Human Roast Pork Beans: Empty Calories
- Sam Luedtke
- May 6, 2020
- 3 min read
"I'm glad I didn't have any of those."
Oh boy, this was a tough one to get through. Human Roast Pork Buns was never quite scary, but still portrayed an absurd amount of horrifying, disgusting, and downright awful events throughout its entire runtime. I almost wanted to stop watching the film halfway through because it seemed to be doing nothing but showing one terrible thing after another without any purpose, which I still felt like it was doing by the end. After watching it and doing the readings, I started to wonder, was the whole point of the film actually to make us as uncomfortable as possible? Maybe it wanted us to squirm since it was telling us about events that actually happened.
Stephen Prince’s piece on graphic violence is a useful tool for analyzing Human Roast Pork Buns’s presentation and purpose of gore. The thing that really sticks out about the violence in the film, especially after reading Prince’s breakdowns of other films, is how not stylized it is. It is so blandly shot that it is almost as much boring as it is disgusting. It is hard to find distinguished uses of any cinematic techniques to aestheticize the film’s violence, such as “multicamera filming (i.e., filming with more than one camera simultaneously), slow motion, and montage editing (i.e., building a sequence out of many, very short, brief shots” (Prince, 10). Prince listed these filmmaking practices in discussion with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, which was extremely controversial when it released in 1967. Some audiences were afraid this film would be seen as rallying cry and justification of violence due to its seemingly glorification of crime and murder. It is easy to quickly label a film like Bonnie and Clyde as validation for violent acts, seeing how carefully edited and squib-filled each gunshot was. Prince does not believe that on-screen gore is a fulfillment of violent urges, but rather provides a feeling of catharsis, “the notion that screen violence provides the viewer with the opportunity to purge hostile feelings in the safe realm of art” (Prince, 19). As violence is often a big factor of the horror genre, it seems to both provide a sense of relief with each kill while instilling fear. These tasks are actually two sides of the same coin because fear and tension found in horror films are, in fact, the biggest complementation of catharsis. The fear and anticipation that builds while waiting for violence in horror culminates in an even bigger release of catharsis when gore does occur.
Human Roast Pork Buns, however, provides a different feeling when it depicts gore. Unlike most other horror films, there is no careful balance between anticipation and presentation of violence. Even its handling of gore is much less stylish and carefully constructed as something like Bonnie and Clyde. When violent sequences are shown, which happens for most of film, they drag on for what feels like is the entire runtime. These sequences are quite frequent, with one beating happening almost immediately after the next. When the film handles gore like this, it is taking away every opportunity the audience could have to feel suspense and refusing to let them decompress from each mutilation they witness. In other words, the film is stealing the viewer’s ability to feel catharsis. I believe that Human Roast Pork Bunsis doing this intentionally because it wants us to experience the same horror felt by those affected from the events that the film was based on. The killer in this film is not a made up being that haunts teenagers dreams, or goes on killing sprees at summer camps, it was a seemingly normal man who was angry at a family for being unable to repay gambling debts (who I guess was rumored to be a cannibal). Is that something that we as viewers should feel a release from as we watch? Apparently not.
As much fun as watching horror films can be, it can be easy to lose track of the fact that there are real killers in the world. I think Human Roast Pork Buns intentionally slapped its audience in the face to remind them of that. Now, this is not to say that I think the film remind us of the world’s true evils in a good way, but it still did nonetheless. There is no problem in enjoying a good horror film though. Many people do to seek that cathartic release I described above. Anyone seeking that feeling, however, should keep a safe distance from this film.
Yes, the violence in the film is clearly sensationalized. The way the film sensationalizes the violence is more so through excess rather than aesthetics. I was just trying to get at that it over emphasizes excess because it does not want the audience to react to the violence in the same way they did during the shoot out in Taxi Driver. The sequences of violence in this film aren't supposed to be celebrated, even if that wasn't the intent of the other film's sequences of violence.
"It is so blandly shot that it is almost as much boring as it is disgusting. It is hard to find distinguished uses of any cinematic techniques to aestheticize the film’s violence"
I think that, even if not properly speaking aestheticized, the film's violence is still sensationalized to a point of unreality. I think that this is something that Prince could have potentially explored more because it does seem possible that violence can be sensationalized without being aestheticized, even if the two often coincide.