1000 Anime Link: Call Me Tonight (1986)

[Note: As I have neglected my other blog 1000 Anime greatly, this is the start of re-energizing activity on there, writing reviews and including links to them here. Some of them will have direct connection to this blog as many anime have abstract and unconventional material, so keep an eye out for more anime reviews in the future.] 

"The subject which this obscure thirty minute anime Call Me Tonight tackles, in the same decade where the beginnings of straight-to-video anime started and both this production and hentai anime came up as product for the format, is parodied directly within a film-within-the-film when protagonists Rumi and Ryo hide in a cinema. A sci-fi film where the tentacle aliens kill the male astronaut and have sinister intentions for the female one, stripping her for nefarious reasons. It's a sanitised take on a concept at its most infamous for Urotsukidōji (1987-1994), on one hand an epic of almost Lovecraftian narrative, nihilistic and horrifying yet complex and full of scale, yet on the other a problematic title in how it tackles its intentional sexual transgression on slanted gender lines, the males strong and turning into tentacle monsters, the women merely there for sexual violence from said tentacle monsters, justifiably condemned as misogynistic and offensive even in the butchered feature length cut you could buy on British video and DVD. And yet, just before that series came into existance, when it was originally a multi-episode straight-to-video anime itself, you have Call Me Tonight mocking that kind of story by showing a strong, sexually confident young woman literally taming a man who turns into such a monstrosity every time he gets an erection or aroused, trying to help him towards an adult, mature sexual life as his improvised therapist."

For the full review, follow the blog link HERE.

From https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSON6R0Eeoq6wFIEgFW00OlPPmyAMq2gOoj5NdwltTKkGEtIEAX

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

From https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-d0VFerE5ktc/WQ_8CHj_qsI/
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Director: Chantal Akerman

Screenplay: Chantal Akerman

Cast: Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman; Jan Decorte as Sylvain Dielman; Henri Storck as the first client; Jacques Doniol-Valcroze as the second client; Yves Bical as the third client

Synopsis: Consisting of three days within the life of Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), a widowed mother of a teenage son and housekeeper, we follow her everyday chores and interactions, as well as her secret interest in sleeping with various men in-between. Reaching Day Two, little mistakes begin to pile up and a sense her life is about to unravel is felt until Day Three...

Anticipating Jeanne Dielman..., all these years, it is a legendary film. A monumental work since premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975, as pertinent now as then. The major work of Chantal Akerman, whose career is not yet pushed into a place where the mainstream can access her work as easily as it should, but with the utter admiration as a director¹. What was unexpected watching the film, however, is that its aura as a three hour and fifteen minute film which was challenging to view has lost its lustre. In the decades past there has been the seven plus hours of Satantango (1994), Lav Diaz's career where ten hours is a minimum length of his newest film, even a YouTube Garfield parody called Lasagne Cat whose epilogue is four hours and forty minutes long; not to mention Liu Jiayin's Oxhide II (2009), which is meant to be 132 minutes of her with her parents making dumplings for a film with a thematic connection to Jeanne Dielman's long food preparing scenes. Many other examples can be brought up which forces one to not view Jeanne Dielman... and its slow, deliberate pace as an endurance test anymore, which is arguably for the better in the long run. I can view it not as a challenge, but justifying its length as a necessary slow burn, each lengthy passage of mundane activity engaging until it builds to a quiet scream heard in the finale.

Day One is deceptive. Whilst Akerman would not expect this reaction from the viewer, the first passage of the film is much more interesting for me in what happens and aesthetically than what one presume. It is, in hindsight, a deceptive lure before the severity of what happens in Jeanne Dielman's life, but I confess to have been utterly engaged with sights of actress Seyrig doing ordinary chores. Seventies French decor is far more colourful than one would presume, and there is something inherently interesting for me of a long shot of her, facing the camera at the kitchen table, preparing food². In fact there's a clear hypnotic nature to what takes place on Day One immediately. Akerman uses a very rigid style - repetition in the activities (washing, cooking, sewing) for many minutes over three plus hours, matched by the preciseness of how the world is depicted. Excluding scenes outside of Dielman's home, within the house the camera is usually at medium distance and height, head to waist with Dielman many times looking directly at the camera at tables. The fact I found the environments colourful, and the activities appealing, is not the usual reaction one would expect for this film, a document of a woman trapped and confined to a domesticated hell, but that's because when Day Two onwards begins, one becomes aware of something horrible about to happen in the midst of the environment. When the rigid structure eventually wears down on the viewer deliberately, the colourful household becomes mundane and lifeless, and Dielman starts making mistakes as simple as overcooking potatoes.

