Tokyo Fist (1995)

I dedicate this review to a friend of mine who would rather see passion at every street corner than having to cope with the banality of everyday life. Being a person of many unfocused desires, a person who yearns for freedom during every minute of every day, it would seem that this friend of mine has chosen a life unfulfilled, and ultimately unsatisfying considering how many barriers have been erected to keep our bodies quarantined in the passionless cubicles of conformity. This proves particularly true in terms amorous, where his pain and unruly passion always seem to give a bitter edge to his bittersweet love stories. After talking to this friend on the phone and receiving some mild complaints about my lack of assiduity in updating the present blog, I felt I had to do a very special review for him. Then I thought of the perfect film to reflect his state of mind. It is a film I saw a while back without being quite able to fully grasp its iconography. But now that I think about my friend, and wish to throw him a thorny life preserver, I start to make sense of all the jumbled celluloid used in making this film. I start to see it almost exactly as I had first wished to see it, as a radical exercise in couple’s therapy. After all, passion will make a couple equally happy and unhappy. Passion is a very fickle thing, and one to create outbursts of affection and outbursts of anger. And while couple life is the focus of countless films, it is usually grounded in dramatic verbose ill-suiting the actual experience of love as a passionate expression of the self. With this film, passion is circumvented in truly filmic terms, and it operates from the very violence at the core of the emotion itself, making it one of the rawest love stories out there. I'm talking of course about Shinya Tsukamoto's Tokyo Fist.

Love hurts: Tsuda and Hizuru remedy their qualms
with a rageous boxing exchange (edited with fierceness
by director Tsukamoto himself)

Love hurts

The film stars somewhat of an impotent everyman called Tsuda, a man whose hold on fiancee Hizuru is actually stronger than he suspects. The two of them met in a bakery, where thoughts of sweets seemed to have encouraged sweet thoughts. They are living together in a diminutive Tokyo apartment when Tsuda makes the mistake of inviting school chum, and semi-professional boxer Kojima to share a drink. The latter immediately becomes infatuated with Hizuru, whom he tries to kiss in a sudden burst of passion (while Tsuda is still at work, earning money for his wife). But she coldly refuses his advance, staying 100% faithful to Tsuda. Right after that, a simple misunderstanding propels the narrative toward the unseen depths of the protagonists' psyche, right into the core of their emotions, into the passionate violence that animates them. When Kojima confesses to Tsuda that his fiancee was "very soft", the everyman starts losing his mind, convinced that his impotence has pushed Hizuru to adultery. And while nothing can be farther from the truth, emotional logic makes it so that Tsuda tries to violently reclaim his "lost" wife, trying to prove his masculinity in the process. Eventually, he ends up alienating her, and sending her over to Kojima, who proves to be equally weak-willed and subservient to an increasingly moody Hizuru. Tsuda then starts training to become a boxer in order to match what he considers to be an over-phallic rival and reclaim his prize by force. But Hizuru won't be taken back by force. Actually, she evolves much more than her male counterparts over the course of the narrative, becoming quite a boxer in the process... In the end, a lot of blood was shed, but only to expose humanity to its intrinsic nature, as an uneven congregation of flesh and raw emotions.

It might not come as a surprise to film buffs, but boxing films are rarely about boxing. The Rocky films for instance, are so excessive in their depiction of fights as to completely, and willingly eschew realism. Fists fly and they land almost every time. The pugilists sustain a murderous amount of blows and come out with cosmetic bruises and cuts. The reason for this is obvious: boxing here is not used as a reality in itself, but as a symbol of the protagonist's resilience and, by extension, the fighting spirit of America. As Sly so eloquently put it in the final chapter of the series (reviewed here): "It ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!". In Tokyo Fist, boxing is used as emotional catharsis. It is a way for the characters to externalize the heated feelings derived from the frustrated love triangle in which they are involved. Coupled with the violence of the editing, the violence of the sport itself becomes a surprisingly raw expression of our basest humanity. That said, the fist thus becomes an unbridled externalization of the emotional self whereas Rocky's bruised midsection served merely as canvas on which to showcase the pain involved in the quest for self-improvement and the showcase of determination.

Tsukamoto as a romantic

While Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tokyo Fist seems to stray away from the cyberpunk roots laid down in Tetsuo: The Iron Man, it merely drops the "cyber" in cyberpunk (read on for details). It is thus an equally fitting addition to his oeuvre insofar as it proves to be yet another materialization of romantic madness. There is no doubt that Tsukamoto is a true romantic at heart, using love as the major driving force behind his hyperkinetic accounts of desperation and hope. And while one might argue that the use of the labyrinthine city, or "metallic" city, is the central leitmotif of his work, I would say that it is merely subservient to the filmic expression of amorous emotions. Thus, both love and the city end up entrapping his characters like so many puppets. And if the city always appear to clamp down on his protagonists, it is their unruly emotions that provide the rhythm at the heart of his narratives. In Tokyo Fist, the oppressive city is relegated to the background (or the foreground, as exemplified by a beautiful shot in which the reflection of a building over the window of his cab entraps the protagonist, effectively entrapping him twice within the frame). And thus the raw emotions of the protagonists take center stage. Well center stage and the backstage as they literally animate the film (through editing).

Although it dwarfs the protagonist, the metallic
city remains in the background

Tsukamoto's films proceed from a powerful form of "emotional realism", opposite of which is the "dramatic realism" of American films. Such a storytelling technique is reminiscent of the Soviet tradition, wherein editing is used not only to create meaning between shots, but to create meaning through rhythm. Here, we have truly a pulse-pounding film in the sense that its rhythm is that of a heartbeat, beating at a normal pace when everything is calm, but alarmingly fast once rage sets in. The addition of loud industrial music only adds power to the depiction of the raw emotions displayed by the characters. The result is a series of aggressive sequences, including several hyperkinetic fights, meant to absorb the viewer right into the film, and make him partake directly into the protagonists' actions, putting him squarely at the center of their resolve. By attacking the senses with an impressionistic flurry of shots, Tokyo Fist will not leave the viewer unscathed. And in the end, he will feel all the bruises and cuts experienced by the protagonists as if they were his own, wondering if the boiling blood in his veins is about to burst out and rain down on the walls.

