Yakuza Apocalypse (2015)

 

Director: Takashi Miike

Screenplay: Yoshitaka Yamaguchi

Cast: Hayato Ichihara as Akira Kageyama; Riko Narumi as Kyoko; Shô Aoyagi as Angus; Kiyohiko Shibukawa as Aratetsu; Ryushin Tei as Killer Priest; Yayan Ruhian as Kyoken (Mad Dog); Masanori Mimoto as Kaeru-kun (The Frog)

Cinema of the Abstract

 

Yakuza Apocalypse is when one refuses to die when shot full of holes because you are a yakuza vampire, and the toughest opponent is in a giant frog costume. Or that Takeshi Miike, used to the crime genre and yakuza tales, returns to the genre in his later career and make an epic work proudly deadpan in how increasingly absurd it is as it goes along. Yakuza Apocalypse is going to be an acquired taste especially at this point Miike’s career, where he gained acclaimed for films like 13 Assassins (2010), because it is a cavalcade of new absurdities followed by a finale which is left unanswered. This is a film which takes itself seriously only to be argued to be a pure joke by the end, set in a town where the recession hit leaving it unstable, the yakuza looking after the place about to devour itself when the noble and kind hearted leader, who also happens to be a vampire, is assassinated in a power shift. This feels like a throwback to a certain type of film from Miike’s direct-to-video era in the nineties, specially the more brazenly pulpier ones like Full Metal Yakuza (1997), and in that context, what could already appeal to a viewer without prior experience as a “wacky” cult film gains more credibility in this knowing how Miike, helped in this film by screenwriter Yoshitaka Yamaguchi, carved a niche for this type of movie that felt a bar higher than others.

With significantly less transgressive (and in places problematic) content from some of those earlier films, Miike’s virtue even without the gems of his more seriously minded tone is being able to juggle tones fully, between being able to be sincere in the moment only to undercut expectations, such as the leader’s food source being former yakuza, imprisoned in a cellar, who spend their time knitting and being treated as if in a reform school for criminals. One of his most loyal members, Akira Kageyama (Hayato Ichihara), is the one yakuza who cannot get a tattoo due to his sensitive skin, which will change when his boss is killed but not without passing on the mantle of yakuza vampire to protect the town. What this becomes after this lengthy set up is a freewheeling mass of pulp storytelling where the time allows it to be fleshed out even when a joke. Clearly this was made as a flex in genre for the sake of genre, apt as this was produced by Nikkatsu, who at this point looked back at their legacy – the constant stream of crime and genre b-films from the fifties and sixties, to their pinku films – and produced films inspired from them in the then-modern era of the 2010s, not throwbacks but modern equivalents. Yakuza Apocalypse feels like what would happen if Seijun Suzuki had not been fired for what he got away with for a film like Branded to Kill (1967), adding here horror, open surrealism and martial arts fight scenes.

And credit to Miike and the production team, they hired martial artists and shoot it well, including the stunt casting of Yayan Ruhian, an Indonesia actor and martial artist who came to prominence through Gareth Evans’ The Raid (2011), here getting to play a striking member of the villainous group who took over the yakuza, if with an eccentric touch that he starts with wearing a nice ironed shirt, glasses and looking like a buff train spotter with a backpack full of maps, one of the many times Yakuza Apocalypse presents its story with seriousness whilst also being sardonic about it. That the film ends with no resolve – a central villain, an actual kappa, disappears with no explanation, or the world ending scenario about a giant kaiju sized frog creature –has happened a few times in his career. Whether it was time, budget or the source material not being fully available, be it Fudoh: The Next Generation (1996) having an open ending, or Dead or Alive (1999) famously ending with the most abrupt shift into worldwide destruction possible, Miike has done this so many times with his career that it is a trademark. It feels on purpose a lot of the time, and there is so much that stands within these films, as here too, where even his more indulgent genre films are more interesting than many. There is a whole series of weird subplots which make this particular case more standout, where an older female yakuza, having betrayed her boss, goes through a Lady Macbeth scenario if she keeps hearing a dripping noise only in her brain and tries growing civilians in a green house, or that Kageyama ends up turning everyone into yakuza vampires, from schoolgirls to young boys who upgrade by removing their hair (and fear) with revenge in their heart and a new afro-perm.

