The Bunny Game (2010)

"A prostitute looking for her next meal hitches a ride with a trucker that leaves her praying for her next breath."

There's nothing like finding out that a film has been banned in the UK to make me want to see it even more. It worked for Nick Palumbo's "Murder Set Pieces" way back in 2004, and it got me even more excited to watch Kôji Shiraishi's "Grotesque" (2009). I haven't reviewed either of them, but the latter was actually really good.

I'm not into conspiracy theories, but banning a movie in the UK certainly helps to boost its sales everywhere else. Nobody even cares about what the bunch of old grannies who make up the BBFC say in Britain itself, and, with the internet, it's not as if the film won't be seen by those who want to watch it anyway. All the outdated BBFC have managed to do with their ban is stop the distributor from making any money from UK sales. Shame on them.

Having said that, Adam Rehmeier's "The Bunny Game" deserves to be banned for being crap. Since I'm a big fan of "torture porn", it wasn't that it didn't live up to my expectations. I vaguely knew what it was going to be like before I started watching it and was prepared for some disappointment. It simply didn't have anything to it to make me feel any emotions whatsoever unless, of course, boredom counts as an emotion.

The biggest problem, other than the black and white "arthouse" style which worked better for "The Human Centipede II", was that, after the first 20 minutes, it was just a mess of images and screaming without actually showing the kind of physical torture that we all know and love.

If you compare "The Bunny Game" to the far superior "A Serbian Film", it was also severely lacking in its production values. This was a bit of shame considering that it contained quite a lot of the same subject matter and possibly the same social commentary on America that "A Serbian Film" claimed for Serbia.

Yes, if I really wanted to stretch my intellectualism to places where it has no right to go, I could see that this was a condemnation of the insane, selfish, empty, drudgery of America; a country with no morality and which sells everything including the souls of its people. You can read anything into any movie if you really want to, but I'm not the guy to do that.

Taking it at face value, "The Bunny Game" was just 76 minutes of meaningless drivel about prostitution and cocaine use which used pseudo arty-farty composition to try and look as if it was something more.

Rodleen Getsic, who not only played the skanky, tattooed prostitute, but also co-wrote the script, wasn't bad looking once she'd had a shower. Happily, she had several showers during the first 20 minutes and was naked for the majority of the movie anyway. I approve of her boobies.

Later on, after her head was shaved and she was dragged around the desert on a leash, she wasn't quite so pretty. At one point, she looked and acted just like a mentally retarded boy... but with boobies.

If you've been wondering what "The Bunny Game" itself is, I'm still not entirely sure myself. Apparently, wearing a leather pig mask and putting a bunny hat on your victim before shouting at her and/or dragging her around is "The Bunny Game". There may be a bigger meaning, but I'm not down with the kids enough to know what it is.

Although there's no way in Hell that "The Bunny Game" is going in "The Vault", I'm not going to put it in "The Dungeon" either. Stuff like this barely counts as a real horror film in the first place.