In terms of a film known as much as a format experiment, it's rewarding to know how necessary its length truly is. Whilst a minimal narrative in plotting, these three hours plus make up three single days in a woman's life fleshed out. The precise of Akerman's work, each move and cut to a new camera frame (even within the same room), brings more out of the work immensely, even at its length without sense of unnecessary excess to the ideas. You have obvious clues to events about to transpire or flesh out our protagonist, that Jeanne has been a widow for a long time or her interactions with her son. The biggest surprise for me, in a film which is undeniably Seyrig's film as the lead, is how important said son, played by Jan Decorte, is in context. He is not in most of the narrative, at school most of the length off-screen, but as the sole person consistently interacting with his mother, the conversations are interesting when they transition from the mundane to the serious. Frank talk of sex among other philosophical subjects that become an unexpectedly distinct edge to the back-story of these characters, alongside Dielman's various words on her husband and life that are pieces building up more than that seen onscreen.

Delphine Seyrig gives an incredible performance in the centre as well. Her prolific in abstract cinema³. Her performance emphasises that Jeanne Dielman... is as much a horror film as it is a drama. It does build up to a horrifying and sudden moment, but the set up towards it is effectively the most subtle of psychological horror as well, where the unloosening of her (through Seyrig's subtle performance) comes not from hallucinations or real unnatural entities but her rigid behaviour becoming unfixed and lost through increasing mistakes and moments of absent mindedness. It fact, whilst the idea of the film as merely an endurance test should be challenged for demeaning its profoundness, to merely call Jeanne Dielman... a "feminist masterpiece" without actually dealing with what the film is about is an insult to it as well. That, in spite of being a widowed woman, Dielman is still going through the motions of a married housewife of time passed, her anecdotes evoking a post-World War II period which feels severed, her actions a mechanical psychological survival process which starts to ebb away. That there is so much that is left intentionally opened is for the better, forcing a viewer to not merely expect a conventional reading of the film but ask and consider the thoughts that would be going through Dielman's head right into the final shot, a lengthy ten minute epilogue of her, sat in the darkened dining room, the cute ornaments in the background no longer seen as they were before, the agonisingly length of the moment before credits a depressurisation, an attempt to deal with the sudden event that came before for her.

Is Jeanne Dielman..., then, an abstract film? The issue out of Akerman's hands, that films have pushed boundaries in length and pace further, which has undercut that aspect of the film, but this is one of those rare, mercurial examples of a film so naturalistic in structure that it is inherently abstract in meaning. As I have continually reminded myself, back in 1975 the will would've been a seismic shock to witness at Cannes or at any cinema, even in a modern theatre having a hypnotic influence over a viewer. It emphasises what "Cinema of the Abstract" is as a choice phrase, that abstract is a contrast to the hegemony of conventional cinematic reality in motion images. That,  (appropriately for cinema which is about contradictions and paradox among others), the realistic is as effecting as the surrealistic, the disruptions of real life activity opposite from "reality" in most cinema as jarring for many viewers of merely conventional, mainstream cinema. Jeanne Dielman... is inherently abstract as homogenised cinema does not include lengthy scenes of a woman preparing food or its languid but intricate structure, an audience used to fast cut Marvel superhero films forced to experience the lengthy act of knitting with the same sense of effect as an irrational moment would. As a result, it fits among such curious relatives I have written about as, whilst not necessarily of the same ilk, they challenge conventions as much as Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles challenges the central image of the meek, quiet housemother throughout itself.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Psychological/Realism

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Personal Opinion:

One of those moments, where you see a film of such a great reputation finally, and have to ingest and try to comprehend what you have seen. Jeanne Dielman... is not the "difficult" film I had been brought up with it to be, instead necessitating its length and style into what is far more horrifying and psychologically deeper than most horror films, envisioning domesticity as something even a male viewer can see as soul devouring as a result.