Non-cyber punk
Now is time to ask a question which I think is pertinent to our analysis of Tokyo Fist as a gutsy, visceral film. That question is the following: what happens to cyberpunk when it is deprived of its cybernetic element? The answer is quite simple: there remains punk. But what is punk? For the sake of argument, let us posit a working definition centered on the pursuit of authenticity. After all, "punk ain't no religious cult. Punk means thinking for yourself". But authenticity runs much deeper than ideas. It runs right down to the unsightly guts and gut feelings which we try so desperately to hide. In so many words, punk is the unbridled expression of the primordial humanity which we restrain through social mores. This unbridled expression of the visceral self is perhaps best exemplified by the infamous incident involving the Sex Pistols boarding a Holland-bound plane at the Heathrow Airport. Some observers referred to this as the “spitting incident at Heathrow”, as members of the band reportedly spat on passengers and airport officials. According to the The Guardian, dated January 7th 1977, one of them is even said to have vomited (on whom or what is not specified). Just like the raw words that came out of the Sex Pistols’ mouths and which tremendously offended the uptight British society, their unsightly spit (and vomit) were also instruments of their radical art, or aspects of the “raw” humanity that lurked behind the layer of civility which we entertain as our true “human” face. But humanity knows better than to be shackled by good mores as it is always ready to burst out and obliterate face with bowelfuls of repulsive, semi-liquid expressions of itself. That said, if spit and vomit exist as the necessary underside of human existence, so too does violence exist as the necessary underside of romance, seeing how our deepest emotions are entangled with our basest "flesh" components. Evidently, flowers and gift-wrapped diamonds might seem like the only true expression of love to those who think they can transcend the flesh, but in the end, everybody knows that they aren’t. Love is a powerful emotion, and as such, it cannot elude the utter violence of its rawest expression. Jealousy, pain, uncertainty, but also tearful joy, exhilaration and sexual bliss: these are the things that love is truly about. Love is both crap and the rose that's blooming out of that crap insofar as it causes pain, but not without offering a way to transcend that pain. Love is equally enslaving as it is liberating. And Tokyo Fist perfectly captures that equivalence by entrapping his characters in a endless waltz of violence that eventually liberates them through the understanding of one's self as a being of passion that will experience equally low lows as high highs insofar as one embraces the dictates of that passion. By further equating bloodletting with the expression of raw emotions, Tsukamoto makes it a point to convey the expression of humanity in true punk fashion.

Unrestrained humanity gushing out of the passionate man:
director Tsukamoto is crying blood in Tokyo Fist

During the credits, just before the title appears, one can notice a distinctly animated layer of flesh rippling away from the center toward the edges of the frame. Symbolically, the film thus emerges out of the director's guts in a direct transfer to the screen. His starring in the film is not a coincidence either as we understand that the present enterprise comes straight from the heart, becoming in the process of its elaboration a cathartic release for the author. And if his sweat is involved in making the film per se, so his is lifeblood, which we see gushing out of his body on several occasions in a bid to reveal what the narrative is really about, namely the raw expression of humanity. The bruised face of Kojima after the final boxing match is yet another reminder of what lies beneath sport as an orderly activity. The blood that spurts out abundantly from his face marks the intensity of his new resolve, born out of the violence inherent to his confrontation with Tsuda and Hizuru. It represents the epitome of self-achievement in the sense that it allows Kojima to get a tangible sense of his own self, the limits thereof and the passion that erupts from every of his pores (as represented by the blood itself). Yet, Kojima and Tsuda are not the only ones to get acquainted with the possibilities of their inner self. Hizuru also gets a sense of self through self-mutilation. Her adorning intrusive jewelry embroidered directly into her flesh is itself an experience in recognizing one's own corporeality (read corpo-reality). Hence, the puncturing of one's flesh, the bleeding, the pain, all those things against which we try to protect ourselves are but the inner side of our rawest emotions, which we also strive to hide under the masks (and suits) of civility. After all, very few people opt for passion in their daily life, judging that it is too powerful an emotion to master. And so too do people try to keep their bodily fluids inside, save for that one act during which humans become akin to beasts and indulge in their most primary function. Passion can bleed you dry, but it can also make you closer to your true self than anything else. And it is almost impossible to strike a balance between the empowering aspects of passion and its darker aspects. Fortunately, the film addresses this issue head-on, without fussing over silly dramatic details.

Tokyo Fist is a constant clash, a clash between the city and the individual, a clash between outward civility and inner chaos, between rage and restraint, between sights and sounds, between man and woman. And from that clash emerges two invaluable things: the raw expressive power of cinema used as catharsis for the author, and the crucial realization of our hidden humanity. Truly, Tsukamoto's film is a powerhouse of unrestrained emotions and one of the most accurate depiction of a true love story out there. A considerable achievement for one of the best contemporary Japanese filmmakers.


4/5 A masterpiece of expressive art that reaches deep into the heart of humanity to salvage our most powerful emotions. A love story as violent and unforgiving as any you will experience under the sign of passion.

Horny House of Horror (2010)

This unimaginative, technically inept horror film created for the Japanese home entertainment market fails to transcend the overcrowded sub-genre from which it hails. Fans of Japanese cinema shouldn't be surprised by the eminent lack of production values here and by how straightforward and predictable the narrative turns out to be. Casual horror fans might either be aroused or put off by the copious amounts of sexual themes and genital violence, but this comes only as very mild recommendation for undiscriminating gorehounds. Most people will want to steer clear of this one.

