That Is One Big Pair Of Scissors

Over at Top Horror Movies Club, I talked a little about how by watching movies from outside my own country, I learn about their local legends and lore. The movie that at last completed a review for was Trollhunter. That film was from Norway and I learned about their local lore about trolls of course. My review for here today was also about a local legend, but this time it is from Japan. This is something I find fun in foreign films as it mixes things up some. Doesn't always mean it is a good movie, but at least I learned a little something by watching it. In A Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007), or Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman, I learned about...well, the slit-mouthed woman.

Rumors are spreading pretty quickly with the children about the slit-mouthed woman. As the story goes, she will appear a child and ask if them if she is pretty. How to respond seems to vary though. As stories seem to grow, an earthquake happens, which seems to release something in one house. Soon after, children start to disappear. According to reports about these children, a woman that matches what the slit-mouthed woman looks like is reported at each scene. Once child, Mika (Rie Kuwana) is being abused by her mother when one of her teachers, Yamashita (Eriko Satô), tries talking to her about it, but it doesn't go well. Mika runs off, straight into the slit-mouthed woman (Mizuno Miki), who then takes off with Mika. Yamashita then teams up with Matsuzaki (Haruhiko Katô) who believes he knows who the slit-mouthed woman actually is. Will they be able to save the children, or is it too late for them?

The lore behind A Slit-Mouthed Woman actually goes back a long ways in Japanese history. Director/co-writer Kôji Shiraishi seems to drop the ball with this, and many other things. With a legend that goes back a long ways, I think I would have found a way to use that in my film. Shiraishi hints with a set of parents that it goes back a ways. The parents tell their kids that they talked about this woman even when they were in school. While it isn't said, it gave the impression that it goes back a long ways. Either way, this isn't the case at all. The woman in question becomes the legend only 30 years prior, which makes it a more recent legend. The plot itself has a lot to do with child abuse. In a way I support this. Just because it is a horror film doesn't mean the publicity it gets should be bad. Anything that gets a subject like child abuse into your mind is a good thing, as long as your not the abuser that is. That being said, I did think that A Slit-Mouthed Woman took it too far. Every major character in the film has been abused, is being abused, or is the abuser. It just felt like over kill.

Speaking of the abuse, some of it is shown in the film. The main person doing this was the slit-mouthed woman. There was a lot of things wrong that was around her character. When she appears, everyone seems completely helpless. There was plenty of times someone could have gotten away easy, or at least fought back, but they never really do. A hit or a kick, especially by the actress playing the slit-mouthed woman, didn't look hard at all, but the other actor would make it look like it was. She would barely move her foot and the person she "kicked" would act like a bone was broken. Okay, maybe it wasn't that bad, but you get the point.

A Slit-Mouthed Woman does manage to get gory here and there. With showing how the slit-mouthed woman got her name, to chopping off a head, the effects are pretty good. It was real gory, but it was a little more gory than I was expecting. The acting was just okay. I didn't really care for any one actor, but each did okay with their role. Outside of the lame hits and kicks anyway.

One of the cool things about this movie was that did go as far as killing off a kid. If you have read my reviews for very long, you know a movie gets major points for doing that. For A Slit-Mouthed Woman though, it was just too bad the rest of the movie didn't work. Another smaller problem with the plot is that we discover that the slit-mouthed woman takes over some other woman's body in order to do her work. So this made me wonder why there wasn't any women being reported as missing as well. A Slit-Mouthed Woman could have been a pretty good film, but it wasn't. To my surprise it still has a fairly good rating on both Netflix and IMDb. Neither has it listed as a great film, but I didn't find it to be an average film. To each their own I guess.
2 out of 5 Going after abused kids seems backwards to me