User Reviews

This is my 2nd writing on this film here on IMDb. Guinea Pig 4: Mermaid in a Manhole (1988 or 1991) is directed by Japanese comic book artist Hideshi Hino who has directed also the most infamous Pig, Flowers of Flesh and Blood which is the second film in the series. His artistic abilities are clearly visible in Mermaid but they are hard to notice with all that puss filled, maggot and worm crawling mayhem on screen.

When the artist (Shigeru Saiki, who has a part in Takashi Miike's Audition (1999), too!) finds the mermaid (Mari Somei, a sweet girl, but whose motivation to act in this film is still pretty far beyond me) in the sewer, he understands the sewer used to be the place in which he played when he was a child and now the beautiful river has been turned into an ugly and filthy sewer. He also saw the mermaid as a child, and now he finds her again, severely injured, contaminated and trapped inside the death hole called sewer. The artist takes her home and starts to paint her and perhaps, take care of her, too, but the creature seems to be more interested in the painting as she wants to be painted before she dies. She has the ability to communicate with the artist without any words. What follows is terror.

The film has some symbolism at the beginning in the sewer, and one could interpret it as a statement about humans exploiting nature and turning it all into smelly and rotten areas of society's excrement. It all is very pessimistic and also nihilistic (to say the least) and these themes are pretty usual in Japanese (underground) cinema.

There are some great details, too, and I mean those statues and "faces" on the wall in the artist's apartment. Also the finale in its madness is pretty memorable because of what weird happens to the artist's painting. The ending is almost surreal as we don't know what actually took place for real, and it just makes the viewer feel even more amazed after this one hour terror experience.

This film is almost as extreme as they get and as mentioned in my earlier comments, full of worms and other similar creatures coming out from the mermaid's mouth and body and the scenes are more than repulsive. Still, due to those mentioned positive points I found after second viewing, I can slightly say this isn't as nonsense and meaningless as I firstly wrote, but still, I am pretty forgiving. The actors are pretty horrible and over act all the time, but fortunately they don't manage to ruin the whole thing.

I would definitely like to see some other work of Hino's as he hasn't done too much in the field of cinema, but I don't have any idea where to get his comic books or other works. Still, Mermaid in a Manhole is one unique film, but extremely loathsome as well.

'Mermaid In A Manhole' is part of the infamous 'Guinea Pig' series of Japanese horror films, considered to be among the goriest, and most grotesque offerings out there. There are six titles to choose from and I went with the one that seemed to be the tamest. As an added bonus I got two films for the price of one. The other title on the disc was a 39 minute horror comedy called 'He Never Dies'. 'Mermaid' itself is only 63 minutes long, and that's a good thing. It is definitely disgusting and a couple of moments were gag worthy, but it isn't unwatchable. I realize that most people would find this film extremely repulsive, and I get that. Everyone has there line in the sand. I don't care for long scenes of rape and humiliation or animal death, but mermaids covered in tumors that squirt out worms and multi-colored pus is just a little too far from reality to be upsetting to me. There were trailers for other films in the series that looked much harsher. Even the favorable reviews I read said that there is little, if any story to 'Devil's Experiment' and 'Flowers of Flesh and Blood'. They are quite simply an exercise in how much you can stand to look at. I love the gore, but I need more! I need a story, or comedy, or some other form of entertainment to go along with it. I'm not going to rush out to rent more 'Guinea Pig' films, but to my surprise, I didn't hate 'Mermaid'. "There are seven different colors of pus in these tumors. You will paint me with the pus of seven colors." Our mermaid starts out with just a few tumors on her stomach and they spread like wildfire. The tumors are extremely disgusting to look at and as they spread they get more vile with the added addition of blood, colored pus and worms. Lot's and lot's and lot's of worms! The artist quite literally does paint her portrait with the seven colors of her own pus. 'Mermaid' was obviously made on a tight budget, and I think they pored every dollar they had into the gore. But there is a story, and the film actually comes full circle with an ending that is a twist that actually makes sense when you look back at it. The film tries to horrify but doesn't really succeed. It will gross you out and disgust you but it isn't suspenseful and it certainly isn't scary. There are more than a few moments that are just dumb. One particularly gory scene of the mermaid twitching out in slow motion, spraying away like a fountain, gave me a good laugh. In addition, there is a fan behind her blowing her hair about. Those crazy sound effects they used were downright cartoon-ish. There are also wacky neighbors that live below the artist that just didn't fit the rest of the film. I'm not sure whether they intended a little comic relief or it was unintentional, but in any case it didn't work for me. There is plenty to poke at, but I can't fail it. The mermaids tail was quite cool; very slimy and fishy. The gore is creative, and at times quite effective and the ending made up for some of it follies. I'm giving this one a day pass but rent it at your own risk!