Bland salarymen as protagonists, baseball outfits,
gross-out humor, nudity aplenty and geysers of blood
with nobody at the helm: here's another typical entry
in Japanese gore cinema

When three everymen decide to celebrate their last days together (the protagonist being engaged to a domineering woman who disapproves of his friends and their unabashed love for baseball), they stumble upon the titular massage parlor and are quickly drawn in by its suspiciously low prices. Obviously, these are only meant to veil the actual function of the bordello, which is to mutilate horny men during the act of sex for the entertainment of some perverts watching the whole thing live. But the naive protagonists pay no mind, and are quickly drawn into a nightmarish world of deadly sex toys and ugly decors. Likewise, the viewer is caught in a series of increasingly ugly sets, increasingly annoying antagonists (most of which is Akemi's foul-mouthed lead whore), and increasingly unfunny antics meant to amuse only the most undiscriminating of toilet humor fans, with plausibility being a mere afterthought on the whole. Granted that the vast majority of men value their penises much more than I do, I still doubt that they'd risk death in order to reclaim their severed organ in hopes of reattachment. Seeing how this is the kind of pressing matter that the film addresses as some of its most dramatic issues, you should easily be informed as to the level of this effort.

That said, the film features an incredible amount of penile trauma and blood showers, with lots of gratuitous female nudity to entice viewers while they are repulsed by the lingering promise of castration. The focus here is put squarely on gore, rubber prosthetics and juvenile humor instead of any coherent attempt at creating an affective or engrossing narrative. While this should be just enough to delight fans of the genre, it won't be anyone else's cup of tea. Just picture this for a spell: a close-up of a girl's butt shot at an angle so as to barely hide her vagina from which a shower of blood violently spurts, followed by the severed penis inside her, all of this punctuated by the ungodly screams of the male victim. If you really, really want to see such stuff, despite the incredibly crappy technical framework of the film, then go right ahead: enjoy! By the way, it will be hard for one to interpret such an attack as feminist backlash against the patriarchal Japanese society since the female perpetrators are but slave agents working for a male crime boss. Obviously, if you can manage to identify with the dumb protagonists, then you might find yourself somewhat troubled by their ordeal, in which case you might actually find an angle from which to successfully enjoy the film. Otherwise, I'm sure you wouldn't even consider buying a ticket for such a title. And nor should you.

"Get a hard-on and I cut your dick": if you can appreciate
the deeper implications of such a prank, then please
rent the film...

Of course, the film also score some points for its unabashed showcase of nudity (male and female alike). For those who like her, I must mention the presence of porn starlet Asami in a typically raucous role, that of a veteran cock muncher equipped with a set of metallic vagina dentatae. Personally, I have a hard time enjoying her tomboy antics and her deep, raspy voice and I was much more attracted to the more dramatic, more sympathetic, but eventually more traditional character played by gorgeous Saori Hara, another porn actress. The luckless whore entangled in a world of intimidation and blackmail will certainly sound more appealing to most film-goers, but in the end, the joyous, mass-murdering cock-slasher would have a better dramatic potential, had her character been properly handled. At any rate, characterization is not the film's strong suit, nor is story structure, direction, production or any important technical area, the sole effective department being that of special effects, which manages to produce all of the functional elements of the film, namely the latex prosthetics and onscreen blood meant to gross out the audience.

Saori Hara (born Mai Kato) is a sight to behold. Unfortunately,
the same can't be said about the film's sets, cinematography,
graphic humor, art direction, acting, editing...

Personally, I bought a ticket for Horny House of Horror just to fill some time. And I soon found out that this was the film's main function too: fill some time. But seeing how I could've been doing anything else than watching this stuff, I also realized that time can be spent instead of filled, spent in order to reap future benefits and not just immediate thrills. That said, I quite enjoyed the opening cartoon depicting the function of Japanese whorehouses within society: instructive and lighthearted despite the adult material at hand. I should've left right after...


1/5 This cheap effort in button-pushing is recommended only for die-hard Japanese horror fans and undiscriminating gorehounds.

Helldriver (2010)

Loud, dark and filled to the brim with compulsory slow motion shots of gushing blood, this is a typical example of Nikkatsu/Sushi Typhoon's recent line of gore-drenched action melodramas. Relying on a derivative storyline and flat characters constructed from traumatic flashbacks, Helldriver manages to reach its goals not with the accumulation of pickled body parts and blood hoses within the gloomy scenery, but with some genuinely exhilarating battle scenes scattered about, mostly near the end, and a crowd-pleasing screenplay involving many key concepts of the zombie sub-genre.

The story is simple, but it involves many heterogeneous elements making for a surprisingly coherent, if completely implausible whole. Kika (Yumiko Hara) is a school girl who comes home one day only to find her helpless father being murdered by her psychotic mother (Eihi Shiina) and uncle, caught grounding the meat harvested from his severed legs in order to eat it succulently later. Joining the endless parade of emotionally shattered schoolgirls in the Japanese genre film landscape, Kika vies revenge and she pits her resolve squarely against her demented mother. While facing each other atop a car near the projects they call home, evil Rikka is suddenly struck by a meteor which digs a round hole in her body, right where her black heart used to be. In order to survive and commit further atrocities, she decides to rip her daughter's heart out and plug it back into her severed, but still pulsating arteries. Logic is suspended for a spell as she does so, leaving the heroine to die in front of her eyes while she laughs frantically.

The bitch is back: devilish temptress Eihi Shiina stars
as monstrous head zombie Rikka

Fast-forward many months, as Kika awakens to a new world order in which the recently dead are rising from the grave and eating the living as a result of the widespread infection caused by alien fumes from the meteor. Following pressures from human rights groups claiming that "zombies are people too", Japan is split in two halves, not unlike the British Isles from Neil Marshall's Doomsday. One half shelters the disenfranchised survivors, while the other half acts as a vast reservation for the infected. All the while, the government is secretly elaborating a program of zombie-killing cyborgs meant to eradicate the plague, the prototype of which is Kika, harboring a metal-plated, external pace-maker and a chain-katana plugged to a backpack full of gasoline.

