I bought Pan's Labyrinth during the trip to the mall with Camille, Ching & Rachel. I started watching it the moment I got home. It's safe to say I may have made a mistake in buying it. There's always been something about fairy tales that seems so sinister and freaks the hell out of me. Like the way that Nursery Rhymes are gruesome and probably the worst thing you could sing to a child, probably better of rapping 50 Cent. Do you want to hear about a boy who falls down a hill and cracks his skull? Or a baby falling off a tree? Or a man falling off a wall who can't be stitched back together? Or the mutilation of 3 blind mice? I don't.
Anyway, Pan's Labyrinth is the ULTIMATE nursery rhyme. Probably one of the scariest bits is when the girl, Ofelia, is given a piece of chalk, an hourglass and the faun's 3 fairies and is expected to face a monster. I slept with the light on that night. Ofelia draws a rectangle in her wall, and creates a door to a monster's lair. She sets the hourglass and is insctructed by the faun that she must come back before the last grain of sand falls, or she will be trapped. She ventures into the lair with the 3 fairies to guide her. Before leaving, the faun told her not to eat or drink ANYTHING, as her life will depend on it. Soon, she comes to a room, where a sumptuous feast has been laid. But at the head of the table sits this monster. She looks aound the room, and sees images on the walls of this monster eating children. The moment you see all these images, you just KNOW what's going to happen. Earlier in the movie she retrieved a golden key from this giant toad, and she uses it to unlock a small door in the wall of this room, there is a dagger inside that she takes. By this time it's quite obvious she has to kill the monster with the dagger while it is "asleep". But the idiot girl goes and starts to eat the grapes on the table, even though the fairies try to stop her. I'm sure everyone who's watched this movie was silently screaming at the girl to "NOT EAT THE DAMN FOOD." because it will wake up the baby-eating monster. & sure enough, it wakes up. It is GROSS. It has to take these eyes from a plate in front of it, and put them into the eye sockets in its hands. It starts to come after Ofelia with this staggering walk, arms outstretched. The stupid girl is still eating the grapes, and turns around just in time to see the fairies try and distract the monster when it grabs two of the fairies and bites their heads off. NOW, she starts running. As she gets back to where she's drawn the door, she realises that it is closing, she frantically tries to draw another one, in the ceiling, and tries to climb out of it back into her bedroom. She JUST makes it, as the monster makes a swipe for her legs.
I'm not going to post a picture of the monster, because it freaks me out so much.
The rest of the movie isn't much better. In one scene, her stepfather uses a bottle to smash a young man's nose into his face. Another is a scene where a doctor has to amputate a man's leg without anaesthetic. And the scene where the housekeeper attacks Ofelia's stepfather is just, ugh. She actually stabs him in the mouth. I stopped watching right there. The movie won at least 6 awards. I was a bit surprised to find that it was in Spanish. Thank God for subtitles.