MovieNight

TOKYO GORE POLICE (Japenese 2008). If you like the actress Eihi Shina who played the psycho-Jap in Takashi Miike’s now classic film Audition (1999) you’ll love her in this movie. It takes place in the near future when a Japanese mad scientist known as the ‘Key Man’ creates a virus that mutates humans into monstrous creatures called Engineers that sprout bizarre weapons from any wound or injury; like a woman who has lactating acid shooting tits or the man whose bitten-off penis turns into a gigantic four foot plus bloody fleshy cannon that he uses to shoot cops and if that is not enough, it then gets worse. I personally liked the woman with the gigantic snapping pussy with teeth but that’s another story. Anyway, the plot has the Tokyo Police Force being privatized to deal with this new threat and they have created a special squad of officers into a quasi-military force known as the Engineer Hunters. Eihi Shina plays Ruka, an anti-social Samurai sword welding Engineer Hunter who wears a black school girl dress. Her job is to hunt down the Key Man and kill all the mutant. The movie clearly isn't concerned with a serious plot. There are lots of gratuitous body parts and lots of blood spraying in this movie; not in any realistic sense but in a very perverse tongue n’ cheek way which goes way over the top in every scene. I laughed alot. Michael Esposito of the Chicago Times gave this film three stars noting that it is as "sick, twisted and gory, but surprisingly funny in an adolescent boy fantasy way— Beavis and Butt-Head would love it.”

MACHINE GIRL (Japanese 2008) The writer/director Noboru Iguchi gleefully if not unashamedly films in graphic detail every bloody dismemberment, decapitation, necrophilia, yakuza ninjas, chainsaw killings, sword wielding, bullet riddled moment. The film starts with gore-splattering sequence in which an innocent-looking Japanese high school girl name Ami Hyūga is killing a gang of bullies. Limbs are being cut off which spurt blood everywhere while others have their faces and bodies literally disintegrated before our eyes as Ami uses a machine gun fused onto her missing lower left arm. After she kills everyone the movie goes into a flashback mode which provides us with the story of how she got to this point in her life. It seems she was an average high school girl, trying to lead a normal life but unfortunately her brother Yu and his friend Takeshi are killed by gang of kids lead by Sho Kimura, the son of the leader of a sinister ‘ninja’ yakuza family. Hell-bent on revenge Ami goes looking for trouble with a take no prisoners attitude as she kills everyone in hyper violent glee but she soon finds herself in way over her head, captured, tortured and getting her arm hacked off. But she escapes, otherwise there would be no movie and she seeks shelter with two garage mechanics, Miki and her husband, the parents of her brother's slain friend Takeshi. They fit the stump that was once her arm with a high-powered machine gun in which she can now use to obliterate her enemies. Oh boy, just what every school girl needs! However, the ‘ninja’ yakuza family have tracked them down. And thus the killing spree begins. After a gruesome blood splattering ninja sword wielding gun shooting battle where Miki’s husband is killed, along with many others, Ami and Miki decide enough is enough and together they unleash an unholy non-stop kill fest against the murderers of their loved ones. If brief; they go to where the yakuza are hiding and another bloody fight ensues. Sadly Miki loses her right foot and eventually dies as Ami fights and kills Sho's father Ryūgi Kimura. Then, upon hunting for Sho, she finds him cowardly hiding behind some students whom he’s holding as hostages. Just as she’s about to kill him, his mother, Violet Kimura, appears and during the fight she reveals that she is wearing a ‘drill’ bra which she presses against Ami's breasts drilling into them in blood splattering glory. It is as this point that Ami notices that one of the students being held hostage has pissed his pants and seizing upon the opportunity, she throws Sho’s mother onto the urine causing her to be electrocuted. Ah, smellovision would be great right now! Anyway, Sho screams, runs to his mother and Ami grabs a chainsaw and the rest they say is history. If you enjoyed how the movie Tokyo Gore Police had enough excessive blood spray to fill a lake then you’ll love this movie because it’s in the same vein, no pun intended.