It is, as a film which fits the director’s career, one which would raise an eyebrow for many, for good as well as he still takes the production seriously, still making these broad archetypes have meaning to them even when the scenarios are absurd, such as the female yakuza losing her sanity or Kageyama having to grow up quickly in his role. Even when this is utterly insane, it is depicted with the likes of a frog mascot being the ultimate fighter, who is cast with a competent martial artist who can even fight in a full mascot costume. That one figure emphasizes, even as pure pulp for the sake of entertainment, the little weird details which have been with Miike’s films early in the career, playing to the joke (he struggles down stares) whilst still being credible as a figure in the world itself (including his death stare). Yakuza Apocalypse among Takashi Miike’s films is not a canonical title, but it is one which succeeds if you take it as a pure entertainment spectacle with all its absurdist touches; if you have been a fan of his, aware of how prolific he is and how films in this tone came before, this is a follow up to this in his career again which is successful.

Abstract Spectrum: Deadpan / Wacky

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

Dead or Alive: Final (2002)

 

Director: Takashi Miike

Screenplay: Hitoshi Ishikawa, Yoshinobu Kamo and Toshiki Kimura

Cast: Riki Takeuchi as Officer Takeshi Honda; Show Aikawa as Ryō; Maria Chen as Michelle; Richard Chen as Dictator Woo; Jason Chu as Prisoner; Josie Ho as Jun; Tony Ho as Ping

Canon Fodder

 

Among the three Dead or Alive films by Takashi Miike – three films only connected by V-Cinema megastars Riki Takeuchi and Show Aikawa - they all deserve their own coverage, but among them the third and final one always came off as maligned. The first was a film which helped Miike’s reputation, as much due to its out-of-nowhere ending, the second film is one of his best and a reminder of his emotional and dramatic side, and Final came to the United Kingdom in the wave of Tartan Video DVDs with a dull thud. It was neither helped that at this point, when Arrow Video decided to preserve the entire trilogy for a Blu Ray release, Final was shot on standard digital with burnt in Japanese subtitles, even having included a warning the preserved copy is less than perfect due to one of this film’s many quirks.

Old films onscreen, all fantasy wuxia with homemade monster costumes, open up the film with a melancholic air before we are sent to A.D. 2346 Yokohama, in a post apocalypse when the new major, Major Wu, has enforced the strictest of population and birth control rules. Pregnant women are incarcerated and it is implied they will outright shot children to keep the population down, with Wu’s own birth control pill is mandatory for all couples to take, with an enforcer called Officer Honda (Riki Takeuchi) as his right hand. Obviously there is a rebel group, refusing to take the pill and this introduces Ryo (Show Aikawa), who wanders in abruptly in this, preventing Honda’s men gunning down a young boy, and being introduced to the rebel group, mostly two figures that have made the ill advised decision to hire gangsters to help them stop Wu. Ryo thankfully is a replicant even able to stop bullets with his hands.

Whilst the premise sounds like horrible homophobic propaganda – when Major Wu is introduced having a shirtless sexy sax man, who preaches eternal love being only possible in homosexuality – Miike films, as usual, are more complicated, especially as whilst this is set in Yokohama, most of the cast are speaking in Cantonese, and the film was shot in Hong Kong, which evokes mainland China’s controversial one child policy than anything else. Implemented between 1980 and 2015, and thus still enforced when the film was released, it was a real life attempt at reducing population rates with strict laws, and I would not be surprised this came to mind for the production alongside the idea, set in a post-apocalypse, of imagining population issues being a subject the creators wanted to explore. Wu, played by Richard Chen, is less evil due to being gay but being a bastard, but one who feels the old world, of environmental disaster and chaos, can only be prevented from appearing in these extremes, Honda enforcing this law by the book of logic. The film, is there are any issues, plays its premise as a merely a context, not as fully fleshed out as it could be, but it feels less problematic than it suggests initially.