From https://criticsroundup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10
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==

1) As of 2018, alongside Jeanne Dielman... being restored, a group called the Fondation Chantal Akerman have been founded to assist in exhibiting and showing her filmography. Hopefully this will also mean making the late director's catalogue much more accessible, especially for an Englishman like myself where few of her films (including Jeanne Dielman...) are available.

2) So much so my father, who kept peering in as I watched these scenes, thought I was watching a cooking documentary.

3) Freak Orlando (1981), Last Year of Marienbad (1961), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Daughters of Darkness (1971), Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour (1963), The Milky Way (1969) and Mr. Freedom (1969), enough there to give her a Hall of Fame entry on this blog if I ever created such a segment.

Non Abstract Review: Sextette (1978)

From https://hollywoodrevue.files.wordpress.com/
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Director: Ken Hughes

Screenplay: Herbert Baker

Based on the stage play by Mae West

Cast: Mae West as Marlo Manners; Timothy Dalton as Sir Michael Barrington; Dom DeLuise as Dan Turner; Tony Curtis as Alexei Andreyev Karansky; Ringo Starr as Laslo Karolny; George Hamilton as Vance Norton; Walter Pidgeon as Mr. Chambers

Synopsis: The legendary actress Marlo Manners (Mae West), the greatest living Hollywood star, is celebrating her honeymoon with her newest husband Sir Michael Barrington (Timothy Dalton) in London. Her agent Dan Turner (Don DeLuise) has other plans, involving convincing her to woo a former flame and Soviet politician Alexei Andreyev (Tony Curtis), in the midst of an international peace conference at the same hotel she is at. Barrington's own miscommunications with the press, a pink audio tape of Marlo's scintillating memoirs, and various former husbands entering back into her life will make it impossible for the new couple to enjoy their honeymoon.

This, I confess, was the worse way to be introduced to Mae West, having never seen any of her films beforehand. The legendary actress of bawdy one liners, enraging the Hays Code and being proudly her own person in films like She Done Him Wrong (1933) is an iconic individual. Sextette, for my first West film, is a tragedy in terms of this image. An attempt by its producers to give her a last hurrah, but encumbered by the sad truth, alongside the general quality of the production, of her being fed her lines, robotic in delivery of them even if heavily made-up and, as a woman of eighty five, moving not as an elder stateswoman still proudly stomping around the sets, but lost in a production so off in style its perversely watchable for all the wrong reasons. The kind of production that, if I was one of the individuals who'd funded the film, would turn his head around in the midst the projection screening and tell the producers of Sextette that it was completely unsellable.

Sextette is part of the hidden underbelly of seventies cinema, where for all our love of the New American Wave it was always as much the era of films like this and disaster movies, both actual disaster films and film disasters. All decades of motion images feed on the popular trends of their eras, and feed on trends they've made up as being popular to the target audience's bafflement. The seventies however is strange as, straddled between nostalgia for the Hollywood studio system and after the studio system collapsed in the sixties, they could still have the (aged) stars of yesteryear return onscreen (or on the television tube) to evoke the old era. Yet this is a film trying to be popular with the young, particularly as this was already when Mae West was a gay icon and disco was popular, leading to intentionally camping up the production and reinterpretation old song standards into disco funk. Your cast can resurrect Walter Pigeon back onscreen, but have cameos as random as Alice Cooper to Ringo Star, in the midst of his solo career, as a European art film director and one of Marlo's husbands.