VISTOR Q (Japanese 2001). This film by Takashi Miike has shocking scenes of extreme violence, lurid bloodshed and bizarre sexual perversion of a dysfunctional family who are creepy and all-together revolting but who really love each other in every way possible; the opening incestual prologue sets the pace. Although, the necrophilia scene where the father is having sex with a nude corpse of a woman he murdered graphically depicting his private part getting ‘captured’ as rigamortis sets in is a classic! This family ends up killing everyone who ever picked on them for being different and believe it or not, there is a happy ending! The noted British film critic and film festival programmer Tony Rayns says, “Of the five or six movies Miike made last year, VISITOR Q is the most offensive.”

AUDITION (Japanese 1999) by Takashi Miike. The movie is about a middle-aged man named Aoyama, played by Ryo Ishibashi, who lost his wife to an illness and is urged by his 17-year-old son to begin dating again. The father’s old friend and colleague, a film producer, devises a plan to hold a mock-audition, in which young, beautiful women would audition for the ‘part’ of Aoyama's new wife, under the impression that they are auditioning for a new film, but with a hidden agenda of him really looking to marry the finalist. During the audition Aoyama is enchanted by Asami Yamazaki; played by Eihi Shiina (born February 3, 1976 in Fukouka, Japan). She is a 24-year-old woman with a soft voice and reserved. His friend warns him about Asami, saying that he has a bad feeling about her. None of the references on her resume were able to be reached and her job history is shaky. The music producer she claimed to work for had gone missing. Unfortunately, Aoyama is so enthralled by her that he becomes blinded by his feelings. What he doesn’t know at this point is that Asami lives in an empty apartment, furnished only with a burlap sack and a telephone. For days following the audition, she sits perfectly still in the middle of the floor next to the telephone, waiting for it to ring. When it finally does, the burlap sack lurches across the room and makes gurgling sounds. She ignores it as she waits a few rings before answering. And the movie gets weird from here on in. There is a bizarre love scene at a seaside hotel where Aoyama wakes up in the morning to find Asami gone. He searches for her; going to all her old haunts only to find a disabled old man in a wheelchair with artificial feet who reveals that he sexually assaulting her as a child. He then goes to the bar where she use to work only to find it has been closed for a year because the woman who was in charge, the wife of a record producer, was found dismembered. When the police tried to put her body back together, they found thirteen fingers, three ears, and two tongues. In the mean time, Asami has now gone to Aoyama’s house and is waiting for him. There are great flashbacks throughout the movie; like when Asami is seen finishing her dinner and vomiting it up into a dog dish. The contents of the burlap sack are now revealed as a man missing both feet, his tongue, one ear and three fingers on one hand crawls naked out of the burlap bag, sticks his face in the bowl of vomit, and hungrily consumes it. Ah, the missing record producer. And, believe it or not, the movie hasn’t gotten strange yet or to the best part! When Aoyama gets home he needs a drink; to which Asmi has previously added drugs. He passes out. Asami then slowly walks into the room dressed in a rubber apron and wearing rubber gloves and proceeds to inject Aoyama with an agent that further paralyzes his body, but keeps his nerves alert so he can appreciate pain. She then begins to torture him ... the graphic enjoyment on her face as she smilingly applies acupuncture needles throughout his body and under his eye-lids; each time saying "Deeper, deeper..." which in Japanese sounds like she's saying "Kitty, kitty, kitty..." is scary. Next, she pulls out some piano wire capable of sawing through flesh and bone with ease, smiling more than ever now, there is a bizarre scene graphically depicting her cutting off his foot, which is not for the faint at heart! ... To this day I cannot watch my neighbor calling "here kitty kitty kitty" to her cat without getting a twitch. I won’t tell you how it ends. This movie has had its share of audience walk-outs.

