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Director: Jôji Iida
Screenplay: Jôji Iida
Based on a novel by Jôji Iida
Cast: Yôsuke Eguchi as Manabu
Hayase; Miwako Ichikawa as Asako; Takashi Kashiwabara aka. Atsushi Kimura; Yukiko
Okamoto as Chizuru Kashiwagi; Haruhiko Katô as Yuuji Makuta; Naomasa Musaka as Sakamoto-keibu;
Kunihiro Ida as Ryoukado-keibu
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #1
First of all, Jôji Iida (or George Iida) has had a long career in horror fiction in general. A
director/author, his career includes two different productions based on the
work of Ringu author Koji Suzuki, penning the screenplay for
the first Ringu adaptation for
television, Ringu: Kanzenban (1995),
and The Spiral (1998), an adaptation
of the Ringu sequel novel released
the same year as Hideo Nakata's
legendary take on the first Ringu story.
Iida also directed Battle Heater (1989)
near the beginning of his career. I admit to hating the film back in the early
days of my cult film viewing, finding weird obscure released on LoveFilm, but has stayed with me still,
in which the traditional piece of Japanese furniture known as a kotatsu (a
Japanese table with a futon or blanket skirting the sides and a heater
underneath) develops a mind like a tsukumogami but also the craving for human
flesh. The film also was a comedy horror, emphasising absurdity first.
Iida certainly changed directions with his adaptation of his own
novel in 2000 with Another Heaven,
forging a chance encounter between a police procedural with grotesque horror.
It's a good idea. There's a reward how the conventional cop story, seen so many
times in which cops are our stand-in for an investigation that leads the viewer
to an unconventional sight, being smashed into horror like it is here. Now the
policemen are forced to use deductive thinking that is meant to rationalise the
unknown against something inherently unnatural and unexplainable even if a
rational is produced. It's an appropriately surreal concept, the marriage of
the rational and the irrational when the police in the first scene go to an
apartment where a person is dead, only to find their brains are missing from
the back of their head, only to find that said brains are part of a sick joke
used as a recipe for the serial killer equivalent of Jamie Oliver. Admittedly, most cop show/murder mystery plots are
utterly illogical in the first place, but let's not get pedantic, as here said
cops after discovering this find themselves encountering more bizarre, gross
murders. A stereotypically dashing, young police man (Yôsuke Eguchi) merely a placeholder to experience various ways to
cook brains and deliberately absurd, complicated murder scenes created by a
force of pure evil. This hero alongside the other burly cops are here for us to
experience, over 130 minutes, a film which mixes sci-fi, horror and melodrama
in a curious series of ebbs and flows.
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The result's with flaws as much as virtues. You have stereotypically burly policemen who usually arrest people in this world before actually finding out if they're guilty, figures in crimes stories who are usually the least interesting aspect of said stories unless they have distinct personalities. Eguchi as the lead is a handsome matinee idol figure who, barring some angst, is there to be our stand-in, far less interest than other characters, especially Miwako Ichikawa as Asako, an ex-con who keeps herself in his life in spite of the controversy the possible romance between a cop and a criminal might be. The film however misses the point of the cops being merely our stand-ins for the plot when Iida makes an error in presuming they're of more concern than a narrative which becomes a body snatcher horror tale. The film grazes potentially rewarding beats constantly only for the result to be a mere scratch. Three men thinking they can take sexual advantage of a sole woman only to all be emotionally castrated by a woman who's sexually dominating and able to break a man's neck with superhuman strength. How a male host evokes gay longings for the hero, the parasite developing an obsession with him when they encounter each other, setting up various murders to taunt him in hope of eventually possessing him, a genderless parasite that in male or female form brings about the suggestion of a union between forms with a sexual connotation. Even how, whilst against the romance professionally, the hero is frankly useless without Asako, almost psychic in knowing the right advice to help his case. All of which is far more interesting than Iida believing any of these cops are emotionally complex.
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These cop characters are also morally grey, both for humour but also meant to be entirely heroic, something which is increasingly problematic without it being challenged. It jars as well with the premise of a parasite form which possesses human hosts until their bodies degenerate beyond use. The film sidesteps the potential of paranoia of a person you know now being the killer but also leads to issues with what's depicted. Deeply problematic acts for characters meant to be clean cut heroes are committed, from threatening to shoot a colleague until he confesses to being the killer to our hero assaulting a female doctor physically without her showing signs of being actually the killer. The later is problematic in entirely larger spectrums, but it's worse as alongside getting away with our hero hitting a woman, it misses the opportunity for an actual dynamic change in his character which gives him actually depth, a man having accidentally committed a horrifying act whose reasoning would be dismissed as insane by his seniors, forced by a taunting killer out of this reality to have to redeem himself by being willing to sacrifice himself to end this force. Instead this problematic scene's sidestepped, as mentioned, and the film eventually leads to saccharine drama with Asako. The evil is confused as well. If it was a body jumping alien who loved to kill in elaborate ways it would be fine. If it was an update of Japanese folklore of evil spirits using sci-fi symbolism, the possession now with a victim being taken over and the mind eventually deteriorating with tumours until the body is useless, than it would be fine too. Instead the abrupt ending explanation, including the explanation of the film's title, is utterly hazy in credibility and garbled in meaning. What should be simple in reason, allowing the irrational of this literally liquid evil to exist, is failed.
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So what is there to appreciate in Another Heaven? The concoction of action, police drama and horror is rewarding to watch. For all the multitude of problems the film has, it's still far more rewarding than more conventional takes on this type of narrative. Where you can suddenly switch to a car chase with one of the people involved on a bicycle with a basket on the front. Drips of the unconventional against the conventional that director-writer-author Iida was clearly more interested in. It's the type of tone that would've been fascinating to see as actual television - not surprising as Another Heaven would later have a TV spin-off later on - the gender concoction not something to squander. And the horror is that obsession in the Japanese version of it of the beautifully grotesque and even absurd. As its disconnected from the reality of death in its true awfulness, depictions of murder in fiction can be exaggerated and even found to have a sick beauty to them, something ero-guro to Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's "Bloody Prints". When the openly surreal is included, than the types of deaths that would be impossible in happening in real life are also found. Moments of this are occassional, but from the culinary perversities to general weirdness, moments in Another Heaven evoke MPD Psycho, known for me through the Takashi Miike TV adaptation, including even a mirroring shot of a flower sticking out of corpse's exposed brains. Another Heaven could've been a much better film than what you get, especially as its got over two hours rather than ninety to work with, but at least for all the seams you could pick at something of reward as horror is still found.
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| From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_gRWMZ-x-wV0/STB8_Ejk7XI/ AAAAAAAADAA/kpukt0Vtmg0/s400/Another.JPG |
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