Contextually the origin in V-Cinema adds a lot to Final as a film, as with the whole trilogy. In lieu to cinema’s constant challenges such as television, Japanese cinema in the eighties gained a new format with videotape, which led to the likes of straight-to-video anime and the cinema Takeuchi and Aikawa made their names in, let alone this being where Miike started as a director originally. Dead or Alive as a trilogy, in hindsight to Miike’s earliest films before the 2000s, with some going to cinemas but others not, feels like a capstone to this period. The sense of its repetition of the two leads, always to cross paths, feels apt for the careers of the two too, as much as the lurid and strange moments in the trilogy coming from the unpredictability of Miike’s earlier films. Here for the last time Riki Takeuchi, Elvis pompadour and cool, and Show Aikawa, eccentric with his own idiosyncratic croaky voice and dyed blonde hair, got to revisit this world one last time. The first Dead or Alice is underappreciated, as it is known for its opening and ending, but with the central crime story being just as interest as a sad, melancholic tale where even the absurdity of the ending befits two men on opposite sides of the law literally destroying the world in their hatred. Dead or Alive 2: Birds (2000) was even more idiosyncratic and bittersweet, with the leads friends and hit men who knew each other from childhood, a drama in crime genre clothing of memory, nostalgia and purpose. In comparison to Birds especially, Final does feel a curious turn, a piece which connects to earlier films, specifically one of Miike’s best Rainy Dog (1997), as passages become Ryo bonding with a woman and the child he rescued in his introduction, but is also an imperfect production next to the other two just for the sense that this could have done with a few more minutes and grown from its virtues.

Shooting in Hong Kong adds something at least for starters, never trying to be futuristic baring some aesthetic details, like CGi giant dragon ships over tower blocks, and the replicant subplot, involving robots from a war far in the past able to eat and be empathetic as much as being dangerous to normal humans. Clearly the film had interest in the country’s history of martial arts cinema, even if it would be fed through CGI, with Show Aikawa trying his own stunts. Here I have to get to its standard digital shooting style too. This is thankfully something changing over the decades, especially with the work of the likes of American Genre Film Archive in preserving shot on video films has caused titles with imperfect technological appearances to be more readily available, but I did have a legitimate concern that an era of early 2000s digitally shot films would be lost. There was some sense of the issue being how something like this, shot likely for practicality, shows the technology in its softness and being out-of-place in a world of 4K and High Definition technology especially when it came to televisions. A production like MPD Psycho (2000), his great mini-series adaptation of the Eiji Ōtsuka and Shou Tajima manga, is something left obscure and with this concern, and here you can see, with its interlacing, Final has a fuzziness to it that will put some off immediately. Considering however though, with MPD Psycho still having huge censorship bars over gore, not for censorship but on purpose, Miike does feel like someone who has toyed with the style of his films deliberately. He is one of the few able to make very obvious CGI work, as here, and the green hue to this world is a slight emphasis on this being a dystopia without overdoing it, all felt with the sense of his usual trademarks of being one of the few directors to go out of the box fully.

This does jar with the beauty of the previous films in this series, but considering the crammed, waste and water logged world of futuristic Yokohama here, it also makes sense to have this style. The film’s hardcoded Japanese subtitles also come with the fact that, continuing his interest in multiculturalism, Miike has a mostly Cantonese speaking cast, with the leader of the resistance also fluent in English. It does not hide its Japanese setting clearly being Hong Kong, and it never feels out-of-place. The golden virtue of Takashi Miike – whilst even Sion Sono could spin his wheels in repetitious content – is that Miike unless you got him on a really bad day is a chameleon, always interesting, and here too, Final becomes more of a drama as Honda’s reality is shown to him and Ryo bonds with the survivors from when the rebels are caught off guard. Here is another film where, even with its absurd moments, it still however has emotional resonance regardless of how bizarre he can get, where even a botched rescue becoming an accidental kidnapping of a child leads to a friendship between two instead.

The film eventually refers back to the two films before by the ending, openly embracing the sense of these films existing within themselves whilst still being serious. Note that, yes, the ending of Final is bizarre, with a penis robot at the end as unexpected as you would presume, alongside the end credits just recording an older man on the street singing a song. This comes with him as a filmmaker - the profound and emotional against this openly silly and juvenile content - and it does not jar from the content from the previous two Dead or Alive films either. The film's true flaw, in truth, is that I have already mentioned, that this does fell slightly undercooked, not fully fleshed out as it could be with the importance of the film, the end of this trilogy, and the virtues already here when it is both serious and it is silly.

