This is all the more surprising because the story itself is very basic and felt hurried with a palatable rushed feeling. The premise, which was derived from an actual Japanese urban myth, dealt with a VERY creepy lady that roamed the streets. The spokey lady with the name of “The Slit Mouthed Woman” snatches up kids while the police, parents and teachers all searched for those missing kids. Eventually everything omes to a conclusion in a ….you guessed… abandoned house. From that little tidbit of information you can guess the outcome easily. As you can tell the story wasn’t the main selling point of the movie.

Along with the fairly conventional story, the film felt rushed or edited in a haphazard manner, having sequences that seemed random or character’s action that appeared downright odd. Examples would be when Ms. Yamashita (Eriko Sato) jumped into Mr. Matsuzaki’s (Haruhiko Kato) car for no compelling reason or when Mika’s mother randomly knocked on a door and found out the location of her missing child. Yet these flaws didn’t ruin the main selling point of the movie : “The Slit Mouthed Woman”.

As I’m writing this review I have all the lights on and some soothing Camera Obscura playing in the background to ward off any evil minded spirits. I can’t help not seeing those rusty scissors in my mind or the image of the Slit Mouthed Woman hovering in the shadows of a hallway in my mind. This all points to the fact that there was something incredibly jarring about the creation of the Slit Mouthed Woman. Stylistically the Slit Mouthed Woman looked frightening in a way I haven’t really seen. Wearing a stylish vintage coat, model’esque figure, but having the disfigured face along with those rusted scissors was something that spooked me out in a way other horror images haven’t done before. If you’re a hardcore fan of gory horror films than this might seem like all about nothing, but for me it was one spooky image to watch. The violence itself wasn’t shown in graphic detail but usually occurred off screen - which left more to the imagination and ultimately more terrifying.

Other aspects of the film likely to raise eyebrows would be the manner in which the mothers in the movie were portrayed and the physical abuse endured by the children. The three main female characters in the movie were all mothers and they all abused their kids at one point or another. Why exactly the mothers were portrayed in that manner is for shrinks to analyze, but I didn’t find it to be a deterrent to the film itself. Ki Duk Kim would probably have love this aspect of the film.

While “Carved” had quite a few flaws that some people may find to be more of a problem, I was more focused on the creepy lady known as the Slit Mouthed Woman and didn’t mind the other flaws (this is a horror film after all). The film in a way could be thought of as a mishmash of Takeshi Miike’s “Audition” meets Wes Craven’s “Nightmare On Elm Street”, but that would be a roundabout way to say the imagery contained in “Carved” was utterly striking and frightening. I’m sleeping with the lights on tonight.