I recently watched the first Guinea Pig film, The Devil's Experiment, and I must admit to being disappointed.<br /><br />This film is invariably included in any list of the "nastiest" films and maybe I was expecting more because of the hype. The truth is though, I don't rate it.<br /><br />If I'd been watching it believing the opening text to be true ("I found this tape..."), I might have been a bit disturbed by it, thinking it was real. Even without the benefit of knowing it not to be real though, I think I'd have worked out that it indeed wasn't.<br /><br />Throughout the film, the girl's reactions to what is being done to her just aren't what they should be. She should be screaming like a banshee in pain. The fact that she isn't means that it's obviously not real. I wouldn't want to watch it if it were real but if she were to be more convincing in her acting, the film would be more disturbing.<br /><br />And then there are the notorious scenes: nothing affected me at all up until the scalpel in the hand. The hot oil, maggots and innards just didn't bother me. I'm not saying I'm "hard"; just that I wasn't able to suspend my disbelief, partly because of the girl's inaction.<br /><br />The scalpel made me wince a little but the hammer to the hand just made the hand look rubber. And the final scene with the eye was again a little wincing but nothing more. I didn't want to look away and neither did I feel nauseous.<br /><br />Perhaps it's because the film is twenty-odd years old, or perhaps I'm just jaded. The truth is, I didn't find this film at all disturbing.<br /><br />It's the kind of thing you might expect to see playing on a loop as a modern art installation and as an exercise in stripping away characters, story etc. and just leaving the torture, it works on some levels. As a disturbing piece of film though, it didn't work for me at least.<br /><br />I watched Guinea Pig with my wife, who is of the "it's just a film" bent and she wondered what all the fuss was about. We got to discussing why I watch these films and my reasons are many but include a desire to be affected by a film. She said that she didn't think any film could be so convincing as to disturb her and challenged me to do exactly that. I played her the fire extinguisher scene from Irreversible and she was indeed disturbed.<br /><br />I'm not sure I have a point, other than that both of us were more disturbed by a scene in a non-horror genre film than any film thus far which sets out to disturb.