The covers for the upcoming American Guinea Pig films have been unleashed, and you still have time to get them!
My first encounter with the experimental Japanese splatter series Guinea Pig was in the early 90s. I was in my 20s at the time, and fortunate enough to be around to experience the VHS tape trading revolution. You see, boils and ghouls, back then there were no Synapse, Arrow, or Blue Underground special editions. There were only grey and black market homemade videocassettes.
My friends and I got our tapes from Shawn Lewis’s mail-order company Blackest Heart Media, and along with other Japanese splatter perversions like Guts/Entrails of a Virgin, the Guinea Pig movies were the most legendary. They were the truest hardcore horror endurance tests. If you couldn’t sit through the Guinea Pig movies, you weren’t shit in the underground horror community. Ok, so I’m exaggerating there a little bit for effect. But just a little bit.
Thankfully the home entertainment industry has come a long way since then, and a lot of previously censored and banned movies are now widely available uncut, with many of them even packaged in sterling multi-disc limited editions.
Writer/producer Stephen Biro acquired the U.S. rights to the Guinea Pig series and created the Unearthed Films distribution company in 2002, with the intention of releasing them properly and officially on DVD for the American market. Unfortunately, those discs are now way out-of-print and fetching hefty amounts of money on Ebay.
Cut to 2014, when Biro, along with gore effects master Marcus Koch, re-launched the Guinea Pig series with their own personal stamp of sophisticated yet intense brutality.
Biro’s first American Guinea Pig film, Bouquet of Guts and Gore, is a relentless exercise in the mutilation of the human body. It is, as Steven puts it, human butchery as art.
Immoral, confrontational, suffocating, and soaking wet in blood, ‘Bouquet of Guts and Gore’ has the aura of a special kind of terror: the kind you might feel when you’re on a gurney, on the way to surgery, knowing that any minute you’ll be chemically forced to sleep, split open with cold steel, and penetrated in the deepest way possible by strangers. The only thing is, you are there to be helped, not chopped into an unrepairable heap of dying human meat.
Yes, it is THAT disturbing. And what makes it all the more disturbing is the fact that you’re watching it! Why aren’t you turning it off? What, you’re eating pizza? What the hell is wrong with you??
Extreme horror teaches us about ourselves and our own moral limits, and asks us how much are we able to take, and how eager are we to take it. The ethics and morality you are confronted with can’t possibly be more frightening, because they are your own.
In 2015 Stephen Biro and Marcus Koch achieved the seemingly impossible: they topped the first film with the smoothly artistic and moving Bloodshock. I cannot put into words how much I love and am in awe of Bloodshock. And as a fellow writer, I fucking seethe with jealousy because I didn’t think of it first.
Giving a clear and solid explanation as to why I find the film so exceptional and brilliant will spoil all the soul-crushing shocks it has in store for you. I will give you an extremely vague and simple plot synopsis simply by saying it involves a doctor addicted to the adrenaline-infused blood the heart pumps when experiencing extreme and unthinkable pain. There you go. Take a firm hold of that and run with it. Like the first film, be prepared to see and feel horrible things.
One of the most remarkable things about the first two American Guinea Pig films is how generous, efficient, and fan-savvy their crowdfunding campaigns have been.
For his third (and upcoming) American Guinea Pig film Song of Solomon, Stephen has pulled out all the stops to create truly one of the most diverse and inclusive crowdfunding campaigns ever on Indiegogo. You have until the first of the month to get in on the action and contribute to the film.
The level of anticipation is staggering, as evidenced by the fact that the original financial goal has been met and surpassed by 1007% (as of 8PM on Tuesday the 26th). And to top all that off, Stephen pulled the rug out from under everybody when, instead of an exclusive preview screening of Song of Solomon, he screened the surprise fourth entry in the series, Sacrifice. There were members of the audience so offended by what they were witnessing that they got physically ill and walked out.
And I can’t fucking wait to see it!!! Bring it on, Stephen! Hurt me!!
The plots for both Song of Solomon and Sacrifice, as well as the red band trailers for both films, are available on the Indiegogo page, linked below. Also below you will see the multiple versions of the covers for the films, some of which are so explicit Indiegogo refused to show them. I highly recommend you check them out, then click on the link and read all about this brave, audacious, and hardcore horror creation.
Pledge a donation and get one of the numerous perks, including intestine and eyeball props, bloody nightgowns, and limited edition versions of the DVDs and Blu-rays.
https://www.indiegogo.com/proj
The Poster Artwork for American Guinea Pig: The Song of Solomon and the Two Gore Covers available for purchase exclusively during the Indiegogo Presale. The gorgeous artwork was painted by Kung Fu Bob O’Brien. He’s been one of the leading artists in the field of Kung Fu Poster Artwork and has done all the artwork for The American Guinea Pig Series.
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