As the plot unfolds, Kika befriends the head of a humble orphanage and his last remaining protegee, both of which are rummaging through the zombie wastelands, harvesting zombie horns for a local kingpin. You see, the grounded horns are used to create a powerful, hallucinogenic drug fetching a high price amongst the desperate poor living in shantytowns near the border. But when the battle-weary trio is arrested during a drug bust, they are forced by the new, anti-zombie government to infiltrate the Northern reservation and annihilate the head zombie, source of the plague. Of course, that head zombie is none other than Rikka, whose evil knows no bound and whose beating heart was stolen from a daughter hellbent on getting it back. The ensuing series of battles is not to be missed.

Not unlike Tokyo Gore Police, Helldriver is
also a crude political satire

I apologize for this lengthy, and mostly superfluous description of the film. Let's just say I got carried away trying to expose every one of the numerous plot points making up the narrative. After all, while the film goes all over the place, discussing important issues pertaining to drug addiction, government abuse, poverty and human rights, all within the restrictive framework of the Nikkatsu action melodrama, it manages to make sense, in a twisted, synthetic sort of way. And although no one will attend the film hoping to find anything other than ruthless gore and grotesque monsters, it's fun to find some substance in the screenplay, which, while not fully original, is a worthy addition to the zombie sub-genre, if only for its all-inclusive take on the living dead mythos.

Still, this is a crowd-pleaser, complete with imaginative, highly energetic action sequences and loads of immoral violence, directed at everyone from innocent bystanders to bloodthirsty zombies. Using a jittery camera, rapid editing and a super-loud soundtrack, the film provides all the excitement one could expect from such fare, while throwing many neat gimmicks all across the battlefield. The protagonist's motored chain-katana is one of those, and so are the modular zombie limbs used to create horrendous vehicles, flying booby traps and over-powered composite zombies. The grand finale set atop a flying giant made from thousands of slithering zombies perfectly exemplifies the extravagant Japanese approach to genre film-making, one that relegates the dramatic issues so dear to Western cinema to the backseat of a hot-rod driven by the immediate impulses and desires of the film audience. And while such an approach is bound to exacerbate the shallowness of its narrative material, it makes for some pulse-pounding, highly-entertaining films that are unimpaired by morality or plausibility.

Helldriver, your number 1 source for chicks
with metal breastplates and chain-katanas

In the end, all you need to know about this film is that the action is fast and furious and the violence messy and ruthless. Add to that a sexy, tall and thick-lipped protagonist and a manic performance by iconic villainess Eihi Shiina, and you've got what genre fans crave: a relentless effort made with contagious zeal by a bunch of genre fans like themselves. That said, the film contains a fun little reference to Odishon that shan't be lost on fans of Miike's seminal one-scene film. Enjoy.

2,5/5 Zany, but derivative crowd-pleaser is, as tagline states, a full-fledged "joy ride".

Urotsukidôji: Legend of the Overfiend (1989)

Review #0042

This infamous animated film is continuously misrepresented in the West, being often categorized as porn, when it's actually a Gothic horror tale (which, by definition, includes sexual themes and imagery associated with transformation). And while they could eventually accept that simple fact, North Americans will probably never consider such a film as a legitimate work of art on the back of their rigidly puritanical and self-centered mentality. Such disregard also stems from the bothersome, but deeply-rooted Western belief according to which animation is children's fare, a contention which posits that the (very) rigid and moralistic Disney/Pixar narrative is almost the only one suitable for animated material. That's grossly under-estimating the awesome artistic potential of squirming tentacles, but most of all, it's confusing container and content. After all, animation is only a technique used to convey an idea, which is immediately freed from the shackles of reality. As for the animated content, its possibilities are endless, although it is often squarely used to showcase national quirks, which is precisely the case with this typically Japanese outing.

RANT ALERT! RANT ALERT! RANT ALERT!
(Please skip the following three paragraphs if you don't care for a rant against the MPAA)

If you're a productivity-minded society with mostly commercial imagination, reproducing sanitized art products ad nauseam, then you'll surely get the full gamut of talking animals and machines dispensing eon-old lessons about family life and friendship. But if you're a desperately expressive society obsessed by dark dreams of insularity, the nuclear Holocaust and sexual inadequacy, then you might get something like Urotsukidôji, a truly artistic endeavour that's both entertaining and cultural-specific. A film that features fairly explicit sexuality (but nothing hardcore or overly exploitative) ranging from the downright horrific to the sweet and innocent. A film that shows sex as a crucial transformative process... just like it is in real life. You might not know this, but sex is actually a very important part of life! It touches every single person from every culture, every religion and every walk of life. Then why is it banned from the screen? Why should I be ashamed to say that I enjoy watching tentacle-rape scenes that are narratively crucial, gorgeously animated, and full of pulse-pouding action?

The answer can be found in the institutionalized puritanism that plagues the MPAA and other such bodies of morality-control. Whenever sex is approached in a meaningful, level-headed way, these organizations always rear their ugly heads. Many complex, awesome films such as Boys Don't Cry, La Mala Educacion, Clerks, Crash (1996), The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, Eyes Wide Shut, La Grande Bouffe, Happiness, In the Realm of the Senses, Kids, L.I.E., Last Tango in Paris, Lust, Caution, Mysterious Skin, Requiem for a Dream, and Where the Truth Lies were either brutally edited down or slapped an NC-17 rating (a kiss of death at the box office) thanks to the evil MPAA. Yet, none of these films is exploitative in any way; many of them being actually very tame, such as Clerks who merely discusses sex in a humorous, day-to-day manner. Now, that's what happens when corporate interests outweigh the relevance of art, when dishonest individuals such as Jack Valenti invoke "the greater good" to justify dubious business decisions, and when lobbyists run democratically-appointed officials. Without trying to boast, let me just say that in Quebec, a harmless comedy such as Office Space is rated G while it is rated R just across the border for "bad" words such as 'shit' and 'fuck', which are uttered maybe twice in the whole film. Why? Because film ratings are awarded here by a non-biased governmental organization that appraises content in light of the psychological impact it might have on its audience, not by a partisan Hollywood excrescence that uses "morality" to regulate the market.

