The Slit-Mouth Woman

The Slit-Mouthed Woman is just the kind of lowbrow exploitative fare perfectly timed for our country’s current state of paranoia and fear thanks to what happened to Nurin, Syarlinie and Asmawi.

Here is a movie about an angry spirit who abducts little children and does horrible things to them. One scene has a child’s tongue getting sliced out and you later see her wandering aimlessly in a public park barely alive. Another scene has a child getting her cheeks sliced. Another gem of a scene has the cast finding a dead boy’s badly mutilated corpse.

The scares come mainly by shocking you. Be it by gruesome imagery or sudden jolts.

The movie’s main plot is about how an earth quake somewhere in Japan inadvertently releases the very evil Slit-Mouthed Woman spirit onto a small town. Children slowly start to disappear, the police are baffled and the key to solving the mystery of the malevolent ghoul lies in trying to decipher clues in the urban legends about the Slith-Mouthed Woman.

Two school teachers get involved, one seemingly having a psychic connection with our wide-mouthed baddie and the other full of guilt because one of the missing kids was abducted in front of her. The body count steadily increases here on. Kids aren’t the only ones who end up dead, there are a fair share of mom’s kicking the bucket too.

If this movie is supposed to be some kind of social commentary about how the family structure in modern society is collapsing and how we need to care for our children more, the message is lost. All you’ll really get is a bloody assault on your senses.

Some of the scenes though are so over the top that you’ll end up laughing instead of screaming. One memorable scene where the scare leads to guffaw is when our villainous spirit is shown for several minutes mechanically kicking a fallen victim. Another fight scene between one of the teachers and the spirit also somehow comes across as silly.

The movie starts off slow throughout the first two acts, but then picks up the pace for the rest.

While this movie is definitely not a Japanese horror classic, there is enough going on here that makes Hollywood and Malaysian horror movies seem like a Disney movie. Be prepared to turn off your brain in places and have the mentality of going on a roller coaster ride and you will be rewarded. God help us with our ugly desensitised souls that the loathsome debauchery, called The Slit-Mouthed Woman, is actually very stupidly entertaining.

The Slit-Mouth Woman
Cast Eriko Sato, Haruhiko Kato, Miki Mizuno Director Koji Shiraishi Runtime 90 minutes Opens 1 May