AB -NORMAL BEAUTY (Chinese 2004) Produced by The Pang Brothers of Hong Kong. The movie details the life of Jiney, a photography student, whom one critic writes, “is a few pounds above organ failure.” She becomes bored by the traditional beauty all around her; pictures of flowers and drawings of the human form are nice but it is the face of death that really gets her motor running. Then one day while Jiney is out with her ever-present camera, she witnesses a car crash and sees the body ejected, hitting the pavement, dead and bloody. She takes photographs and experiences excitement and satisfaction looking at death. Slowly becoming obsessed, she seeks out dead things to photograph. Her lesbian lover and fellow art student, Jas, tries to accept her strange new behavior but eventually she takes a stand and denounces it. Jiney, feeling rejected, starts to date a boy whom she photographs looking as though he’s dead … around this time she also receives a video tape which shows a girl in bondage; tied up in a chair, chained in a dungeon like surrounding, being beaten to death. It scares her, excites her, but before Jiney finds out what to do with her abnormal behavior she is abducted by the likeminded maniac who sent her the video and who also enjoys images of death. This movie features some very disturbing violence against women.

SUICIDE CLUB (Japanese 2002) The movie was written and directed by Sion Sono. The plot begins on May 26 where fifty-four teenage schoolgirls, all about 15 years old, gather on a platform at Shinjuku Station in Tokyo. As the train approaches the station they line up on the edge of the platform, join hands, and starting swinging them while chanting in perfect unison "A-one... and a-two... and a-three!" and then they throw themselves in front of the train just as it arrives. The exceptionally bloody mass suicide bathed in carnage and devastation is horrible to watch as blood splattering body parts graphically fly everywhere; smashing through windows and heads popping like melons under the wheels of the train are almost too much to handle. The film then goes on to deal with a wave of seemingly unconnected suicides that strikes throughout Japan with young kids jumping off roofs, out windows and hanging themselves. Yes, this movie is not for the squeamish. And did I mention there is a lot of blood in this movie? The effort of the police to determine the reasons behind the strange behavior is amusing and the key detective is played by Ryo Ishibashi; who also played the leading role in Takashi Miike’s film Audition. The plot may not seem obvious to western viewers but if you realize that the movie is primarily a scathing and scary commentary on the state of contemporary Japanese society then you’ve got an edge up. Still, I found that there are a lot of really hard questions that I wanted to ask and when the movie was over I found it didn’t commit to giving answers to any of them. Still, although I found the movie genuinely creepy and disturbing, I also found it mesmerizing, profound, and meaningful although deeply depressing as I scratched my head wondering if I had not just seen some kind of Japanese Jordorowski movie where only a dozen viewings will allow me insight into the madness. I liked it!

NORIKO’S DINNER TABLE (Japanese 2006) This movie is written and directed by Sion Sono who also wrote and direct the now classic Suicide Club. The plot takes place before, during, and after the Suicide Club antics in hopes of explaining some of the lingering mysteries that the earlier film had left behind. It details a seventeen year-old teenage girl named Noriko Shimabara who lives in Toyokawa with her quiet family, formed by her sister Yuka, her mother Taeko, and her father Tetsuzo. But like many teenagers, Noriko feels alienated and misunderstood by her parents. She resorts to the internet where she finds a website named Haikyo where other teenage girls in Japan gather; she then makes new friends and eventually runs away where she plans on meeting Haikyo's leader, a mysterious girl who goes by the nickname of ‘Ueno Station 54’. Inevitably they meet up at Locker #54 in Ueno Train Station where it is revealed that ‘Ueno Station 54’ is a pretty young woman named Kumiko. She introduces Noriko to her “family”, a bizarre organization whose purpose is to become connected with people who want them to act out strange roles (like their families, lovers, spouses, etc.). Six months later, ‘54’ girls decide to act out their roles by jumping in front of a train at Shinjuku station and committing suicide; hence the beginning scene of the Suicide Club. The fifty-four girls happily die in their roles, splattering all of the onlookers (including Noriko and Kumiko) in blood. After the events of Suicide Club transpire, Yuka (back in Toyokawa) hears about it and suspecting that her sister might be involved, she also runs off to Tokyo. After the mother Taeko commits suicide, the father Tetsuzo starts looking for clues as to what his children might be up to in Tokyo. It all eventually brings him to Kumiko. In order to get his daughters back, Tetsuzo gets a friend to ‘rent’ Kumiko so she can play the ‘role’ of his wife and the two girls, Mitsuko and Yoko, will play the ‘role’ of his daughters. Strange? OK. But then the plot really thickens and toward the end, or approximately two years after the mass suicide at the train station, you realize why the name of the movie is Noriko’s Dinner Table.