Just imagine... Imagine a world without MPAAs and legions of decency, where touching, meaningful films such as Mysterious Skin and Happiness could be enjoyed and discussed by mass audiences, where Robin Williams could properly sing the hilarious "Blame Canada" at the Oscars, and where horror fans could watch pornographic sequences of animation without being tagged as disturbed perverts. Because that's another thing, the generally negative outlook on pornographic animation. It's as if it was somehow worst than live-action pornography. It's as if the tortured toons of hentais had it worst than the unilingual Russian immigrants who nervously stare at the camera while getting agressively double-fucked in mainstream porn. Are you kidding me? Pornographic animation is harmless. In it, no real girl is force-fed cum or anally sweeped by twelve-inch cocks. It's just this silly idea that people have according to which it's nerdy to jerk off to a "drawing", however life-like it might be. Personally, I think that the super-agile, unnaturally proportionned hentai heroines offer much more in the way of fantasmatic possibilities than any live girl could. I don't think that carnal lust for animated characters is any weirder than the consumption of "regular" pornography, insofar as it doesn't alienate the viewer from actual women (which he should love and respect above all). I mean, I know animation is not real, but so are Hollywood starlets. I know I will never fuck Motoko Kusanagi, but I will never fuck Megan Fox either!

END OF RANT

Sorry. I didn't originally want to write such a long rant. It's just that my fingers were on fire while I typed, fueled as they were by my hatred for the MPAA. On the other hand, I couldn't really review a film as controversial as Legend of the Overfiend without putting it into context. And now that I have, there is nothing much more to add other than to say that it is a great horror film that features unforgettable imagery, crisp animation, insane action scenes, and a tight, involving plot with epic proportions. It delivers on almost all fronts, and although the English dubbing (made by porno actors) defuses many emotional scenes, it still benefits from true-to-life, street accents that perfectly befit the irreverant script. Thus, we get "fucking Nagumo" instead of "damned Nagumo" or "fornicating Nagumo". The film also has some historical importance since it is the first incarnation of "tentacle porn" on the big screen. That said, such a form of erotica is not new at all for its roots actually date back to the Edo period. Case in point: below is a reproduction of the famous woodcut featuring The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife by renowned artist Hokusai, dating back to 1814 (app.).


The premise of the film is as follows. According to the legend, a god known as the Chôjin is born every 3,000 years on Earth to unite the three parallels worlds (the Ningenkai, human world, Jûjinkai, world of man-beasts, and Makai, world of demons) in one peaceful whole. Content with the prophecy, foul-mouthed man-beast Amano Jyaku has spent the last 300 years wandering Earth in search of the one who would become the Chôjin (thus his nickname, urotsukidôji, which means "wandering kid") while the demons of Makai (such as the awesome Suikakujû) plot his demise. Surprisingly, the Chôjin seed is found within a nerdy college student, Nagumo Tatsuo, a young man who enjoys his love for angel-faced Akemi by peeping and masturbating while she's changing clothes in the locker room. A young man whom bodily harm and sex can transform into a gargantuan demon with powerful phallic tentacles. But is he really the Chôjin? And if so, what is his true agenda?

What starts out as a colorful coming-of-age story perfectly combines with the Gothic elements of mythology that gradually seep into the plot, bringing along warped concepts about sexuality and manhood which the teenage characters must face head-on. As the film progresses, the concern shifts from Nagumo and Akemi's budding romance to the upcoming apocalypse via the messianic prophecy of the Chôjin (which, instead of provoking dubious "immaculate" conceptions, relies on its numerous glowing cocks and exploding seeds to impregnate women). On the way to oblivion, intriguing new characters appear such as Suikakujû, demon rival of Amano Jyaku responsible for the 1923 earthquake, and Niki Yûichi, a human rival of Nagumo who replaces his own penis by a demon's in order to become a sort of anti-Chôjin. This is real Gothic horror in the sense that it includes many grotesquely unnatural "romances" bearing catastrophic results as well as dubious "pacts" made between demons and power-mad humans. And do these demons look great, or what? Nowhere better than in Japanese animation! For the most part, they are grotesquely deformed humanoids with extra mouths and phallic, tentacular limbs that bind and rape nubile, but hairless human girls. In other words, they are creatures of pure, depraved pleasure and their bodies are built accordingly. Quite a welcome change of design from that of the tame, sexless Cenobites of the boring Hellraiser mythology... As for the action fan, Legend of the Overfiend provides him with many great, gory fights (the best of which involves Suikakujû and Amano Jyaku on serpentine mounts duking it out over the Tokyo night sky) and a typically extravagant finale featuring the fiery destruction of the city. For the non-discriminating aesthete, it's got fluid and colorful animation and awesome monster designs, combined with the best results during Akemi's initial rape. Sure, it's not Miyazaki, but it's certainly not Dragonball either.


4/5 A unique, historic effort with an epic scale.

Uzumaki (2000)

Review #0040

Now, here's a film with a one-track mind: uzumaki, the spiral, the line that goes round and round and round and round until we all transform in suicidal madmen or slimy snails. It's a pattern in nature, but also a pattern in the noblest of arts: pottery. It attracts the eye and drags it, along with its proprietor, into the nether realms of human thoughts. It may be a bait used by a Snake God or a curse that befell a small town and its wholesome inhabitants. We are not sure, but then, how can we be? We are already knee-deep in the whirlpool that is Uzumaki!


Have you ever stared at a snail shell or at the water flushing down the toilet, wondering how a perfect shape as the spiral came to be? Do you love pottery, but can't determine why? Do you feel the urge to drink liters and liters of water to quench that bothersome, bulging excrescence in your back? If you answered 'yes' to any of those questions, I'm sure Uzumaki will mesmerize you. But beware! It might also make you want to slice the tip of your fingers off. OK. Enough jokes. It's just that Uzumaki is such a manic, fun-loving and unpretentious little film that it puts a vacuous smile on your face and makes you wanna go CRAZY! It's a gimmick film, sure, but one that takes it all the way, right up to the extravagant finale. But most of all, it is a savvy and original project which benefits from both the Japanese's technical savoir-faire (particularly in terms of framing and composition) and their love for the weird and hypnotic.

