Body Art Movie Review

This short documentary (50 minutes) takes us from the historical origins of tattooing and body piercing all the way to modern plastic surgery.

But Body Art gets its real freak on in the middle -- profiling cultures and people who put enormous holes in their earlobes so they droop down, who use battery acid to get a bright yellow makeup effect, who put so many studs in their lips they can't talk right, to men who have scars chiselled into their bodies so as to take on the appearance of an alligator. The end result is so explicit and grotesque that I was actually nauseous by the end of it.

The conceit is that Body Art tells us about various cultures and the way they look at people who don't fit the mold (in Japan, tattooed people cannot work for the government). To an extent, the movie does present some social commentary with its earnest but extremely dry voice-over, but by and large the movie is a little old-fashioned at heart.

It's a little something they used to call a freakshow.