The Untold Story: Human Roast Pork Buns

Wowie. This one is a doozy. And not because of the terror it inflicts, but because of its pure vulgarity, in all aspects. In fact, I don't think there was a single scene I actually was scared by. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was honestly more scary for me than any part of Human Roast Pork Buns. For me, this entire movie was just disgusting, for lack of a better term: utterly indigestible. But it wasn't just the blood, gore, and merciless killer that charged these feelings; it was all of the violence in combination with the inclusion of a sick-minded version of comedic relief.

This is going to sound really bad, but I think by itself, the murder's story, in all of its gut-wrenching explicitness, would have made me more comfortable than it does with the inclusion of the police force. Without it, I at least am watching something horrible and seeing it for what it is. There is no place for me sympathize with the murder or get caught up in crude, sexually exploitative jokes. Unfortunately, that is not the movie. With the addition of this befuddling lightheartedness, all of the horror seemed that much worse. Not only was the waitress brutally raped and murdered, but in the very next scene, there was a prostitute being sexually objectified in the crassest way possible, apparently for the audiences pleasure. And of course, we couldn't just loathe the the murderer, he had to be savagely beaten to a pulp (for what felt like a comedic agenda) so we would feel *jusssstttt* bad enough to pity him. These kinds of additions made the film feel like they included them just to push the boundaries and make you feel sick, which I guess maybe it was, but that is where I draw a line. Contrastingly, it also made me take the film much less seriously. Anytime I could tell something grotesque was about to happen, it felt like a "here we go again" moment; by the end I was just yelling at my computer because it only made sense that they would take it ~there~. It made me think about Prince article when they said that the viewer oftentimes takes refuge in the spectacle and visual effects of a movie to prevent themselves from feeling it was too real. HRPB became so vulgar it became almost cheesy and I think I took refuge in that as a spectator. 

This is an aside thought, but  I found something a bit contradictory through this week, and I would like to know how people feel about it. As I mentioned above, there is a certain amount of reliance audiences have on the film to provide an aesthetic appeal to horror and violence, basically parameters from making it too close to reality. But in our lecture for this week, there was a claim that horror is dependent on an investment in realness to provide the terror to audiences. I guess I am just interested in how that relationship works out. I think HRPB is an great inspection of this for it is something that feels way too real, but also oddly fake and it produced a certain ambivalence in me as a viewer, finding it supremely horrifying in its grossness, but also too fake to take serious... idk. Let me know if that makes sense.