The pretitle scene features a nice variation, a twist if you will, on the classic Hitchcockian "spiral" tracking. Starting with a close-up on a splattered corpse, and using fading graphic matches, the camera manages to ascend an entire spiral staircase while keeping the corpse in a spiralling frame. With such a clever, dizzying opening, we immediately know that the uzumaki gimmick is for real. This is confirmed by an early scene in which high school protagonist Kirie is "surprised" by a nerdy suitor framed laterally, then upside down. And that's not mentioning other such technical uzumakis as the irises on molding clay. Of course, the scenery is also peppered with spirals such as clouds, smoke, snails, pasta, 6s and 9s, which sometimes feel contrived. A bit like easter eggs scattered about for viewers to yell: "Hey, look! Another uzumaki right over there!" I guess that's also part of the fun, especially for Where is Waldo? fans... At any rate, it's great to see such a viral gimmick investing all aspects of the film in an attempt to entrap us as well as the characters.


Based on the eponymous manga by Junji Ito, Uzumaki is the story of "a strangeness" that befell a small town. It's the word used by protagonist Kirie Goshima in an attempt to resume the diegetic events: "strangeness". Early on, she catches her friend Shuichi's father manically videotaping snail shells. When she mentions this to the young man, his face becomes stern. "Maybe it wasn't him..." says Kirie to humor him. "It was him", he replies. Then he suggests he and Kirie should elope before they get caught in the uzumaki curse. Hesitant and attached to her own father, Kirie stays put, despite increasing evidence of the curse. Shuichi's father gets madder and madder, obsessed with the uzumaki to the point where he commits ritualistic suicide (in a quite down-to-earth, but original way). Students start transforming into snails, sluggishly making their way across the classroom and spewing goo around. Shuichi's mother gets crazy, as well as Kirie's father. Everything is absorbed in the titular vortex.

Convenient title, Uzumaki, because of all its connotations. But when applied as a narrative and symbolic pattern, it works surprisingly well. But most important of all, it's fun! Almost hypnotic... It's fun to watch all the weird little events that make up the story, and eventually witness the whole gamut of spirals, which we find in increasingly incongruous places as the pace picks up. In the twirling of eyes in their sockets, in bodies wrapped around car tires, and worst of all... in millipedes. God I hate millipedes, especially when... well, you'll see if you rent the film. Uzumaki keeps us excited with tentalizing chapter titles and the promise of increasing weirdness, thus, of increasingly elaborate special effects. In the end, it works exceptionally well, thanks in most part to the solid direction which keeps those special effects in check and to the lack of any contrived explanation that would lessen the mystery surrounding the hypnotic spiral. Actually, the "hero" reporter character, which does feel contrived, dies while bringing his findings to Kirie and Shuichi, leaving us with only scraps of information gathered from a short montage of him in the library. It's possible to "make sense" of what happens, if you care to do so, but the story works equally well as that of the uzumaki curse. Plain and simple. A vortex that swallows all in its intricate design.

3/5 A well-made gimmick film with strong Japanese flavor.

All Night Long 2: Atrocity (1995)

Review #0034

This second entry in the infamous All Night Long series is not a sequel. It's just another bloody story of revenge pitting nerds against homicidal gang members. Shunichi is a typical recluse nerd enamored with a naked plastic model. He mostly stays home chatting on the Internet (a very early, crude version thereof) because outside roams a sadistic gang of bullies hellbent on torturing him. Their leader, a soft-demeanered psycho wearing all white, is apparently an old friend who's got a considerable crush on him. After a series of grueling trials (including the crushing of his beloved model, cigarette burns to the genitals, severe beatings, and a sordid night out where he is forced to torture a raped, starved, nail-less, humiliated, fork-punctured girl), Shunichi finally manages to find some friends off the Internet who are willing to lend him the money he "owes" his bullies. That night, they celebrate. Until they are all taken hostage by the gang and tortured "all night long". In the end, everybody is dead (even the gerbil) except Shunichi , who has taken justice by the sword, thus matching the ruthlessness of his captors.


This film is akin to theater. It is shot in bare, interior sets using a cheap video camera that manages to capture every sordid detail in the frame. Using almost no artifice (including close-ups and camera movements), the film is all about content, that is the extreme cruelty of the gang members and the bloody retaliation that ensues, which we are forced to watch from beginning to end. Confronted head-on with this surprisingly vicious violence, the viewer is in for a very unpleasant, nerve-racking experience.

Atrocity is one of the most depressing, disturbing films I have ever seen. There is nothing good, or uplifting about the protagonist. He spends his time alone in a dark room filled with disorganized piles of stuff, with no family or friends to look after him. And when he does make friends, they are savagely tortured in front of him. His most faithful companion is the mute plastic model, which he lovingly paints and kisses to a soft, sad tune. I have tears in my eyes just thinking about it: extreme solitude embodied by this scene of a boy and his plastic lover (shot to that damn syrupy song!). I was also disturbed when the innocent gerbil was splashed with (fake) blood. For me, that was another symbol of innocence soiled. Everything in the film is dark, twisted but most of all, inescapable. The faith of Shunichi was sealed the instant that bunch of sadistic gaylords set sights on him. Unfortunately, he is not the only victim here. There are two young (and pretty) girls whose treatment could infuriate the most stoic of women. And two other male victims who are forced to chew knives or watch their girlfriend being drugged and raped.

Atrocity didn't get a theatrical release because Eirin (the bad-ass Japanese rating board that fought to get tame Battle Royale banned) wouldn't allow it, saying the "overall tone of the film was unacceptable". Although I don't agree with any form of censorship, I must say that the film's tone is indeed unacceptable (for the general public). For the first 65 minutes, it almost solely features sadistic tortures dished out on innocents, while the last 12 minutes only shows sadistic tortures dished out by soiled innocents on the guilty. Overall, all we observe is the sick pleasure of sick individuals. Nihilists, to say the least, who value human life only insofar as other people's pain is the remedy to their own ailments. Why anybody with a healthy mind would want to see this is highly questionable.