The casting itself is an anomaly worth a paragraph. West's appearance is sad, more so as in a world where her Marlo Manners is the most beloved figure, the ultimate sex icon who can bring about world peace in the end of the plot, everything feels like it is in an alien world or a perverse Twilight Zone episode without the punch line, characters laughing at her mechanically spoken one liners in ways that linger too long in the air, constant and awkward. DeLuise does better as her scuzzy, panicked agent. The rest of the cast, barring one who will get his own paragraph after this one, is a sorry lot of varying performances. Alice Cooper is a mere cameo near the end. Ringo Star, a year after a disastrous attempt at a disco album, tries an accent but eventually just sounds like Ringo Star in a cameo role. Tony Curtis being the stereotypical Russian, Walter Pigeon a nice sight, as a recent convert to Mrs. Miniver (1942) and his performance, but too slight a role. And then there's Keith Moon of The Who, of all people, playing a dress designer as camp as possible. Whilst the following will come off as a tasteless remark, the exaggeration he puts into the performance causes one to wonder if he was either/both game to be as ridiculous as can be onscreen or drunk during the performance considering how flamboyant he tries to be.

From https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/2/2d/Sextette.JPG

Timothy Dalton, God bless him, manages to leave the film unscathed and with dignity. Even if it originally rests on dated gay humour, even the cringe worthy gag panic gags show Dalton has an incredibly good comic timing especially when it comes to being dead pan and playing a character utterly naive to what the press is misquoting him about. How the character becomes more serious as the film goes on, and the only one you care for, is entirely dependent on a charisma that shines even when he's thrown against the disaster around him. The film's reference to James Bond even comes off as an unexpected premonition, as whilst his Bond stint was only two films and divisive, the same virtues he shows here were to be found in those films (even Licence to Kill (1989)) fully. Also, as this is a musical where he does sing a duet with Mae West, he's a significantly better singer than another Bond actor Pierce Brosnan, as anyone who has watched Mama Mia! (2008) is aware of.

The film as an entity is within its own time lapse. Everything is truly that of a seventies film, in aesthetic and even the decor of its central hotel setting. There is a deliberate attempt at camp irony which yet hollow, as it's a construct of kitsch not properly formed and sincere. Considering the material here would've greatly suited this tone, West at one point surrounded by half naked beefcake, it's a neutered form of what it is attempt to sell. Aside from West's stiltedness the film, directed by the same man who helmed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), is completely flat in structure and appearance, perfunctory to an extreme especially as it also attempts to have dance sequences alongside musical numbers, none of which standing out in the slightest. The dialogue is rudimentary, the one line innuendo flat, and moments of bland un-PC humour cropping up which are merely pitiful rather than offensive (like a hotel kitchen full of multi-cultural chefs arguing, allowing for jokes about non-English or American food being inedible, and a solitary Chinese chef, dressed like a old man from fictional Chinatown with chopsticks, scored to stereotypical "oriental" music to emphasise his existence).

And the music's strange. Some is hummable, some especially when it tries to go disco awful. Some songs lyrically are peculiar in context, especially when West sings to the youngest member of that group of beefcake, Olympic athletes, a song about growing up, reminding you that many of these songs are "golden oldies", being forcibly crowbarred to be more sexually explicit when usually their innocence and casual tweeness suit more for other forms of subversion. The result in general, like Sextette as a whole, is a tug-of-war between the old films that made West's name and the new cinema, like many of these infamous seventies films, which are bastardisations of such tropes that cannot be even called antiquated. They are "Golden Turkeys", to reference the Medved brothers who ripped into them at this period of time and helped create the "so bad its good" phenomena of now, beasts not of anytime but created in pockets of their own hubris. Films like Sextette which are, in honestly, tragically naive, follies which wanted to commit to something but fail miserably. That Sextette took a while to even be distributed back in its era says a lot of the film; even if it's still with us and talked of, it was always a complete failure on paper as much in result that no sane producer would've bankrolled.

