Guillermo del Toro unleashes a pathologically sadistic fantasy horror film

Rating: 5/10 (20 January 2007)

** Minor spoiler ahead, but nothing crucial **
Having seen the elaborately edited and designed movie trailer as well as the impressive article on del Toro's creatively imagined sketchbook in Premiere magazine, I came in with a neutral expectation.
Pan's Labyrinth is a supremely well-made feature in production design and make-up, among other essential integrients contributing to the standard cinema experience. However, the level of grisly violence -- the cinematic dwelling on the blood and mutilation -- is so off-putting as to be revolting. That leaves a bad taste in my mouth after the movie concludes. That's what del Toro and producers (among them Alfonso Cauron of Y Tu Mama Tambien & Harry Potter 3 fame) wanted in achieving the purpose of pushing the buttons on the audience's reaction, which I find rather disingenuous.
Not that Pan's Labyrinth is a feel-bad movie, because it's a very imaginative story reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. I don't even like schmaltzy Hollywood-esquire contrivances and happy endings in this decade of everyday vapidness, apathy and cynicism, at least in the Americas.
I've never seen a del Toro picture except for the fact I found "Chronos" so laboriously tedious in pacing I hit the stop button on the VCR and returned the rental unfinished & unrewounded. I saw clip bits of Mimic on expanded pay cable TV, which was pretty lame.
I don't discount the fact that Guillermo del Toro is an immensely talented filmmaker, but his fascinated lingering on the prolonged scenes of grisly violence and gore is unbelievably repelling - to say the least. The Fascist villain's mutilated face is particularly too gruesome, even in spite of the acknowledgment he "deserves" such painful wound for his evil acts as depicted before the villain suffers the assault.
For this reason alone, one star is deducted for unnecessarily gruesome scenes of violence that tries to instill the seldomly utilized psychological terror which did not achieve a desired effect. Instead, this inspire only revulsion with "ill-in-the-stomach" horror, as so many typical slasher horror movies usually are.
One exception would be the "Feast Monster" sequence which is actually terrifying to watch under the right circumstance in the dark room or screening during the strange (windy, rainy or stormy) weather late one night. This particular sequence is the nightmare of vivid imagination that would scare unsuspecting young children to the extent they never forget the background story of this monster's penchant for flesh as well as the hideous appearance of the monster. Del Toro and FX team are to be commended for achieving a notable film which tend to inspire terror in some unsuspecting viewers.
However, as I said before, the gore effect left me slightly repulsed (knowing the efficiency of the behind-the-scene FX) so, unfortunately, despite the film's incredible achievement in "cinema-bizarre" fantasy film-making comparable to Terry Gilliam's strange Brazil & 12 Mondays and Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro's one-two punch black humor extravaganza Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, it left me disappointed that I cannot recommend the film to friends and family members without strenuously warning them of the violent content that would be too disturbing for them to endure.
Word of mouth for Pan's Labyrinth may be favorable for the aesthetically genuine cinematic fantasy experience, but the focus on gore FX is a major turn-off so whether the film will do well at the box office is a question mark (the fact that it's a subtitled film in a wide release notwithstanding).
Guillermo del Toro is a technically and creatively good filmmaker, but he needs to lay off the herb in such self-indulgence by showing off the creatively-constructed yet very gross blood 'n' guts FX effects that left some patrons in the audience reeling in utter disgust.
It is my contention that if the grisly gore effect is MINIMAL yet effective without absurd prolonged lingering on the crimson blood pulps and open-gap mutilated wounds -- or at least subliminally staged to achieve the genuine effect of cinematic psychological terror like Robert Wise's The Haunting, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Changeling and Halloween without resorting to the old trick of gore FX to gross out the audience as maximally as possible -- Pan's Labyrinth would be a much more effective fantasy-horror film with the reprehensible evil deeds depicted in vivid details but certainly not so much as to cause the desensitized perception of the passively viewing audience.
Pan's Labyrinth is a good film of artistic and technical merit, but a failure in generating compassion for any character -- even the young female Alice-type protagonist because of the Mexican producers' penchant for the imposition of moral relativism that strip this film of anything remotely compassionate.
"Innocence has a power evil cannot imagine," indeed. But emotionally vacuous thanks to del Toro's self-indulgence in desensitizing gore FX effects.
Señor del Toro, try for the PG rating for Deadman the Movie Adaptation for a change. Enough about grisly violence, you enjoy it too much.
** 1/2 out of four stars