Now, whether the film is a serious psychological study of extreme, asocial behavior (typical of the Japanese do-or-die mentality) or simply a despicably exploitative piece of garbage is up to you, the viewer. But ethical questions aside, the film is intense as very few and it features many memorable scenes of real-life horror. It may be lacking some production values, but it is undeniably effective as a masochistic experience. Watch it, then you will feel completely hollow.

2,5/5 A cheap film that works.

Pinocchio 964 (1991)

REVIEW #0025!

Fukui's first feature film is this confusing, hyper-kinetic account of an android's martyr. When cyber-prostitute Pinocchio 964 is thrown out in the street for impotency, he wanders into the arms of Himiko, an amnesic young woman who takes him under her wing. She offers him shelter and food, tries to teach him to speak and helps stimulate his memory. Unfortuantely, she also shares her bed with the strange character (at least that's what we're entitled to think after a freeze-frame of their tongues intertwined fades to black). This encounter seems to poison her as she starts to stagger and puke frantically (in what is perhaps the lenghtiest vomiting scene in film history!) Ill and angry, she takes it all out on Pinocchio, torturing the poor, screaming android quite nastily, and eventually selling him to the headhunters sent by his creator. The ending is pure Japanese pulp as Pinocchio and Himiko "merge" together through inflated-head-transplant.


First of all, let me just say this: if you do not fancy Japanese genre cinema, steer clear of this one altogether. It is an assault on the senses that's even nastier than 24, but without any hint of a clear, well-defined storyline. It is shot with an hyper-active hand-held camera that clings to the characters as they frantically run through the city (which they do for a large part of the film). Badly-lit, badly-framed and agressively edited, watching it is more of a (very unpleasant) sensual experience than an intellectual one. Add to that a noise/scream-heavy soundtrack, and you're right inside the demented Japanese psyche. And it works, if you're willing to go along and risk a seizure. The labyrinthine and confusing nature of Tokyo streets is perfectly captured by Fukui, including its large, anonymous crowds completely oblivious to the protagonists. It is a city where the individual is dwarfed (check out photo #2) and regimented in its movements (thus the numerous shots taken inside public transit systems). What we learn from Fukui's film is the expressive potential of the body, and of art, in the face of a more "functional" humanity. The screams, the running, the puke, the blood, the pain, the hatred, the contempt and the anger, as well as the unrestrained expression of art are all indicators of a basic humanity claimed by cyberpunk in the face of an increasingly sanitized and impersonal system of social exchanges. It is the city vs. the individual. And thus, it is a block of ciment that Pinocchio carries instead of a cross.

3/5

Rubber's Lover (1996)

Review #0024

The tagline alone should be evocative enough to help you appraise this wild cyberpunk thriller : "Psychic power is achieved when mental anguish exceeds physical pain". If that opaque statement intrigues you in any way, I'm pretty sure you are curious enough to enjoy "Rubber's Lover", Shozin Fukui's sort-of-prequel to his seminal "Pinocchio 964" (1991). The premise is quite simple, but it is the execution that makes the film truly unique. Three doctors and a cute helper dressed as a maid, all of which are neurotic to varying degrees, conduct illegal experiments on psychic development using ether and some weird headgear called D.D.D. Unfortunately for them, they have yet failed to reap any results, and so their sponsor sends his secretary to shut them down. Hellbent on keeping the project alive, two of the three doctors go renegade, capturing their partner (an ether-junkie with psychic potential) as well as the (sexy) secretary, and using them in one last attempt "to achieve psychic power". In the end, they are both killed by their creation: a super-powered ether addict linked mentally to their sponsor's secretary, which then escapes into the city. Unfortunately, the last few frames constitute less of an adequate conclusion to this film than a flimsy link wih "Pinocchio". An artificial link since the two films differ in plot, themes and characters. In my opinion, the term "prequel" shouldn't even be used to caracterize "Rubber's Lover".

The film is shot in black-and-white using somber sets, making ample use of silhouettes to blur the distinction between the organic and the technological items in the scenery. The machines are framed in fetishistic close-ups as parts of one big, independant organism. They seem to have a life on their own. Human life, on the other hand, is what seeps from the body during the experiments: the blood and foam spurting from the mouths of tortured patients. It is their pain, their screams. The machines are tireless workers, while humans are the mere vessels of madness, greed and pain. And in the end, contrarily to say, "Tetsuo", the result of their unholy alliance is not a functional man-machine, but a weak drug addict, prisoner of his own tortured flesh. One shot in the film shows the demented Motomiya inventorying the different muscles in the human body as if it was nothing but the sum of its parts. As if it were a machine. But in the end, he returns to ashes, just as the simple man from the old Christian metaphor. His humanity is proven in death, as it is proven with fluids and screams. The film also features some enticing images of techno-fetish, which are sure to please the weirdly-oriented. Shimika in the rubber-suit, sporting the craziest headgear you've ever seen, could give Bianca Beauchamp a run for her money. But the scene where Akari and Kiku share a techno-orgasm while squirming around metal wires in an elevator takes the cake. It almost gave me a hard-on! This is the stuff you want to see: extreme, fetishistic images of machines, pain and pleasure, all weirdly intertwined in a cacophony of sounds and images driven by savvy rhytmic editing. This is what cyberpunk is all about! And although "Rubber's Lover" is slightly inferior to "Pinocchio 964", it constitutes quite a thrilling experience nonetheless.

3/5

Guinea Pig 5: Android of Notre Dame (1989)

Review #0022

Make no mistake, this is the fifth entry in the series. And although it is often featured as "Guinea Pig 2", it's only because it was the second one made after the distribution deal with JHV (Japan Home Video). As the two previous entries ("He Never Dies" and "Mermaid in a Manhole"), this one features some sort of a plot, albeit a poor one. It involves a dwarf scientist experimenting with corpses in order to cure his sister suffering from some unnamed heart disease. As in most films of this kind, scientific terms are thrown around as if to magically infer legitimitacy to a pulpy, improbable script. Throughout the film, the link between the sister's disease and the dwarf's experiments with pickled body parts and alligator clips is never made quite clear. We can only watch in amazement as some fucked-up science goes down, fucked-up science being the raison d'être of this tame splatterfest. Things get even weirder once a mysterious sponsor tries to crook our crafty protagonist who manages to trap him, sever his head, and regenerate it as part of the ongoing experiments. Surprisingly, the relationship between the dwarf and his sponsor's severed head is much more involving than that with his bed-ridden sister, which is a revealing indication about the quality of the script...