MPD Psycho (2000)

 

Director: Takashi Miike

Screenplay: Eiji Ohtsuka, Gichi Ootsuka and Yumi Sirakura

Based on the manga by Eiji Ohtsuka

Cast: Ren Ôsugi as Tooru Sasayama, Naoki Hosaka as Kazuhiko Amamiya, Tomoko Nakajima as Machi Isono, Sadaharu Shiota as Masaki Manabe, Yoshinari Anan as Kikuo Toguchi, Rieko Miura as Honda, Lily as Yôko Yamamoto, Nae as Tomoyo Tanabe

A Night of the Thousand Horror (Shows) #39 / An Abstract Candidate

 

Reflecting on how I got into Takashi Miike as a director, I can think of a couple of titles in his filmography which helped shape the interest. Ichi the Killer (2001) - a very transgressive yet smart film, with greater layers than its infamy suggests. Rainy Dog (1997) - his sombre, compelling crime dramas, shot in Taiwan, arguably his best film or a strong contender for one. One I realise left a lasting mark early in getting into his career, and sadly in danger of being forgotten and unpreserved, is his 2000 mini-series based on a manga by Eiji Ohtsuka, who co-penned the series' script. From when Miike became big and notorious, and early DVD labels grabbed what they could of his career, this was a great example back then for me in showing Miike's workaholic mentality, constructing interesting productions in any medium.

It also, with fresh eyes, emphasises that despite his self professed "working director" viewpoint, that he works with others' material, he is an auteur. Truthfully, returning to MPD Psycho, its plot eventually becomes the weakest point, a strange mishmash from its manga source. It starts strangely but with a clear, intriguing beginning. Kazuhiko Amamiya (Naoki Hosaka) is a former police officer with split personalities. The show is not PC nowadays on this, confusing schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder, and sadly does not use this as much for Amamiya's character as it should; nonetheless he is someone with multiple personalities, one buried after the tragic murder of his wife. He killed the suspect as a cop, leading to a cover-up, and another personality to take over. That calm personality returns to the police as an outside help, for police detective Tooru Sasayama (Ren Ôsugi), when a series of perverse murders are taking place where, emphasising the manga's grotesque creativity, bodies are being buried with flowers growing out of their exposed brains.

The plot gets stranger, but stays the right side of compelling for the first half. The manga should be viewed as an entirely different work as, in the bit I have viewed, even from its first two volumes it is radically different in tone and content from this. The mini-series has that, stemming from an American hippy terrorist and musician Lucy Monostone, a sentient personality named Nishizono exists can transfer himself from host to host, invoking their homicidal side as he occupies them, another female sentient personality, able to also transfer through the web and phones, trying to stop him as Tooru and Amamiya with a female psychologist, effectively Amamiya's new boss and handler, have to deal with a variety of bizarre cases from school shootings based around brainwashed students to bingo games using severed body parts. The hosts Nishizono can occupy all have bar codes marked under one eye under the bottom eyelid, and he is directly connected to Amamiya and the murder of his first wife, alongside the kidnapping of his newest wife, all of which for the first three episodes, fifty plus minutes long to an hour, is compelling. The show does waver when it gets the final, with a convoluted exposition of artificially made personalities, to create killers, for a government project and trying to tie everyone together into the conspiracy. I do still love MDP Psycho, but I will admit the plot is ridiculous, more so when a huge exposition dump transpires near the end of the fifth episode, in a burning hospital, lasting long after the flames should have surely caused everyone to flee early in the exposition.

Where the show is still compelling is that, as a shot on digital production, Miike adds so much just as the director to this show in tone, improvising greatly. Even in the fifth episode, it ends abruptly with Tooru over the end credits, as a character who is with multiple women, wandering home to a miserable place with one of his romantic interests and her child, all slow burn tension as he tries to get a bath off-screen, broken by a moment of humour between the characters. The sense the mini-series has allowed Miike to improvise is felt throughout. The show, whilst the eventual need to explain everything does undercut it slightly, is idiosyncratic, and considering this is the director of the likes of Gozu (2005) and Visitor Q (2001), to say this is strange even for him at times tonally is a real crown of this show's virtues, more so as it is under seen. Miike was allowed to improvise around the narrative, without letting a low budget undercut him. The fact that I have always found the use of ordinary, grounded locations in Japan, in the streets and public places, evocative helps, but there are many of the flourishes, his impulsive, where Miike got his reputation for being unconventional but clearly showed his voice too. Little details stuck with me from the first time watching this mini-series and still do, such as there being green rain on beaches full of thrown away electronics, for example, with Miike one person whose use cheap and very obvious CGI always worked. Throughout, even using very creative placement of actors and props in scenes, this has the type of flourish outside of scripts that show the director's own creativity.

