button. "Anyway, Junko told me to give it to you." Even better! But he says that no, he doesn't like her and never will, but she's still pretty, so she should cheer up.
Yeah. He went and told the girl whose face was permanently disfigured with acid that she was pretty.
She believes it too. No, really.
And then he finds himself viciously stabbed with a pair of scissors until he dies. It is then that Mayumi realizes the woman in the red coat who has been haunting her? Is Mayumi.
The police investigate, and Mayumi denies having seen the "missing and presumed dead" college sempai. Yukie is immediately suspicious! You said you were going to meet him, little sister. But Mayumi continues to deny it. Unsatisfied, she leaves work early one day to go snoop around in her sister's room. She finds a blood-soaked sweater just hanging up neatly in the closet.
Apparently she just didn't have time to wash it in the last two weeks and hung it up in her closet anyway.
Yukie brings this shirt to the attention of her (somehow pregnant though still living in separate houses from her husband) older sister. Yukie wants to bring it to the police immediately, but Sachiko tells her she had better not or else. Faced with biggest sister's knowledge that doing so would only smear their names in the mud for eternity and their lives and careers would be shot to hell, they ... have no choice but to sit on their hands on this one. Whoops. Unfortunately, months of her room being the only place to hang out have left Mayumi with a very sharp sense for when even the tinest details are off in her bedroom. She realizes someone was in her closet.
The important part is that the police, weeks later, still don't realize he's dead. I mean, goddamn, how much do you have to suck as a police force not to check the entire town and find a bloodied, hacked up corpse in the middle of a back road? Goddamn. While watching his mother bawl and beg on the news for any news as to the whereabouts of her hopefully still alive son, Mayumi removes her mask for the first time ever around her sister and puts on her game face
Or uh ... regular ... face ... goddamn why haven't those stitches healed?
... and pulls a giant pair of scissors from out her back. She and Sachiko just act like this is completely normal and go about drinking their tea as per usual, but ... suddenly Mayumi starts choking and coughing up blood!? Holy shit! Yukie is EXTREMELY unsettled and rushes to her sister's aid, but Sachiko ... not so much.
I'd call this her "Just as planned" face.
She very calmly and rationally explains as her youngest sibling is choking to death that she has decided the only option is to kill her baby sister. And she very calmly and politely explains to Yukie that she has laced Mayumi's juice with the finest of rat poisons to do so. The only thing to do is let her die, she says.
Her eyes are probably screaming "Fuck you" while she barfs up her lungs.
She collapses, seizing, and dies. Probably. Sachiko seems to realize what the fuck just happened and reaches out to touch her. Thank God Mayumi is a mutant girl, because she's not actually dead from rat poison. She was just biding her time! ... Apparently! She lashes out and cuts Sachiko with her scissors. IT'S A TERRIBLE SCENE made ... more terrible when Mayumi keels back over, dead as a doornail.
... probably for keeps, but you know what, I'll lay the odds at 25/75 for you. The 25 is for staying dead.
Completely insane at this point, Sachiko runs for a mop and bucket to start cleaning up the blood spatter all over the dining room table. She throws an old coat over the corpse to keep Yukie from staring in horror at what was twenty seconds ago their little sister and demands that she help clean. Their cover story, they decide as they drive the body off in the middle of the black night, is that Mayumi went to a hospital in Tokyo.
When they pop open the trunk of the car, we can all see that no one bothered to close the corpse's eyes. Well. That's. That's lovely, ladies. Thank you for being so kind to your kin. They dig a nice deep grave in their finest clothes and drop Mayumi's body into it. She is buried wordlessly, and they leave.
... Despite worrying so much that her sister being outed as a killer would ruin her career, Yukie is having trouble cutting customers' hair at the shop. At home, Sachiko just can't stop washing that goddamn table. She finds the singular drop of blood left and attacks it mercilessly, doing every good OCD-sufferer proud.
The sky goes ominously dark. Yukie looks out the window at work and sees the filthy face of her dead sister staring in from outside. Curious as to whether this is a customer or not, the boss opens the door and is shanked by a large pair of shears and dies on the doorstep of her own business. Now officially the dumbest person in the room, instead of screaming and running for her life, Yukie very slowly backs away and just kind of stands there waving her arms as her sister draws closer with her weapon at the ready.
Wait for it ...
Wait for it ....
... Well. So much for the five finger discount.
Yukie doesn't even have time to react to her new look before she, like her mother before her, greets death via blades in the mouth. Mayumi casts a disdainful eye over the rest of the patrons in the salon before stalking out, not unlike every zombie you've ever seen in every horror movie featuring zombies.
At home, Sachiko has received boxes and boxes of her husband's things. Guess he's finally getting to move in. She moves away to fix the skipping record player and turns back only to see her supposedly dead and buried homicidal sister in the doorway. Sachiko thinks that throwing books will save her, though it doesn't actually phase Mayumi at all. She deftly cuts through the barrage and sliced up her sister's shoulder.
And now, for the chase scene, a must-have for any good or decent horror flick alike.
But wait! Instead of running out the door to safety, she decides she better do something about the vengeful murderess. Probably a good idea. She takes a big ol' kitchen knife and runs Mayumi through. After Mayumi collapses, Sachiko runs off in terror. As for Mayumi? Well, it's kind of old hat for her to just get up from what should be a fatal injury and just keep cutting, so she goes with that route.
Having learned somewhat from her mistakes, Sachiko takes to the streets, screaming for help and running as if her life depended on it. Protip: Her life depends on it. Just when help is in sight, when she is but a half an alley away from people... She gets Gaia'd from behind and Mayumi's scissors pierce through even the wall that Sachiko had collapsed upon.
Now that's fucking metal. Someone throw up the horns here.
She doesn't stop stabbing until the inside of the wall glistens and lights up like a sky full of beautiful constellations. So beautiful... ! Sachiko manages to turn around and get one last look at baby sister.
... this is in fact the image on the DVD cover.
For the first time since the night before she died, Mayumi begins to speak. "Sachiko-oneechan... Am I pretty?" With her split open face, she turns to face the only witness to her crime -- a small child -- and charges.
... wait a minute, when did her stitches come out?
So begins the tale of the kuchisake-onna, who asked the same question of her every victim before brutally murdering them with her scissors, known for her face mask and long coat.
ALL IN ALL, I liked this movie! I liked the first one too, of course, but I liked seeing how this prequel rolled out. I got super bored of seeing that mask all the time, and I had hoped to see more of the scarring all the time, but eh. I LIKED IT, too bad! It will stay on my computer for as long as I desire ♥