Reality... A city, grey, dull, maybe abandoned and then a dead dove wrapped in plastic. What is reality and what is cinema ? A naked woman lying on a table. A hand grabs a scalpel and cuts through her groin. A brother is obsessed with his sister, who's going to give birth. He decides to care of things himself, extracting the baby with his bare hands.
Nude people are crawling in a field. The field has bloody holes. Jesus is tortured by wild naked cannibal girls. A new martyrdom...

Until now, Subconscious Cruelty could be seen only in festivals where it had a famous career and where it got its cult movie status. Even ten years after, the original script keeps all its power of suggestion. It surely continues to shock people even when you've already watched it !

Subconscious Cruelty is a timeless movie. As you may have guessed, it's not a film with a clear and linear narration. Basically, several "short stories" are put together but they have no really link between each other but the obsessions of producer Mitch Davis and director Karim Hussain. And these guys could easily be the sons of David Cronenberg and David Lynch who would have melted together in a strange mutation. The movie has a slow and hypnotic pace. The music takes a large part in this surreal atmosphere. As soon as the first images are shown to us, you understand you're watching something very peticular. It is permanently a visual and audio experiments, a journey into a sick mind.

After weird wanderings in corridors, then come the serious things. Hussain seems to be interested in all what makes our body : internal organs, body fluids. Everything is broken up and what's inside goes usually outside in Subconscious Cruelty. It deals with a lot of taboos, which kind of still exists today : masturbation, menstruation, the view of birthing, religion. All of this is blended in a very graphic, horrible yet beautiful filmed poem. Each sequence has its peak, a kind of violent, brutal and gory orgasm where all kinds of stuff squirt : sperm, pee, blood.

We could have thought Karim Hussain would be just a low provocative filmmaker. But the movie, even if it includes lots of nudity and gore, has a longer range than a shocking B-movie. It really make the audience think about they see. If you don't throw up or faint, it really slaps you in the head and makes ask yourself why it is so shocking. Why am I disgusted when I see blood and viscera since it belongs to any human being ? Moreover, the movie contains a lot of symbols that could be discussed of hours. For example, Hussain litterally illustrated the "body of Christ" we eat for communion... Here you can see cannibal women who DO eat the body of Christ. When you see this scene, it is clearly one of the most shocking scenes but actually it just reflects what is means in the beginning...

Subconscious Cruelty must be seen like a dream, or rather like a stylish nightmare. The impact is still here and the movie is to be considered as a genuine masterpiece of underground cinema.

Jerome