This goes as much in how, as a director with traits, his reoccurring actors are as much part of his style. Ren Ôsugi is the main reoccurring actor here, the stand out as the police detective and the one true friend of Amamiya, both as someone as talented to be able to be funny when need be for the comedy, but also to be serious when the narrative drama has to, a huge virtue as for the rest of his reoccurring actors in other films from the time for Miike. And when this gets wacky, Ôsugi gets a lot, an eccentric police chief who, when talking to his superiors about the latest murder case of strange spree killings, he will eventually have ones making comedic puns, with a Christmas tree in the background, and even playing a guitar. With his police assistant Tatsuya (Satoshi Matsuda), an otaku who, rather than presides over autopsies or real crime photos, creates intricate plastic figurines of the bizarre murders, and MPD Psycho does manage to slot itself as unique in the director's career, continuing his trend of idiosyncratic characters and an ability, without undercutting the drama, of having wacky humour that actually makes the characters distinct. Allowed to have tangents, Miike is allowed to breath, more so with a longer length of narrative to work with.

A huge virtue is that, even as a low budget production which embraces its style, but there is a lot of quality among those who are working with the director. The female personality is depicted in black 'n' white animation, a big aesthetic flourish among many that emphasis, even on low budgets, Takashi Miike is someone happy to embrace different aesthetic styles, such a stop motion in The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), or his embracing on CGI regardless of how fake it looks. The music in particular for MPD Psycho by Tsugutoshi Goto and Yumi Shirakura, when it stands out, is striking. The main theme based as Lucy Monostone's, the death fixated Strange New World, is legitimate psychedelic rock which is haunting and strangely calm alongside the show's flourishes of audio aesthetic design. Considering this is a show that even defies how an episode should be structured, such as ending one after the end credits with an older woman calmly eating food in a cell, having the chance to direct a mini-series does show Miike alongside everyone working with him here, on or off-screen, are happy to take risks in terms of how this show presents itself.

The original world, as transported to this show, was already a distinct one to work with. Even if the plot has to try to wrap a lot up, it offers something intriguing connected to this format. The grotesqueness before, contrasted by the original manga's exceptional art style by Shou Tajima, elegant in appearance, is contrasted now by the surreality of early Miike when he worked with a lot of low budgets as a straight-to-video filmmaker who occasionally moved to theatrical films. One of the more contentious choices of the television mini-series, the censoring of gore by way of large blurred bars onscreen, is even deliberate, a weird touch to deliberately undercut how the narrative is perceived and not far from other times, whilst still being completely sincere, Miike has shown a trickster-like mentality to blur tone in his work or even undercut the mood of a film on purpose. Even in what the show looks like, it is helped that I have always found depictions of real Japanese locations, urban public sectors and on the street, compelling, always bustling or at least lived-in for many of these films rather than isolated in corridors.

It is also helped that, for the plot aspects which are absurd when revealed, of these personalities being the result of secret government experiments to have personalities that induce psychopathic behaviour just because, a lot is still startlingly relevant even if technology has evolved further from what this evokes. One major piece of exposition, a great example of pure colourful exposition than important, reveals the female personality is one of these experiments accidentally acquired off-line, a computer geek managing to update her better than a government in that, alongside being a benevolent personality also meant to be an artificial musical idol, she can enter any person through the internet and phones rather than the limitations Nishizono has, someone still able to enter people (and escape them) by modern technology. He even sneaks into a hospital at one point by way of floppy disc, and using anti-virus technology or just destroying a telephone tower have to be used to deal with the problem. Set at the time of the dying emperor, the end of the Showa era, this is still relevant in terms of how it plays with technology as much as it is a time piece in the best of ways, to the point that at one point a hospital staff member, a shut-in in a future life, is dragged into a war between these sides by way of his 2D girlfriend in a dating sim, when she is infected and develops an actual personality able to talk back to him. Even the hokeyness of the plot, more because it has to explain everything being rationally explained by technology, and having to make everyone related, has something salient as it evokes MK Ultra, a deeply troubling series of projects by the United States CIA in brainwashing and interrogating people, more so as this story stems from experiments by the United States in artificial personalities, but comes to Japan and its own history, including the left wing terrorist group the Japanese Red Army being evoked in the final episode.

MPD Psycho does still stand up even if the final narrative beats do go to directions it never should have needed. Only having some of the plot details being unnessary does not in the slightest undercut what virtues of here. In fact, it really emphasises that, whilst the narratives and drama in his work can be incredible, especially when he makes dramas, the virtues for Takashi Miike for me have come from when he has been allowed to match them with the creativity he shows onscreen. Returning to this mini-series, you have the perfect example to find in showing this virtue of his.