STRANGE CIRCUS (Japanese 2006) This movie is written and directed by Sion Sono who also wrote and direct the now classic Suicide Club. It is a surreal shockfest about a teenage girl named Mitsuko who is forced to watch her perverted father and domineering mother's lovemaking through the peephole of a cello case. When Mitsuko's mother apparently dies, her father forces his daughter to be the victim of his incestuous desires, which drives her to attempt suicide. ... yet all of this is apparently just a novel being penned by a reclusive, wheelchair-bound author named Taeko (who also plays the mother!) about a fictional character named Gozo and his family, or that is until his assistant, a young man named Yuji, sets out on a mission to uncover the terrible truth behind Taeko's “story” … The entire film can be summed up by one line articulated by Yuji as the final line in the final scene before the epilogue - “what's real, and what's not?” ... And then the film gets really, really strange and the cast of charaters makes you realize what a ‘Strange Circus’ it really is!

THE GREAT YOKAI WAR (Japanese 2006) This Takashi Miike film is about the yokai (spirits) who inhabit everything that has ever existed; they can be good, bad or simply mischievous. This movie is about those yokai of waste and discarded items; disgusted with how humans have treated them, they want revenge. The best description reads: “... a young boy moves to a small town after the divorce of his parents. At a local festival, he is picked to be that year's Kirin Rider, a protector of all things good. He soon discovers that his new title is quite literal, as a nefarious spirit of waste begins to wage war with the local yokai and human populations.” … The evil female character is Agi, the Bird-Catching Sprite played by Kuriyama Chiaki. She made her Hollywood debut in Quentin Tarantino's 2003 film Kill Bill, Volume I as Gogo Yubari, the manriki-wielding schoolgirl yakuza bodyguard of Tokyo mob mistress O-Ren Ishii. There are good lessons to learn from this movie. The next time you throw away an old toy, soda bottle, an old pair of shoes or book, ask yourself, “If everything has a spirit, how do they feel if I throw them away as if they were garbage?” … and yes, like all good Japanese monster movies, Tokyo gets destroyed!

SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANJO (Japanese 2000) This Takashi Miike film is based on Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars starring Clint Eastwood. This is Miike's first American feature, perversely cast with Japanese actors in 99 percent of the roles and instructed to speak in contorted English, rendering some of the dialogue indecipherable.The character played by Quentin Tarantino, who is named Ringo, is a lonesome gunslinger who engages in some mighty fancy gunplay concerning a rattlesnake and an egg in front of a blatantly false campfire and background. We then shift to a remote western town in Nevada named Yuta which is lorded over by two rival clans; a white clan named the Genji led by a cool, sleek, walking-manga illustration named Yoshitsune and a red clan named Heike which is led by the psychotic Kiyomori who insists that everyone call him Henry. It seems both clans are hunting for a hidden treasure in the nearby hills. At the height of their conflict a revolver-wielding gunman ‘with no name’ and burdened with deep emotional scars, but blessed with incredible shooting skills, comes to town. He plys his trade to both sides against each other while indirectly helping a prostitute get revenge on the warring gangs. This movie is bathed in dirty tricks, betrayal and love as the situation erupts into a final, explosive showdown with samurai sword lust, kung-fu barroom brawls, a gatling gun, dynamite and massive gun play, with blood, blood and more blood, which remains completely gripping despite the plot. My favorite scene occurs during a spectacular melee where a sawed off shotgun blasts a hole through one hombre's chest allowing another to take aim through the hole in order to shoot an arrow from a crossbow into another guy. What a shot!!!

