The Bunny Game is a horror film made in 2010 by about 15 people over 14 days and, to its credit, that kind of turnaround is impressive. It tells a story about a prostitute who might be retarded.
I’ll try and explain.
So Bunny is an overworked and apparently homeless hooker who appears to hate her lifestyle. The first 20 minutes is spent pounding this premise home; we see here snorting coke, peeing in a parking lot, and getting raped constantly. By the way, this movie is incredibly not safe for work if you haven’t guessed that by now.
Okay, so, because she is an idiot and doesn’t know any better, she does endures this horrible living situation day in and day out. In fact the very first scene is her giving head to some guy for like 2-3 minutes while crying. That scene by itself sets the tone for a long and brutal 90 minutes where eventually Bunny meets a creepy trucker that knocks her out and proceeds to torture her physically, emotionally, psychologically, and fetishistically until she becomes a gibbering idiot.
Usually brutal is an appropriately good word for a horror movie when describing violence and discomfort. This movie turns the discomfort part up to 11 by placing the audience in the middle of what appears to be a snuff film. The pacing and the editing is designed to keep us disoriented, and given the obvious shoe-string budget, I would like to tip my hat to the producers for nailing the tone. What hurts this movie a lot, though, is that Bunny is a completely irredeemable character who has no plan, is a permanently tortured soul, and is neither intelligent nor capable enough to get out of a desperate and alarming situation. Usually, horror movies follow this trope that says the protagonist at least attempts to fight back, and we as an audience respond with feelings of desperate and visceral hope. We want the hero to succeed and can be considerably moved if they fail.
In this regard, The Bunny Game is a broken movie. We literally just see a bunch of things happen, and maybe say to ourselves “Jesus, that guy is sick.” But there’s no emotional connection. There’s no motivation. There’s no resonance. There’s no success, no failure. Things happen, and that’s it. Maybe that was the point the director and writer were trying to make: that there’s this inexplicable darkness that encroaches on everything and everyone that strikes as fast as it disperses. I get that there are people who haven’t seen horror movies of this subgenre before, but it’s a novelty that wears off fast. The ultimate reality is that there’s not enough meat here for a feature-length motion picture, and that’s especially evident in the way this film is edited. Why doesn’t this film have a plot???
ThomFiles 