Pig

PIG is not a movie you're likely to put on for the family after a big Christmas lunch, but as an exercise in unrelenting brutality it's certainly worth checking out for any fan of extreme cinema.

Even at only a little longer than an hour PIG seems a bit too padded. If this was a 60-minute MASTERS OF HORROR episode it would have easily been the best one, but a certain numbness sets in to the viewer around 45-minutes in after such a protracted exhibition of frenzy, brutality and madness.

Technically the film's much-ballyhooed 'single take' technique is certainly daring. And the performances are committed, if not always entirely successful in some instances.

All-in-all this isn't a perfect film. But Adam Mason and his team have gone and done a left-of-field experiment in grueling extremity. And for a vast majority of its run time it most certainly succeeds.

I'm not going to go into elaborate detail about the quality or goings-on of the story, because Adam Mason's press release warned/boasted that the film contained no plot...only brutality, gore & degradation. And it certainly lived up to that. As far as as a review is concerned, I agree completely with pretty much everything Shawn Savage said in his review.

I was pretty bored throughout the proceedings, especially after I noticed the first edit in the supposedly uninterrupted, single-take film. It occurred approx 20 min. into the film...the camera moves in on the truck-bed girl's dress, there's a dissolve (read: cut), and the camera pulls back to continue capturing the goings-on. Not that what Adam Mason & co. pulled off in long takes wasn't sometimes impressive, but if you're going to boast a 70+ minute, uninterrupted take, don't cheat. My opinion is if they decided to allow themselves "hidden" cuts (a la Hitchock's ROPE), they might as well have put some effort into some semblance of a storyline to make the whole thing a bit less monotonous.

I probably would have only given this 2 stars, but the film's score was really quite engaging and well-done throughout, and that's primarily what kept me watching.

So...usually, before I get into what I liked and didn't like about a movie when I review it, I usually give a plot summary to show others what it's about. But, in this case, I cant give one because, frankly, there IS no plot

Now, I have good news and bad news about this film. The good news is that this film goes above and beyond the normal setting for films going "too far". The bad news? There's not much else to this film.

A thing that I have to praise this film for is it's one on-going shot that's used for almost the entire film. If you want to become a director, cinematographer, or pretty much anything else to do with film, you should see this film purely on that.

But, the major down-side to this film is that it's just plain boring at times. I'm not one of these conservative people who will hate this film because "It's too terrible" or "It will corrupt the kids" or anything like that. I mainly don't like it that much because it's just plain boring at times. Your waiting for the film to move on at points, but it never really does.

Maybe that was the director's intentions or the actors intentions (because you can tell that this film is mainly improv), but whatever it is, it's not something that you should really see OTHER than the technical stand-point.

I really, really did try to like this movie. I really wanted to enjoy this as sheer brutality, something that simply tried to be as vulgar as rating systems would allow. There's just. No. Plot. It's just a bad movie, plain and simple. Sure, it's got all the earmarks of a pretty, technically well-made film, but if you don't have that kind of film school background, it's nothing but torture porn, and within the first 5 minutes, you realize that it's not even torture porn: just sexist, reprehensible and filth. I'm fine with a good bit of Saw or Devil's Rejects fun, but when you're just beating the sh*t out of women for a good hour and a half, it's not fun anymore.

What a damn shame.

A psychopath's idea of fun is to torture and kill people on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. Seemingly filmed in one take, Pig is pretty much just torture, killing and degradation, with a slight twist at the end. Grim, mean spirited stuff. But effective. .