In the end, "Android" is yet another poorly-produced, effects-driven exploitation quickie to add to an undeservingly notorious series. Considering the vast and varied output of Japanese horror, I doubt anybody but the most hardcore completists would want to see this mild-mannered freak show. Designed to attract viewers, I would even argue that the plot risks repelling them by impairing the functionality of the film as freak show. In a way, "Android" is "less pure" than the uber-exploitative "Flower of Flesh and Blood" and "The Devil's Experiment", looking more like a toned-down version than the rightful successor of these two titles ("He Never Dies" being in the middle). With its diminutive protagonist, naked breasts, electronic gizmos and soundtrack straight out of an old computer game, it plays more like a home-made version of "Frankenstein" for Japanese nerds than a truly exportable film. And anyway, I doubt that any Western moviegoer could watch this without making at least one smart-ass remark, most of them being likely to turn it off halfway in disgust or exasperation. For a truly remarkable experiment in pain and grossness, I suggest you privilege the vastly superior "Rubber's Lover" by cyberpunk great Shozin Fukui (also available through Unearthed Films for even less than you'd pay for the out-of-print "Devil's Experiment/Android of Notre Dame" double bill).

1,5/5

Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985)

Review #0019

One of the most infamous titles of all times, this bargain-basement Japanese "effort" actually benefited from the allegations against it, turning them into some unhoped-for publicity. Legend has it that Charlie Sheen saw the film and denounced it as snuff to the MPAA (!), which in turn contacted the FBI for investigation. What everybody this side of the Pacific failed to understand is that they were five years too late. Japanese police had already investigated the case, and "forced" the release of a "Making-of Guinea Pig", billed with "Flower" on the Unearthed Films DVD (a neccessity, considering the 45-minutes runtime of "Flower"). Not unlike "Cannibal Holocaust" (also investigated on charges of verisimilitude) at the beginning of the decade, "Flower of Flesh and Blood" is pure exploitation, deserving of its cult status only insofar as candid people will believe it snuff. In itself, it is a pretty witless and forgettable film with top-notch gore effects to elevate the ensemble slightly. As in all such exercises in exploitation, primary importance is put on the goo, while everything else is secondary. The production values are minimal (the lighting being particularly awful), the "plot" is uninvolving, the sound is way off (the "noises of splatter" are so unconvicing that they border on the humorous), the acting non-existent, but the mastery of latex... magnificent!

A truly expressive image by Hideshi Hino,
unlike anything you will see in Flower...

According to an introductory text, "Flower" is the faux-doc recreation of a snuff tape sent to film director/manga artist Hideshi Hino. But it is actually a loose adaptation of "Red Flower", one of his mangas featuring a lonesome florist using severed female parts to create floral ornaments. And despite the fact that the film is virtually plotless, it contains many references to the director's mangas in a weird chant that the killer performs near the end (which mentions "Panorama of Hell" and "Lullabies from Hell"). It's a shame that such literary inspiration is almost concealed in the film, as well as the introspectively-grotesque Hino style of storytelling. What we're left with is grotesque indeed, but in a run-of-the-mill, torture-porn sort of way. It lacks any sort of finesse, and any sort of emotion. All in all, it is not more than a flat depiction of dismemberment. A woman is abducted, tied to a table, drugged, and cut down piece by piece. The killer adresses the camera and describes the events to follow in floral metaphors, then grabs the adequate tool for severing the next body part. The hands go, then the arms, legs, guts, head, and eyes, all in loving close-ups. The film is little more than an exercise in creating and framing gore. There is no tension, no thrills, no suspense, just grossness. The "bad guy" is not creepy, nor credible. He is just plain silly. And the fact that the girl is drugged (and indifferent to what is happening) greatly softens the blow, making the horror lukewarm. The film is the mise-en-scène of dismemberment. Period. The entire wealth of expression comprised in the manga is excised in favor of a snuff-looking piece of trash. "Flower" is the kind of film that will make people around you exclaim "Why the fuck would you want to see this?", or (looking at the DVD cover), "Oh my God! This is disgusting, you sick fuck!" Try to play the film at a party and watch your friends' faces, but make sure to be convincing in your explanations if you want to keep them as friends.

2/5

Tokyo Gore Police (2008)

Review #0003

If the title appeals to you in any way, you're sure to love this typically excessive Japanese film. In the near future, where the Tokyo police is privatized and wrist-cutting has become fashionable, officer Ruka (Eihi Shiina, of "Audition" fame, sporting a leather skirt, fishnet stockings and leather boots) must investigate the appearance of "engineers", evolved criminals with the ability to spawn elaborate weapons in replacement of severed limbs. Part sci-fi, part police thriller, this film functions as a blunt social critique, but mostly as a gore-drenched freak show. Horrific images of bodily mutations abound including chainsaw-arms, projectile hands, and the obligatory phallic machine-gun, vagina dentatae so dear to Japanese imagination, all of which are rendered in glorious latex. The violence is ruthless, the imagery bizarre and the soundtrack agressive inbetween scenes of victim exposition and flashbacks explaining Ruka's past. It all culminates in an orgy of death and destruction once the police goes renegade and start to systematically massacre protesters (including Ruka's long-time bartender friend). All in all, the mystery to be solved serve only to justify limbs flying, the drama is subservient to the violent outbursts it provokes, and the exposition of Ruka seems only to be a set-up for the sequel (announced post-credit, it could as well be Nishimura's following film, the disappointing "Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl"). If you can appreciate that, "Tokyo Gore Police" might just be a hot ticket for you.

3/5 : for giving me what I came looking for, but without a great replay value.