WHAT is it with Kiwis and gross-out horror comedies? Braindead. Bad Taste. I Survived a Zombie Apocalypse. And, of course, Black Sheep.
Crikey, they are a dark and funny lot!
If you need further proof, take a squiz at Grafted, which is now streaming over on Shudder.
Billed as Mean Girls meets Face/Off, this, the directorial debut from Sasha Rainbow is a grotty coming-of-age body horror that throws elements of everything from Takashi Miike to Re-Animator, Eyes Without a Face, The Skin I Live In, and Heathers onto the barbie.
Rainbow’s film combines serious teenage angst with oodles and oodles of gore, while taking perverse pleasure in our agonising discomfort throughout. Grafted is absolutely chocka with disgusting and graphic medical procedures that will very possibly have you feeling well crook. It’s not pretty, and certainly not for those of you with weak stomachs, so be careful you don’t chunder all over the living room floor.
The story follows Wei (Joyena Sun), a talented young scientist who arrives from China to study at Auckland University. Haunted by a family trauma and a facial disfigurement, she becomes embroiled in some questionable biology experiments, in a desperate quest to fit in.
Shunned by her social butterfly cousin Angela and her glamorous friends, Wei is determined to change her fate as she immerses herself in her late father’s research, working on a revolutionary skin grafting procedure that could cure her deformity. As her experiments take a dark turn, she becomes more dangerous and unhinged, willing to eliminate anyone who threatens her secret. She’s clearly a sammie short of a picnic, this one!
The message, of course, is to be comfortable in the skin you’re in. Our obsession with beauty and changing our bodies is put under the scalpel with gruesome and fun effect.
Bloody Nora, but some of the scenes are absolute carnage.
Think Frankenstein crossed with The Substance and Clueless and you are in the right cricket field.
Sweet as!
(4/5)