From http://www.mondo-digital.com/sextette4big.jpg

Touch of Death (1988)

From https://pics.filmaffinity.com/
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Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Brett Halsey as Lester Parson; Ria De Simone as Alice Shogun; Al Cliver as Randy; Sacha Darwin as Margie MacDonald; Zora Kerova as Virginia Field; Marco Di Stefano as the Tramp

[Warning: Spoilers Throughout]

Synopsis: Older bachelor and gambler Lester Parson (Brett Halsey), constantly having to pay off debts for an illegal horse racing group, has a novel way of acquiring the funds needed. Dating wealthy women from the Lonely Hearts adverts in newspapers, wooing them so they take out all their money in a form easy for him to horde, and then kill them. Things are not what they originally seem for Lester, however, when a copycat killer is reported on TV claiming his victims and implicating him with each news report.

I didn't expect to be covering Touch of Death, one of the later Lucio Fulci films from after 1985 until the end of his career which were once more obscure. There are strange entries at this point in his filmography - Aenigma (1987) springs to mind, whilst Touch of Death was one of the many films either directed by Fulci or had his brand naming upon it recycled as clips for his truly bizarre, quasi-autobiographical oddity A Cat in the Brain (1990). Touch of Death itself, made the same year as the infamous Zombi 3 (1988) production where he only finished a large portion of it due to illness and the team of Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei finished the final film, is a strange movie to my surprise. A perplexing mix of comedy, nasty splatter and his reoccurring obsession with reality slowly ebbing out of grasp as the film continues on.

From http://horrornews.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/
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The tonal shifts are themselves effecting. Most of the narrative, until it builds to Lester's increasing paranoia and his fate being sealed, is the character interacting with a string of various female victims. Most of the film is also, in spite of the stereotypical Fulci gore that became synonymous to his work at this point, played as a black humoured farce. John Waters springs to mind, even if a failed comparison, for playing up bad taste deliberately. A strange quasi American environment, meant to be Florida but entirely in a netherrealm of Italian cinema's interpretation of it, one where Lester is an unapologetic sociopath but his female victims are exaggerations or even a glamorous actress like Zora Kerova having pronounced prosthetic disfigurements like a mere birth defect on the top lip or a vague moustache to undercut their appearance. Not flattering in the slightest, and can be seen as sexist, but in general the film's tone is a peculiar ode to the tasteless in a weird way. The exaggeration of the women for broad comedic effect, the most extreme an opera singer with masochistic streak, is balanced out by American actor Brett Halsey playing a strange, pathetic man himself. Charming enough to woo these women, and played by Halsey with charisma even with the ghostliness of him having to dub himself, but a man unable to keep hold of money and about to slip off the deep end.

He also gets realistic advice from the voice, similar to his, on the radio. That moment was enough to push Touch of Death into the abstract before it went further. It's clear the film is entirely from inside the mind of a man losing what sanity he had, the copycat himself in some form, but the dreamlike lack of clarity famous from Fulci taking this to an extreme. One where it can be as argued Lester is already dead or a literal doppelganger situation is involved. Everything is unexplained, the grotesque broadness of the female caricatures or the depopulated world of a low budget Italian genre flick, alongside the stranger details. The illegal horse gambling group, ran by an older Caucasian man and a still older Asian man, who exist in their own world wary of the police. Horse racing commentary is constantly in the soundtrack, at first presumed to be on the radio constantly for Lester, but becomes apparent in being part of his psychosis at it continues.

From https://strangewitness.files.wordpress.com/2011/
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That it's played for comedy is a surprise too. Fulci had made comedies early in his career, (fans proclaim that one, The Eroticist (1972), is actually a hidden gem from his filmography), but he was known at this point and still as a serious, nasty director of gore. Unintentional camp which appeared in the late eighties films was one thing, but deliberate humour catches you off guard. Obvious jokes stretched out at length such as Lester struggling to get a body in the boot of his car. One is legitimately a great moment, his attempt to add a Mickey Finn to a potential victim's drink only for it to continually, but even that scene is violently contrasted against the violent gore that happens afterwards, more glaringly fake compared to his early work and with such exaggeration, that victim losing an eye but still standing, that it becomes a heightened wreck of conflicting reactions as a viewer. That Fulci is credited as the sole screenwriter adds a fascinating touch to this film, that this is his interests unedited and leading to this concoction.  

