This Geek In Netflix: Carved: A Slit-Mouth Woman

Welcome back to a new edition of “Allison found another crappy movie!”  

Carved: A Slit-Mouth Woman (Japanese title: Kuchisake-onna) had its theatrical release in Japan in 2007, then was picked up by Tartan Films for DVD release in that same year.

The quote is a lie.

A Slit-Mouth Woman (oh, the jokes I am not making right now) was (very) loosely based on the Japanese legend of the Kuchisake-onna, a woman who wears a surgical mask to cover the graphic cut of her mouth.  She appears at night and asks children, “Am I beautiful?”  Depending on how they answer, she either kills them or gives them facial scars to match her own with a deadly pair of scissors.

It’s a neat horror myth that has been around for hundreds of years, with the sleeve of a kimono being the original cover for her facial cut, which was given to her by a samurai lover who caught her in an act of infidelity.  

This movie should have been fairly terrifying.

It started out strong.  The opening credits were lovely, with a pair of scissors flying around, slicing up the screen as eerie music played and the beginning shots were stacked well with various children that would later come into play in the film talking about the Slit-Mouth Woman’s rumored reappearance after a thirty year absence.

The series of opening shots is cut off by an earthquake that releases SMW (if you don’t know what this abbreviation is for, please review the movie title) from her “prison” of a wooden closet and into the public, where she immediately appears and snatches a mouthy little boy.

He deserved it.

Now, this snatch scene is the beginning of a theme where bad things happen to someone in the movie and all the other characters that are witnessing the event either a) scream, b) run away very fast, or c) stare with their mouths open while brutalities are committed on their friend.

Also of importance, Mika, a little girl, is introduced in a scene where her mother tells her that she wishes that the SMW would come and take her away, and then throws her daughter to the ground.

There’s a lot of child abuse in this movie.  It’s basically the fuel for the plot.  Kind of a downer, I know.  Here’s a joke to cheer you up:

What do you get when you cross the Atlantic with the Titanic?

About halfway.

Continuing!  The movie moves into the social impact of the boy’s kidnapping and we’re shown scenes of a school assembly where children are instructed on safe practices and then teachers walk all the students to their various homes.  Yay for safety!

Mommy only beats you because the bruises are so pretty.

Mika, the beaten little girl from a few paragraphs up, is the last student to be dropped off by her teacher, but when her teacher attempts to hand the kid off to her abusive mother, Mika starts pouting and says she doesn’t want to go with her mother.  The teacher offers to walk her around a bit more and Mika agrees.

It turns out, in a flashblack, that the teacher herself is a child abuser.  So when Mika reveals that her mother beats her, the teacher freaks out and defends Mika’s mother and Mika runs off.

You know that theme I mentioned earlier, about the bad things happening and how all the characters suddenly become pussies?  Well, mid-flight away from Teacher Nutbag, Mika gets snatched by SMW while the nutbag sits and gapes.

Insert stereotype here.

Driven by guilt (and free time due to suspension from the school she teaches at for letting one of her students get kidnapped), Nutbag pairs up with another teacher to hunt down the SMW and rescue Mika (or her corpse).

In a “crazy” reveal, we learn that the teacher Professor Nutbag pairs up with is actually the SMW’s son, and hears the phrase “Am I pretty?” whenever his mother is going out to kidnap another kid… and he can somehow locate said kid based off of those voices.

If you’re like me, you might be looking at the convoluted couple of paragraphs above this one.  So some guy is the son of a (un)dead serial killer who mutilates kids’ faces and/or kills them and can hear voices in his head and locate kids that haven’t yet been kidnapped based on those (internal!) voices’ approximate volume?  And this teacher who beats her daughter has decided to team up with this guy who listens to the voices in his head so she can return one of her students to a mother who abuses her?

She’s definitely not getting adopted now.

Most of that doesn’t make sense.  And, if you watch the movie, it falls apart even further.  The legend that it was “based on” is barely used.  The origins of the SMW don’t even remotely mirror those of her namesake, and the asking of “Am I pretty?” only ever occurs in the male teacher’s head.

Watching this movie has a psychological process similar to Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief that I’ve outlined below.

THE STAGES

Stage 1: Confusion.  You find yourself asking questions like, “If this woman died and was trapped in a closet until she was recently released by an earthquake, how did she kill all those kids thirty years ago?” and “If this woman and her three children all went missing, how come her house was never searched so her body was never found?”

Stage 2: Bewilderment.You stare at the screen, watching perfectly healthy and able characters watching other characters die because..?  Everyone in this film repeatedly engages in deer-in-the-headlights tactics when they weren’t even the characters in the symbolic headlights.

Stage 3: Anger. You end up shouting at the screen because the characters learn two-thirds of the way through the movie that the SMW can be killed by chopping her head off, but none of them seem to be willing to do so and instead prefer to stab her in the stomach, back, or side.

Stage 4: Resignation.  You give up on the movie entirely when it is shown that the SMW is possessing the neighborhood mothers and, instead of immobilizing the mothers, the main characters keep killing them and then crying that oh no they’ve killed another one.

Stage 5: Seppuku.  As the credits roll, you take your life with a frisbee.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, don’t watch it.  Well, unless you feel like following around characters that have no realistic adult reactions, emotional states, or personal agency.  Or if you like shouting at your television.

As always, this movie is available on Netflix on Demand.  Watch at your own risk.  Hopefully next week I’ll find something that doesn’t make me feel like someone vomited into my skull.