Abstract Spectrum: Bizarre/Grotesque/Weird

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

Masters of Horror Season 1 Part 6: Imprint (2006)

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Director: Takashi Miike

Screenplay: Daisuke Tengan

Based on a novel by Shimako Iwai

Cast: Billy Drago as Christopher; Michié as Komomo; Yûki Kudô as the Woman

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #14

There's the obvious hypocrisy, openly humorous, how the production of Masters of Horror gave their chosen directors carte blanche to film episodes with adult content, and not only hired Takashi Miike in the first place, considering his career by than included Visitor Q (2001) and Ichi the Killer (2001), but expected him not to create a transgressive story when given the chance out creative control. Miike has done commercial mainstream horror, like One Missed Call (2003), but when he was picked because of films like Audition (1999) which pushed boundaries, it's only the production staff for the series to blame when he brought back Imprint, pulled from US cable television for being too extreme. Even with concessions - all the lines of dialogue spoken in English awkardly by most of the cast, whilst Billy Drago "emotes" as an American named Christopher in period Japan going to a pleasure island looking for a geisha named Komomo (Michié) - Miike managed to pull off a paradox in this creative freedom but going too far.

It also reveals how, when J-horror became a commodity of interest for the US film industry, something was visibly lost in translation about Japanese horror storytelling. Another perfect example of this, within this same year or so, was when Miike inexplicably cameoed in Eli Roth's Hostel (2005); seeing him phonetically say a single line of dialogue about his enjoyment of something nasty and horrible, looking like a badass in his trademark shades whilst disappearing off screen never to be seen again, you could see how off the mark Roth was making immediate mirroring of his film and Japanese horror, regardless of the level of transgression in some of them, and missing the noticeable difference between them. Whilst films have been made that are gore for the sake of gore, there's some many differences in tone and content that makes the meeting between American horror and Japanese horror confused. Japanese horror in any medium beyond the gore and weirdness has a significantly different attitude. For every one that feels like a mainstream crossover in the tone of Hollywood, even mainstream films reflect reality through horror tropes (adultery, gender politics, the plight of hierarchy) that's synonymous in Japanese culture or are far more complex in their transgressive natures by way of the types of films they've been inspired by or clear genres like Ero-guro.

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The irony with Imprint is that, beyond the notorious content that got it kicked off the air, the plot's pretty standard in both Japanese horror cinema and even in the likes of Kenji Mizoguchi melodramas. If this has been an episode of a Japanese horror anthology series, it would've been a solid six out of ten.  A little disappointing from Takashi Miike when you expect better, but perfectly solid and amongst some of the Masters of Horror episodes, standing out by a country mile to many of them in terms of quality. The plot's pretty simple to an advantage, built from well aged but reliable plot threads. Christopher wants to see Kimomo again, only to meet a disfigured geisha (Yûki Kudô) who not only says his love committed suicide, but is suspicious in the exact story she tells of how this came to be as well as in discussing her own life since birth. Mostly it's a chamber piece with a Rashomon like narrative where she's not a reliable narrator, the story changing as it keeps being questioned. Kudô, in an episode which honestly has poor acting throughout it, does actually commit to a good performance, arguably amongst some of the best through the series. I was surprised to discover she's in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989) as one of the iconic pair of Japanese, rock and roll obsessed tourists in Memphis, pleasantly surprised to see her here fifteen or so years later. That her career has spanned English and Japanese speaking roles means she's actually able to create an interesting performance with nuance to her dialogue, this the first of Miike's ill advised attempts at an all-English language film with non-English speakers (Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)), and with Kudô the most comfortable out of everyone including Billy Drago in acting in English. The story does overstuff the twist ending with unnecessary inclusions, missing the point when the geisha herself is so much more interesting than what's done. Not only is Kudô's performance enough by itself, but the reveal of the level of her deformities is enough for a story without the random additional twists included.