IMPRINT (Japanese 2006); Showtime initially proclaimed that they were proud to present the directorial ‘Masters of Horror’ anthology on TV but once they reviewed Takashi Miike’s episode, which they had commissioned, they ‘banned’ it from ever being shown; citing it as “just too shocking.” In theory, the idea of this series was to find the best and/or most notorious horror directors of the age, give them an hour to do whatever they wanted but it seems Miike went too far. If I had to give you an overview I’d say this movie is set in the mid 1800s, is about a young American journalist who ventures to Japan to search for the Japanese prostitute he loved and abandoned years earlier. But when he ventures to an island off the coast, he discovers that human demons and whores rule the land where a deformed courtesan awaits his arrival, leading to a tale of extreme cruelty and perverse vengeance … but, believe it or not, it’s a love story

TOKYO ZOMBIE (Japanese 2005) Director by Sakichi Sato. The movie is a Japanese zombie comedy based on a dark comic manga by the same name. This movie is directed by the writer of Ichii the Killer (Sakichi Sato) and the director of that film was Takeshi Miike, and his two co-conspirators, Tadanobu Asano and Sho Aikawa, are the main stars in Tokyo Zombie! So, how can you go wrong with this movie? Anyway, the plot is simple, it revolves around two blue-collar factory workers, Fujio and Mitsuo (Aikawa and Asano) who work at a fire extinguisher plant. They spend their free time engaged in wrestling and jiu jitsu in order to fulfill their dreams of being world-class champions. Mitsuo is the teacher and no matter how hard he tries, Fujio simply cannot beat him. Unfortunately their boss catches them wrestling which leads to them accidentally killing him with a fire extinguisher. They bury the body, as does everyone in Tokyo who must dispose of such unwanted things, in ‘Black Fuji’ which is a fifty plus story kind of a man made mountain of toxic garbage which just so happens turns everyone into zombies. Realizing the dilemma that has befallen the city Fujio and Mitsuo decide to flee and while on the road they come upon a pretty young school girl whom they rescue but during the battle Mitsuo is bitten by a zombie. Convinced that he will become one of the undead, he leaps off a bridge into a river and out of Fujio's life - or so it seems. Then, after a brief anime where five years go by, we find a post-apocalyptic feudalistic society in Tokyo ruled by an evil woman who captures zombies and uses them and surviving low class humans as her slaves. As entertainment for other bloodthirsty old women she stages gladiator-style zombie battles. It is here that Fujio must use all his fighting skills in order to survive. A guess who one of the zombies is that he must fight? But, I won’t give away a classic ending. ... As an aficionados of bad B-movies, I loved this one! The sound track alone will never be gotten out of your head! The review in FANGORIA said it best – “It’s essentially as if KUNG FU HUSTLE and SHAUN OF THE DEAD had a baby.”

AZUMI (Japanese 2003) The title character in this movie is a young girl named Azumi who is brought up as part of a team of ten assassins or chosen warriors who are given the task of killing three warlords that threaten Feudal Japan. The movie sets a chilling tone right at the onset as we watch the children grow in both skills and friendship and then comes the day when we learn that their first mission, to prove their worthiness, is to pair off with whomever they want and, once they all picked their best friends, they are told to fight to death. This is an emotional scene for all as Azumi kills the one she loves. The idea being that those who are too weak to kill their best friends are too weak to fulfill their over-all mission. After this initial bloodshed the teacher, an old man named Gensai Obata and the five remaining children are now ready to go off on their mission. And then the sword wielding bloodbath begins ... and by the end of the movie you can’t help but to love this cute little Japanese school girl in a short skirt with a big sword as she stands amongst the carnage of hundreds of dead and mangled bodies. ... This is just part 1.