Fulci, bless him, even when background material states the film was undercut by its low budget still managed to make a memorable film in Touch of Death. Its obscurity is not surprising as, compared to the stereotype of his career of lurid horror films, even the gore found here doesn't off-set that most of it is a melodrama black comedy of a sociopath. The film eventually gains more meat, whilst fascinating before, when you suspect the rug is going to be pulled from under Lester's feet at any moment, helped because Fulci's history of the unexpected always happening, able to wrong foot the viewer even if it breaks the logic of before, is prevalent here too. Even the music, which is chintzy, works for the strange humour because it sounds like cartoon music. The tone eventually leads to an ending that can be interpreted in different ways, which is applaudable, Zora Kerova's femme fatale (who yet has that distinct lip disfigurement) a warning of Lester meeting his matched, followed by an emotional conversation with his own shadow for a very unique ending scene. The kind of twist you'd want from Italian genre cinema.

From https://pxhst.co/avaxhome/29/b9/001fb929_medium.jpeg

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Quirky/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Personal Opinion:

A dark horse just in terms of Lucio Fulci's stranger films. Does Touch of Death actually work though? That depends on the viewer, the content and presentation erratic and likely to get varying reactions. For me, there's a lot to like. Fulci is at least going with the premise to its extreme and its memorable as a result.

From http://horrornews.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/
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Executive Koala (2005)

From https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com
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Director: Minoru Kawasaki

Screenplay: Minoru Kawasaki and Masakazu Migita

Cast: Lee Ho; Eiichi Kikuchi; Arthur Kuroda; Shôko Nakagawa; Hironobu Nomura; Hideki Saijô; Hitomi Takashima

Synopsis: Tamura is a hard working employee at a pickle company. His wife vanished years ago and his new girlfriend has been murdered. Frequent visits to his psychiatrist leave him trying to negotiate his own emotional turmoil whilst a police detective is obsessed with him being guilty for both incidents. Tamura is also an anthropomorphised koala bear.

Loving boyfriend. Diligent employee. Possible psychopath with a split personality. Koala bear. Executive Koala does eventually slip up in the end by becoming too silly with its premise, but when it's trying to take itself more seriously before, even the jokes the film throws in doesn't detach from this low budget, digitally shot film succeed. It plays out like a peculiar mix of a low-fi drama about a koala bear working for a pickle company, and a tone with fake dream sequences which inexplicably evokes when Brian De Palma is at his most playful and intentionally ridiculous. You could imagine this as Raising Cain (1992) if John Lithgow wore an animal head throughout the narrative.

From https://babel36.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/executive_koala1.jpg

At one point, Minoru Kawasaki gained attention in the West for his peculiar obsession with anthropomorphised animals and aquatic creatures participating in human activities. Synapse released a few of his films, including Executive Koala, on DVD in the States and in Britain, I learnt of him through Japanorama (2002-7), the BBC Three TV series about Japanese popular culture hosted by talk show host, film critic and noted Japanophile Jonathan Ross, playing at the right time in my adolescence to have a significant effect on my interests. Kawasaki also follows a trajectory found for a lot of Japanese directors of his era, beginning in either V-Cinema or (as in the case of Kawasaki himself) pinku erotic films before moving on to genre films which flirt outside of conventionality. Particularly in the early 2000s, where there was a wave of interest in Japanese films from the cult audience, even someone relatively obscure like Kawasaki (for better or for worse) was intriguing for an English language audience from the "Weird Japan" perspective.

