Review: When it comes to films there is very few that have really made me feel uneasy or disturbed. The last one to do that was Slaughtered Vomit Dolls which I reviewed awhile back. The Bunny Game is the newest film to actually make me uneasy. I knew before I got into the film that I would be entering a world of insanity, but it took me much further than I thought it would go. I can say that this is not a film for everyone.
The plot of this film is quite basic, it follows a young prostitute who gets picked up by a trucker and he takes her out to the middle of nowhere and tortures her for 5 days. That is probably one of the most basic plots to a film I have ever had to describe. Now those who have not seen this film but are into the much more dark and intense films may thing you will get the intensity and darkness with heaping amount of gore, but you actually don't. Which in alot of ways makes this film that much more disturbing. What I mean by that is you don't get a gore scene thrown in that throws off the balance of the film, instead it is able to keep it's intensity without interruption. To myself I really found the atmosphere to be very raw and primal which is something I rarely find. After watching the "making of" feature I can see why. It's because there is alot of things done in the film that they did for real, like when he brands the girls or does some knife play with them.
To me that is simply awesome because you never see that. Don't get me wrong I am not for killing or torture but when in a film of this nature I don't mind it as long as everyone is on board with it and want to do it. The pace of this film varies from steady shots that go at a more normal speed to ones that are very fast and chaotic like something from a music video with quick cuts. There is one sequence like that where it kinda had a rythmic pattern, it's this part where they add in him stabbing a knife a few times quickly into the bed of the semi-trailer. It's really a scene you have to experience to get what I mean. Which that brings me to another point, this film is an experience and something you really have to see to get the full effect of it. Really just reading a review will not justify how intense and great The Bunny Game really is.
Now there is a very very little cast and those involved all brought their best to their roles. Especially the main duo made up of Hog( Jeff F. Renfro) and Sylvia (Rodleen Getsic). Jeff played Hog in a very serious and believable way that made him truly scary. As Rodleen playing Sylvia she truly brought the torment and raw emotion to the screen, which could be because of some of the things being real and because the film is based on encounter she went through before. For the most part the other characters are only in flashbacks and really are not seen quite as much as the main two. Aside from the cast one of the other things I really liked is that the whole film is shot in black & white which does take this film into an artsy direction, but not in a pretentious way. For myself I love seeing this because very few directors are bold enough to step out of the world of color films and do something in b&w. To me it's more beautiful even if the subject matter of the film is as brutal as The Bunny Game.
Overall this is seriously one of the best and most disturbing films I have seen in this niche of extreme horror in awehile. This film is very much something that I don't think myself or anyone who comes in contact with it are ever going to forget no matter how hard they were to try! This is a must see for anyone wanting a horror film that will fuck with you on many levels without having to shed buckets of blood!
-Daniel "Damnation" Lee
Director: Adam Rehmeier
Genre:Horror
Blu-ray/DVD Release Year: 2012
Theatrical Release Year: 2010
Time Length: 76 mins.
Company: Autonomy Pictures