AZUMI 2 (Japanese 2005) - Titled 'Death or Love'. ... In this conclusion we find young Azumi and Nagara, the only two surviving members from the original group of assassins, continuing their mission to prevent a civil war. In their hunt for their third and final target, Masayuki Sanada, who is protected by both an army and a dangerous clan, they meet Ginkaku, a person who shows a remarking resemblance with former friend Nachi whom Azumi appears to fall in love. Later, after much killing and bloodshed, Azumi meets up with Tessai the priest who assigned her and the others their originally mission. After discussing this with Tessai, Azumi and Nagara leave to seek out Sanada. A group of government Ninja also accompany them, among them is a young Ninja girl named Kozue who is played by Chiaki Kuriyama. If you don’t know who this actress is, she played GoGo in the now infamous Kill Bill movie. The fight scene with Kozue and Azumi is a crowd pleaser but too short. ... I’d like to say that this movie has a happy ending but ...

THE EYE (Chinese 2002) More properly called Gin gwai. This is the first of a trilogy directed by the Pang Brothers. It should not be confused with the later Hollywood remake starring Jessica Alba in 2008. It is a touching story of a young Hong Kong girl, a classical violinist named Mun, blind from the age of two, who undergoes a cornea transplant but finds her new found sight brings its own macabre rewards. Her first night in the hospital, after surgery, she begins to see a blurry image of a shadow accompanying a patient out of her hospital room. The next morning she wakes only to find that patient died during the night. She is terrified, confused and she confronts her doctor's nephew, who is a psychologist, about this and many other strange figures that she’s beginning to see through her ‘new’ eyes. At first he is hesitant to believe her but admits that in his heart she is "more than a patient" so he trusts her judgment and he even accompanies her on a trip to Thailand trying to find the donor of her eyes. Here the story starts getting really weird and scary. They track down the mother of the donor and learn that her young daughter had committed suicide by hanging herself. It seems that since childhood her daughter had been accused of being a witch and foretelling gruesome events of death and tragedy in the village. ... And Mun now has her gift and what she soon sees ... well, you should watch the movie. I rather liked it a lot.

THE EYE 2 (Chinese 2004). I liked this plot better than the first or THE EYE (2002). Although an implied sequel the plot has absolutely nothing to do with the first. Produced by The Pang Brothers of Hong Kong; this movie has their typical inventive camerawork, well constructed scenes, a few scary jolts and a story line that mixes fantasy, flashbacks, hallucinations and dreams with some present tense reality and impossible events. In some ways the first EYE was scarier as it dealt with a blind girl who gets a corneal transplant from a donor who is psychic & she starts seeing ghosts. EYE 2 details ‘another’ method of ‘seeing’ ghost which is for a pregnant woman to attempt suicide. The plot is simple: after several failed suicide attempts pregnant Joey (Shu Qi) teeters on the brink of madness as she becomes the unwilling recipient of an influx of eerie shadowy figures that float like they're swimming in water. They haunt her pervasively. In an attempt to quell this disturbing phenomenon, she seeks to identify the main female ghost who continual plagues her only to be led to the front door of her secretive ex-lover Sam; the father of her unborn child. Digging into his past, Joey sheds light upon the mysterious twilight world descending upon her. To me this movie brilliantly depicts a Buddhist view regarding part of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In this book, in the third stage known as Sid-Pa Bardo, the soul observes hundreds of couples whom it is to consider as potentially future parents and it is counseled to choose a ‘womb’ in which to incarnate and in THE EYE 2 it clearly shows a ‘soul’ entering the vaginal area at birth in order to enter into the child. But who is the ghost and why does she want to enter into Joey’s baby? Ah, we learn about ‘karma’ in this movie and why, in some cases, the 'River of Forgetfulness' is so important. ... one of my favorite scenes in the movie involves a realistic depiction of what happens to one's body after falling from the top of the building.

THE EYE 3 (Chinese 2005) This is properly called EYES 10. ... According to this movie there are actually 'ten ways' to see ghosts. The first movie details one method, the second movie another and the third shows us the final eight ways; all of which are based on true stories and legends from China and Thailand.