Anatomia Extinction (1995)

 

Director: Yoshihiro Nishimura

Screenplay: Yoshihiro Nishimura

Cast: Kisei Ishizuka as The Man; Jun Sasaki as The Engineer in Subway; Chikako Tone as The Man's Girlfriend; Tomoko Haseyama as The BCG News Anchorwoman

Archival Review

[Author's Note: Almost good enough to have published, this was unfortunately just lost along the way in my writings. Reading this review to publish does entice me to want to revisit Anatomia Extinction. Once an obscure title, an American company Error4444 had a limited edition Blu Ray released in 2021, so people are more aware of this production. Tokyo Gore Police (2009) is one that needs to be returned to as well, as whilst my views here have not really changed at all with my issues with later mid-2000s onwards films from the likes of Sushi Typhoon, as discussed in the review, there is an interest in seeing if my views change a little. Like other archival reviews, the review has been tidied up and even re-written in terms of grammar, but none of the content has been removed or altered from when it was written, even if my tone and views have changed in places.]

 

If there is a fascinating comparison to be made between two different eras, Yoshihiro Nishimura's same premise - where in a bleak futuristic Japan, a figure wanders it turning people into bio-mutants - between the more well known Tokyo Gore Police (2008) and Anatomia Extinction from the decade later is a great example. Anatomia Extinction is superior, as much because, under the Sushi Typhoon label, Nishimura's feature length version has an erratic, frankly tedious third act of mindless practical gore with no cause to truly cheer. Anatomia Extinction has the virtue, beyond only fifty minutes in length that before you shot in warehouses and stages, within the vibrant indie filmmaking era of Japan, Nishimura had to shoot this sci-fi/body horror/splatter work in actual streets and subways stations.

The world, ironically, is more fleshed out and elaborated on here than in Tokyo Gore Police. The later feature film tried to show itself as a fully fleshed world through RoboCop inspired fake advertisements, but with sparse sets with few people. Here, likely stealing shots in the street, the crowds of bystanders going about in their daily lives stands out, as is real night time locations and dark subway corridors. It's ordinary life is fleshed out, like nineties Japan but with the details tantalisingly shown - one, ran with in Tokyo Gore Police of a privatised police force which is merely hinted at in radio and audio, the second which adds so much more here in that there is an overpopulation issue and a string of inexplicable massacres, even of children, constantly taking place. The later makes the mutants in Anatomia Extinction have a reason to exist, that they are creations of a cult wishing (horrifically) to cull the populous by creating monsters.

The work, not very long and as much a practical effects demo, still has this as a simplistic plot where one person finds himself drawn to this cult out of chance, which becomes grotesque and as freakish as you would expect, what with a loved one in a sewer left limbless yet in orgasmic ecstasy and a mutant frenzy that even references Death Race 2000 (1975). Some of it is darkly humorous in a sick way, all with icky and immensely accomplished practical effects, but never distasteful. Knowing Japanese pulp cinema has a gross underbelly I wish never to encounter, there is thankfully as a balance this era of transgressive pulp which yet has a higher bar of creativity and for intelligence. In an era which coined the term of Japanese cyberpunk, whilst not of the genre, there is an intense atmosphere here of claustrophobic crowded streets, tiny moodily lit rooms and a hell of a lot of primal bold colour lighting. Yes, there is CGI visually equivalent to a Playstation One cut scene, starting the film off no less, but as someone who likes dated CGI, that just added to the material.

There is also, in vast contrast to many genre films from the West, a greater sense of being able to tell the stories through aesthetic and mood even in a gory work like this. There is always a danger of exoticising Japanese culture but, whilst a lot of sluggishness and emphasis on conventions is found in Western genre films, there is (even with clichés) a greater emphasis on mood and a gut "visceral" experience, a lot of Anatomia Extinction atmospheric or, picking up the pace such as a midnight hit-and-run escapade, with a sudden volt of energy inbetween.

At this point it is worth saying I had softened to Tokyo Gore Police more but the ending, a mess of randomness, spoilt it alongside the noticeable sense of being shot within a limited environment or available locations rather than ordinary places. Anatomia Extinction still has a pace, an ebb and flow of progression where the latter film did not, alongside a huge factor that there was no irony in the text at all. Instead, the short version has an incredibly grim sense of world building, a sense of constant congestion and melancholy, over ripened within this world to the point people go mad and kill crazy. There is of course the body horror, which was more elaborated in the 2009 film, but here in its limitations it is still appropriate, as arms lost can merely be grown back as guns, and everything (including how mutants are created) having a nightmarish quality. A lot of the problem with Tokyo Gore Police, and these later films aware with targeting Western audiences, was that shot in bright crisp digital camera and all about the spectacle, many of the virtues of mood and the grotesque materials building to the tone, rather than for itself, was lost.