Ryan Nicholson
Pasto Umano

One of the best and most time-tested ways to spend a silly evening with friends is, as we know, to rent a bloody and mindless movie, one of those that exudes trash right from the title.

"Pasto Umano" is one of those films. The plot is a duplicate of "Hostel": five idiots, horny as caimans, go on vacation to China and end up in a seedy porn-hotel with an attached adult cinema where, needless to say, the fate of the kids is to be tortured, filmed, cooked, and fed to the evil & sadistic yakuza boss of the moment. Only two of them manage to escape, aided by a Chinese martial arts expert (in the series "stereotypes? No, thank you"). The five are three girls (Linda, Sarah, and Emily) and two boys (Mike and Darren). Linda and Sarah are two cocaine addicts, one brunette and one blonde, who at a certain point in the film declare they are eager for "peas and chickens stuffed with peas" or something like that (I swear); Mike, the true champion of the movie, is a beefed-up Big Jim with the IQ of a water heater, who speaks by using the words "fuck" and "fucking" instead of commas, delivers macho one-liners like "if it rains shit, we'll have to start swimming" and sounds dubbed by one of those puppets that talk when you pull the string. It's a shame, really, that he's the first to meet an unfortunate end. Completing the group is Mike's best friend, named Darren, and the oriental Emily. They're slightly less idiotic than the friends, in fact, it's the two of them who manage to escape in the end. Needless to say, the actors are complete unknowns and totally incapable.

The villains are characters who aim to be unsettling but, of course, make you laugh: the hotel guard is a hybrid between Albus Dumbledore and a Furby; the "Butcher", who handles the torture with the help of a Bruce Lee imitator, is a hairless Galeazzi in a sadomasochistic outfit; his father, the "director" of the torture, is a sleazy old man dressed as a German tourist; the yakuza boss is a playful little Japanese man who revels like a hedgehog while watching the kids’ deaths live, savoring the "bird roll" (just like that) of poor Mike.

As for the rest, the film abounds with all the necessary ingredients for a great film: slow and boggy pace; footage shot by a drunken cameraman; lousy dubbing; dialogues at an elementary school level; senseless scenes (like the one where Linda, or Sarah, I don’t remember, enters a bathroom full of porno photos with non-working light bulbs, gets attacked by cockroaches, finds Darren behind her who popped out of nowhere and, after telling him "you’re not a complete idiot, I mean, just a little" starts copulating with him); grotesque torture; frequent forays into porn; ridiculous Tarantino quotes and much more.

Do you want to spend an hour and a half of trash but are tired of Alvaro Vitali and know all the various "Violent Shit" by heart? Good, "Pasto Umano" is the one for you. A real piece of hot and steamy shit. Almost like the review.