A painter takes to visiting the sewers to find inspiration for his art; there he discovers a beautiful but seriously ill mermaid who he takes home and places in a bathtub. As the mermaid's condition grows progressively worse, with tumours spreading all over her body, she implores the artist to make her the subject of his work, using the seven colours of pus from her sores as paint.

Bodily fluids; worm vomiting; a dead foetus; graphic dismemberment: Mermaid in a Manhole certainly packs a lot of tasteless imagery into into its 63 minutes, but compared to the sadistic ultra-violence of director Hideshi Hino's earlier Guinea Pig movie, Flowers of Flesh and Blood, this one is a walk in the park: for the most part, Hino replaces realistic gore with messy, multi-coloured goop and absurd, misshapen growths that are too divorced from reality to be truly stomach churning. Even when the mermaid dies and the distraught artist maniacally chops up her body, finding a fully grown dead foetus inside her body, the fantastical nature of the story prevents matters from being too disturbing.

That is, at least, until the film's ambiguous ending, which suggests that the mermaid never really existed and that the artist, driven insane through a sense of loss, has actually hacked up his heavily pregnant, terminally ill wife. Now that's a lot nastier than him chopping up a mythical creature, doncha think?

Originally part of the notorious underground video series GUINE PIG (which came to the public's attention when actor Charlie Sheen mistook an episode for an actual snuff movie), GUINEA PIG: MERMAID IN A MANHOLE is the only one to have gained a cult status outside of the series' infamy. People unfamiliar with the series need only know that it is largely made up of extremely gruesome, brutal and realistic footage of people (mostly women) being tortured, mutilated and murdered (sometimes self-inflicted). Guinea Pig 2: Flowers of Flesh and Blood (the one that sparked the Sheen controversy) is a 45 minute long video in which a woman is graphically dismembered and disemboweled. MERMAID has aspirations beyond simply grossing its viewers out (though it doesn't skimp on that), and goes more for a David Cronenberg-esque atmosphere of disease and decay, meant to disturb as much as repulse. The story involves an artist who gets his ideas from items he finds in the sewer. One day, while rooting around for inspiration, he comes across a real live mermaid. She is injured and sick, from years of living in all the filth and muck. He takes her back to his apartment and places her in his bathtub, where she slowly begins to rot. He paints her as her condition worsens. Sores appear all over her body and erupt in multi-colored pus, which he uses (at her request) to continue painting the portrait. Blood, slime and worms squirm out of her skin. She vomits worms and slime. Eventually, her intestines burst out of her body and ooze onto the floor. It's really, really gross. All through this he continues to paint her picture. Blood-drenched and nightmarishly bizarre, but with moments of dark, offbeat humor sprinkled throughout. If you have the stomach for it, and you can find it, this is an interesting little movie for fans of bizarre and/or grotesque cinema. Easily the best of the Guinea Pig series.

Mermaid in a manhole follows an Artist who has recently lost his wife to some unknown circumstance, he goes down into the sewer to paint the many hidden treasures he finds down there that remind him of his childhood. While down there he stumbles upon a beautiful mermaid whom is injured and decides to take her back to his house to paint her.

The film leaves small clues that not everything is what it seems.

She is then placed in a bathtub where her condition grows worse as she begins to disintegrate into tumors, blood, puss and vomitting up worms. But she keeps insisting to him "you need to finish my painting so I can die." He then paints of her with the seven colors of her own puss. (At her request) then her intestines explode out of her onto the floor and she finally dies after he finally adds the last horrific detail to his portrait of her.

What comes next will make anyone's jaw hit the floor, as he begins to chop her body to pieces in a depressed frustration as its revealed the Mermaid was carrying a child? The main character shocked and as confused as us finds a dead foetus inside the mermaid after cutting her up.

He is then thrown into jail where the officers suggest "he killed his wife" while our main character keeps insistings "no it was the mermaid." it ends on a ambigious ending as the officers have also found fish scales at the house and are unsure where they came from. Though the ending and the fact the mermaid's voice comes straight from the artist's head suggests indeed the mermaid was never real and that this man just killed his pregnant wife. Although we dont see a reveal that it was really her.

