Junk Films (2007) – Tsurisaki Kyotaka.

The famed creator of Orozoko The Embalmer unleashes another unflinchingly bloody shockumentary, one that generously provides a quite literally eye-popping preponderance of expressly mortal, frequently gruesome, real-life, video-immortalized death. While the contents can be intimately graphic, this largely unfiltered view of man's terrible fragility has always maintained a macabre, if occasionally inexplicable fascination for me. Junk Films is a vivid, morbidly voyeuristic compendium of internationally curated outré material, often sad, unexpectedly bizarre, with brutal, blood-spattered crime scenes, grisly road accidents, revered ancient burial rites, and random gory incident. I have no qualms over my undeniably adolescent appreciation of Faces of Death'd corpse-porn, in all of its notoriously suspect, mostly grim, trashy, crudely prurient, and often wholly exploitative guises. The myriad ills of our world are not the fault of extreme horror/gore/shockumentaries, it is simply because the human animal is a base creature, and has been foolhardily allowed to propagate unchecked. I found the material collected at the Thai vegetarian festival to be the most compelling, as the stultifying repetition of human roadside carnage proved somewhat numbing. There is a briefly amusing moment when you can see fat-bellied tourists gawking at the blazing riverside funeral pyres, the lurid camera's eye making sure we had a good long look at the melancholic sight of a jutting, partially charcoaled human leg.