Another factor of worth is knowing Imprint's source material is from a female author Shimako Iwai, complicating potential accusations of misogyny with the content particularly the notorious torture sequence halfway through, more so as Iwai herself plays the torturer trying to gain information from Komomo. Iwai sadly doesn't even have real articles on her in the English interweb let alone any published work in English, more so a disappointment as the little on her Wikipedia page suggests such a fascinating figure. An authoress, pornographic director, television celebrity and essayist, the sort of figure I'd be dying to be able to read any of her work of as, particularly as Imprint is seen usually as Miike at his most nasty and transgressive, realising its from a woman's voice originally does bring more depth to an otherwise adequate entry. A story consisting mainly of the voice of a woman (Kudô's character) telling of how women like herself are sold in sexual slavery and the various plights women in general suffer as a result. Even if her geisha character commits evil acts, she's someone created from a life of misery and having had to become controller of said life to avoid this misery further, a continuation of countless narratives like it in Japanese storytelling. It actually further, in a story where women are the predominant characters and the sole male one is a weak willed listener, that Drago's performance is as ridiculous as it is, unintentionally adding a lot to the powerlessness of Christopher in how wooden and hysterical the performance is.

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Lastly, it's interesting for a series that I've mainly ignored the production side of the episodes, as it rarely stands out, that Imprint does stand out particularly in set and costume design. Costume designer Michiko Kitamura stands out immediately with her work giving a deliberate artificiality and sense of colour found in Japanese horror rare in Western stories, just in differing Yûki Kudô (even in the dyed colour of her hair) with blue against the other actresses playing geishas or the brothel Madame in stark red. Having the cinematographer of Gohatto (1999), Toyomichi Kurita, doesn't hurt either. Nor the general production, (be it art, production or set design), where as a period piece in stands more noticeably out than the other period stories in the series just for little touches which catch the viewer off guard. How, even when the disfigured geisha's childhood is retold with even more taboos on display, the shack she grew up in has colourful paper windmills on sticks in every version nearby in a dirt mound. For all the problems with Imprint, especially in its plot structure, it still manages to be more rewarding than other episodes because of this. Miike, even when he drops the ball, usually still creates a film of interest and only rarely in his insanely prolific career makes something completely unwatchable. This could've been a lot better, which is disappointing as one of the those die-hard fans of his, but it's in a class of its own to other Masters of Horror episodes not just because of it being the only banned from air time. 

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Gozu (2003)

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Director: Takashi Miike

Screenplay: Sakichi Satô

Cast: Yûta Sone (as Minami); Shô Aikawa (as Ozaki); Kimika Yoshino (as Ozaki); Shôhei Hino (as Nose); Keiko Tomita (as the Innkeeper); Harumi Sone (as the Innkeeper's Brother); Renji Ishibashi (as Minami's Boss)

Synopsis: When his mentor and senior yakuza Ozaki (Shô Aikawa) is deemed to have lost his competency and sanity, requiring "disposal", the younger gangster Minami (Yûta Sone) is the one forced to take him away by his seniors only for Ozaki to both die accidentally and for the body to vanish in broad daylight from his car. Stuck in a small town trying to find his mentor, Minami's investigation leads to a mounting series of bizarre people and events, stuck in an inn where the owners are strange and more than happy to provide twice a person's worth of food, stuck in a small town where he's seen as a foreign body and going around in circles in spite of the assistance of the partially white faced Nose (Shôhei Hino) to find Ozaki. Then there's a beautiful woman (Kimika Yoshino) claiming to be Ozaki and can manage to actually prove who she is.

Gozu is an episodic odyssey with a nod to Alice in Wonderland, not in presentation but the idea of a person finding themselves wandering in a strange place with bafflement at everything they witness.  Admittedly the film does start strangely already. Miike's almost interpreting what a David Lynch film is like with Minami watching a television is a cafe with his gang which is entirely distorted and about someone wanting to lactate but isn't being allowed to, a stiltedness to the initial performances and scored, as throughout the film when it isn't completely silent, but ominous strings by perfectly implemented by Kôji Endô. Ozaki, played by Shô Aikawa, immediately sets the bar by randomly killing a small dog outside in front of two terrified women, having claimed its a yakuza attack animal and proving he's lost his marbles, setting up the black humour immediately off the bat. However this is sane for Miike, his usual balance between seriousness, that has a surprising amount of cinema verité in the grungy environments and minimal use of music, and bizarre punctures into transgression and slapstick. Gozu actually has a visible shift for protagonist Minami where he'll enter his Wonderland, reaching a road in his car that's completely swallowed up ahead by a river, a sudden glitch in the image and distortion in the soundtrack, his mentor inadvertedly dead before Minami finally developed the courage to kill someone he had platonic and friendly love for. Than Ozaki's body vanishes when trying to phone his seniors in a cafe and has to puke up an egg custard he's didn't order in the bathroom.