When the film finished I had a few questions for example. Did the artist kill his wife before or after he went down into the sewer? Im going to assume before, since the likely case is that the mermaid fantasy was imagined up to hide the fact what he's talking to and painting is really the corpse of his beloved.

His neighbors who are suspcious of him mention a detail that his wife "left him" which gives some credit to my next insight.

The addition of the baby also might give us a clue, that probably why he killed his wife was because he found out she had been impregnated by another man. Which might also explain why the baby isnt part of his delusional fantasy, and why he dreamt up a mermaid instead of his wife. As a mermaid is sometimes a symbol of purity.

If you have the stomach, and want to see a very artistic depressing story. I highly recommend it. Also for you gore hounds out there, you'll enjoy this one.

Za Ginipiggu 4: Manhoru no Naka no Ningyo, or Guinea Pig: Mermaid in the Manhole as it's more commonly known amongst Enlish speaking audiences, starts in the Japanese sewer system where an artist (Shigeru Saiki) likes to go & paint things, for some reason I'm not aware of. One day he discovers a beautiful mermaid (Mari Somei), half Japanese woman, half fish. He decides to paint her but it quickly becomes apparent that spending all her time in the Japnese sewer system isn't doing the mermaids health any good & she starts to develop huge puss filled sacs of diseased flesh on her stomach. The artist takes her back to his place & sticks her in a bathtub filled with water, unfortunately this does not have the desired effect & the mermaids entire body becomes engulfed in these disgusting sacs of rotten flesh which eventually begin to burst. The artist becomes desperate as his beautiful mermaid is rotting away in front of his very eyes!

This Japanese production was directed by Hideshi Hino & I'm not really sure what to make of it or who it's supposed to appeal to, the entire Guinea Pig series of films seem to exist for no other reason other than a pointless exercise to test the endurance levels of it's audience out. The script is far removed from reality although it does try to redeem itself with a really sick & unpleasant twist ending that seems to contradict itself. Za Ginipiggu 4: Manhoru no Naka no Ningyo seems to exist for no other purpose other than to try & gross it's audience out at every available opportunity, which when I think about it isn't necessarily a bad thing by any means! It's hard to know what to make of it & as long as you know what your letting yourself in for I suppose it's quite good in a sick, perverse & bizarre sort of way. At only an hour or so in length it moves along at a fair pace & certainly grips the viewer as you want to know how this thing is going to end. The dialogue is sparse & little attempt is made at characterisation, but the filmmakers include just about enough to get by with.

Director Hino doesn't do anything special in the film-making department, this thing has all the style & class of a TV soap opera. The gore is plentiful, the puss filled sores & sacs on the mermaids body really are gross, that is until they burst & start oozing blue, purple, green, yellow & white liquid when it becomes more comical. One thing this film uses are slimy worms, boy the filmmakers must have used 100's if not 1000's of the things! They start to slime & crawl their way out of the mermaids wounds & totally cover her, if you don't like slimy creepy crawlies then Za Ginipiggu 4: Manhoru no Naka no Ningyo isn't for you as there's loads of them. The nasty climax features a total body dismemberment, severed limbs, hacked out foetus's, a popped out eye, scalp removal & plenty of internal organs. Most of it's pretty disgusting & Hino doesn't mind long lingering close-ups of the action.

Technically the film looks cheap throughout, it's point & shoot stuff. The special make-up effects range from gross to absurd but most of the time they are well realised. I never comment on the acting on subtitled films but I'm sure the material doesn't lend itself too well for a great performance, that female buck toothed neighbour was highly annoying though.

Za Ginipiggu 4: Manhoru no Naka no Ningyo is a strange film, I can't really say it's a good film but I can't say it's a bad one as I thought it was OK & took a certain amount of sick pleasure from it but I personally wouldn't want anyone I know to watch anything like this. Equal parts disgusting, strange & pointless. One more thing, that guy's carpet must have been rank by the end of the film! I mean he could have put some newspaper down or something, right?

If you don't know what Guinea Pig is, you probably shouldn't.

Hino was born to Japanese immigrant workers in Northeast China and his family left just as Japan surrendered to the Soviets. They were nearly killed en route and when they arrived back in the mainland, he's claimed that his grandfather and father were both in the Yakuza. These memories have informed his horrific manga visions in books like Panorama of Hell and Ghost School.

Hino produced the Guinea Pig series to transform his manga into movie form. These videotapes became infamous when the fourth film of the series, Devil Woman Doctor, was found in the thousands of tapes that Japanese serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki owned. Because of this controversy, the series went out of print but the series has been reissued on DVD in the US, UK, Netherlands and Austria.