A lot of these films are a potpourri, and some like Executive Koala are exceptionally ridiculous. But for three-thirds of its length Executive Koala, whilst not perfect, is perversely satisfying as a conventional psycho thriller. Played out both in the most mundane of circumstances, in conventional urban Japan, with the central actor playing out the film with a giant koala head on. A costume obviously fake, like a fairground mascot with koala hands and human clothes throughout the length of the narrative, to the point that scenes involving food have the actor just putting it close to the mouth but unable to do little else. The joke is played well, and baring unnecessary winks that puncture the reality, there's delight in how (barring one random woman) no one questions him, nor his boss being a white rabbit, or that the figure who helps characters unravel the mystery is a frog who works in the connivance store. When this joke is played in character it works, such as the first scene of three female employees at the pickle company saying how Tamura is cute despite being a little hairy. That its surrounding a tale of murder with a streak of nastiness to it, with domestic abuse and conspiracy within it, adds something more due to how innocuous the koala costume is. Particularly as there's not actually a lot of adult content - barring some blood and one (frankly unnecessary) scene of sexual dominance using a dog collar, the rest feels like an episode of a weekday crime show in film form, one made stranger especially with cast members wearing animal heads.

From https://d3uc4wuqnt61m1.cloudfront.net/images/
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In spite of the exaggeration within these three-quarters of the film, Tamura played by the actor with exaggeration to his manners even with the koala costume on, the very low key tone takes over everything for the better. There has always been a distinction even to the lowest budget of Japanese "cult" films from the 2000s against their Western counterparts. Whilst many digitally shot English language films have been unbearable for me to sit through, the bar of technical quality and mood even the worst pre-digital films had completely lost, the lowest bearing fruit of Japanese genre cinema has still been better for the most part. As much of it is because of even the blandest of white walled public building rooms still having a distinct character, Japan an inherently cinematic place where even their least interesting environments still have personality. Many a genre film like this also benefit from the emphasis many have of a slower pace or at least leaving moments of calm, even if for jokes, to keep things sustained. Because of this you can have Takashi Miike films from this same era, some of his most notorious, which yet leave moments of slow contemplation in-between the perversity for greater effect.

Through this, as much of Executive Koala early on hangs as much on Tamura trying to close in on an important deal with a South Korean company, one which ties in to the main plot as the man he is meeting has a connection to his past, giving the koala further paranoia about his own mind's depth as much as enticing the viewer in whether he's able to secure a lucrative kimchi deal at the same time. When the film ramps up, even if it's cheap "all a dream" shocks or jump scares, they are so ludicrous to the low key tone they become memorable. A red eyed koala in the foreground, whilst a character is oblivious in the background, moving side to side on an unseen camera dolly with a audio sting. A meta scene of "cut!" which is strange but also inspired. The only one I wish Minoru Kawasaki did differently, since it would be acceptable to do so and I've already mentioned Brian De Palma, is an obvious Psycho (1960) reference just to see a koala silhouette against a shower curtain. De Palma, who has baited the audience from the seventies to the current day, played games with these clichés and the structures of thrillers on a high level of budget and technical skill, bringing to them a magic of the unpredictable, even here a little of this spirit in the least expected of circumstances.

From https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d5/c7/44/
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The film does stumble in the final quarter. It is still a memorable film, but it does slip into one of the dangers of these cult Japanese films, that they can try to pile on more plot twists and events to the point they become a mess. This became more problematic for me when you got to the late 2000s and Sushi Typhoon, to my disinterest, became popular in the West with their low budget splatter films. The ending of Executive Koala somewhat squanders to the nice build up of absurdity along its way with hastily put together twists, over-the-top in an unnecessary way by introducing a martial arts style where you can resurrect yourself from the dead and a conspiracy that is abrupt to the more interesting, Raising Cain-like plotting of before. There is a nice moment, that the ending makes a dynamic conflict utterly pointless with only forgiving and forgetting the only way forward, but from the scenes in Alcatraz, the legendary American prison, onwards this film does stumble a little when it could've gone a lot more closer to the first three-quarters of the movie in tone.

Abstract Spectrum: Absurd/Surreal/Wacky

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Personal Opinion:

Though it is with flaws, Executive Koala is fascinating to watch. Pretty funny at times, pretty twisted and dark in plot as much too. It does commit the crime of being too irrelevant and silly especially by the ending, but when it does succeed it brings out of lot of memorable moments that'll stick with you.

From http://hkmovies.timchuma.com/images/scenes/
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