In 1991, the series made international news thanks to Charlie Sheen. Film Threat editor Chris Gore had given him a copy of the series and upon watching the second installment, Flowers of Flesh and Blood, Sheen was convinced that he was watching a snuff film. He called the FBI, who soon learned that Japanese authorities were already on the case, as they had summoned the filmmakers to court to learn if the movies were fake.

Maybe everyone would have been better off if they just kept watching, because at the end of each video, there was behind the scenes footage of how the makeup and FX were achieved.

Make no mistake - these are unrelenting and sadistic films. Your capacity to withstand gore will be tested by them. But this is perhaps the easiest in a very rough lot.

An artist is trying to cope with the death of his pregnant wife through the work he creates. For inspiration, he often visits the sewers beneath Okinawa, places that once had been rivers where he once met a mermaid as a child. Now, she has been trapped in the sewers but agrees to let him paint her.

However, all the time within the muck and bile has given her tumors all over her body. The artist takes her back to his home and keeps her in a bathtub, giving her medicine in the hopes of bringing her back to life.

The more she suffers, the more she oozes blood and pus from nearly every orifice in her body, fluids that the artist is able to use to create art. Yet with each brushstroke, she's nearer to the final curtain, demanding that he continue painting her all the way to the point of her death.

That said - she may not have been a mermaid at all, but instead his terminally ill wife - and the fetus that he removed after her death just possibly may have been their child. Yet where did the scale come from that they discovered in the bathtub? And just what is moving in the sewers after the credits?

Mari Somei, who played the mermaid, is a real trooper for her work in this, being covered near head to toe in practical and oozing effects. The artist is played by Shigeru Saiki, who is in Audition as well as several sentai shows on Japanese TV.

I don't know where else you'd be able to find a movie so awash in fluids. There are literal geysers of vomit, blood, bodily fluids and even intestines filled with worms and insects spraying out all over the bathroom tile. There's a message here about love and loss or art and death, but really, it's nearly an hour of watching a mermaid expire in a filthy tub. Only in Japan, right?

"Mermaid in the Manhole" is about an insane painter who has lost his wife. He lives alone and occasionally visits the sewers to paint. One day he finds a mermaid in the manhole. She is sick (she's got a big wound on her stomach) so he takes her to his apartment and puts her in a bathtub.

!!!SPOILERS!!! She tells him to paint her instead of taking care of her wound. The painter does what he has been told. The wound on the mermaid keeps getting worse and worse. Pus and worms ooze out from her wound and mouth. When the mermaid is dying he cut her into pieces. The neighbours call the police and he is sent to the funnyfarm. The way this movie is filmed reminds me of a tv soap. I don't like soaps, but the story and the gore was pretty ok. This one is not as gory as the other Guinea Pig-movies. I give it a 5/10.

*MINOR SPOILERS* Recently widowed painter spends all his time shifting through the local sewer to find motifs for his paintings. The sewer is build where the river dried up and he played at as a child, but the river's frogs and dragonflies are gone and now he is starring at dog cadavers, aborted fetuses and worms and he comes across a mermaid in the sewer, he met her as a child in the river. She stranded in the sewer when the river dried up. But the mermaid has a nasty infection, so he brings her home. She wants him to paint her and not spend time to treat her, so the infection grows worse, much, much worse! The viewer is treated to boils, pus, worms and blood. All very gross made, yet this is a very moving film as well, it is clearly the most artistic of the Guinea Pig movies, the ending is ambiguous, you have to see for yourself. This little gem of a movie is laden with atmosphere and symbolism, it has beauty midst its grossness. 10/10.

A lot of people say this is pointless. No actually, if you think about it, this film is very well made. The gore effects just like every Guinea Pig film is amazing, however of all of the Guinea Pig films, this one is probably the best one, story-wise, gore wise of course the first Guinea Pig.

We follow our main character the Artist, that finds his lost mermaid in a sewer stuck. He brings her in his house, trying to heal her wounds. The artist paints her, we see the painting transforming from a gorgeous glorious mermaid, to a monster, same with the painting and her physically. The mermaid tells him to kill her because she cant take the pain anymore, which he does.

In the end we learn that the mermaid is actually his wife, that suffered from cancer, meaning that the Artist just wanted the love he lost from his wife, imagining a mermaid that can actually give him love, so he expresses it on his painting of her. It's really tragic when you realize that all of his imaginations comes to him ending up in prison, just because he was missing love, and that love was not towards his wife, it was towards his childhood mermaid which lost him.