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Technical Detail:

Yet Gozu, from this initial premise, emphasises one of Miike's best virtues especially from all the films up to this one of the slow, deliberate tone. Miike even in some of his most notorious films usually paces his work with a greatly leisured tone; ironically its now as a much older veteran, making more mainstream films and adapting manga more so than before in his early career, that he's making faster pace films rather than the presumption older directors become more sedate. This slower pace helped him in even the stranger genre works of his to always emphasis characterisation, here of immense importance as its entirely down to the fresh faced Yûta Sone to anchor the film, playing a virginal adult yakuza lost in a realm of sexual obsessions and various distractions he's forced to go through which exasperation like a labyrinth of nonsense. The cast helps greatly, full of regulars from Miike's career in large and minor roles who, throughout all the films Miike made, are all talented actors able to bring an air of seriousness even to the most ridiculous material. For example Renji Ishibashi, as the yakuza boss who can only get an erection from an intricately inserted ladle, manages to give this absurd character some gravitas so the character can be taken serious but, helping this black comedy to succeed, is visibly having fun with the material, as with everyone else in the cast recognisable or new to Miike's world here.

The slower, deliberate tone is needed as its one of Miike's films which is not inherently propelled by plot but a lot of character building, Minami's search through the small town making up most of the film's length and deliberately filled with pointless tangents, searching for clues which go in circles and arbitrary goals to complete, even having to complete a riddle to get help from Nose (Shôhei Hino) in the first place, the assistant of a local yakuza who's ability to be stroppy if angered is tantamount and just as liable to delay Minami's quest. The lengthy running time in hindsight of this isn't indulgent but a necessary, Gozu very much in the area of cinema and storytelling I love the most of either dream logic or a journey which is not based on a quest, but a small goal where like a sightseer the viewer and the protagonist(s) witness things entirely new to them and have to respond to them. That this journey becomes increasingly weird for Minami, who reacts with more and more shock and alarm at everything he see, adds to the film and the slow burn pace allows for each scene to be even more shocking for the viewer and hilarious. It helps in being in Minami's place trying to rationalise the events around him, not only the transgressive aspects like excessive lactation or a cow headed man in only underpants appearing in his dreams, but the unexpected egg custard forced onto him when he only orders coffee or how his outsider position to even his own yakuza group makes him useless in convincing many he encounters into talking to his straight about what he needs.

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Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Surreal/Weird

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

Undeniably, this is one of Miike's strangest films, a film where character moments take up most of the time rather than a plot until the third act where Kimika Yoshino comes in, rejecting a rational beginning, middle and end for bookmarks side-by-side of increasingly oddball events. It's known for its notorious sequences which stand out in the director's career (the full adult birthing, Renji Ishibashi's collection of ladles, the skin suits of yakuza tattoos preserved in a freezer from all the disposed of yakuza) but the weirdness is more palpable for how the film is grounded in tone in spite of its odd moments.

One of the biggest aspects to this strangeness, in a career that's full of sexual issues and kink, is the subplot of Minami's sexual yearnings, visibly in the plot to have feelings for his mentor Ozaki. This is not the first relationship between gangsters that's either yearning or explicit homosexuality shown in Miike's cinema, neither is it the first time this narrative plot has taken place in a Miike film, Full Metal Yakuza (1997) leading to the gangster who looks up to his stronger, wiser senior becoming stronger himself from having his senior's body parts (including genitals) attached to his rebuilt body. Here, it's a visible confusion in Minami's relationship with Ozaki, and it's not through literal envelopment that this relationship is consecrated but with a desire that's built up through flashbacks that suggest more is going on for Minami, literalised when a beautiful woman appears who knows intimate secrets about Minami that only his senior knew, claiming to be Ozaki herself and breaking the wall Minami has had for his mentor. That this film is rife with various forms of sexual kink brings to mind Gozu being entirely from the perspective of Minami's confused sexuality manifesting itself in various forms.

But Gozu's success is truly found in how the normalcy is as much strange as the more extreme content, maybe even stranger on subsequent viewings when the initial shock of the more infamous scenes had faden. You're initially struck by the odd sight of an older man in a gold tracksuit talking to a similar one in a silver jumpsuit, only to find that their conversation about the weather is one you'd hear in real life in an actual cafe and actually strange in itself to realise. Sakichi Sato, the screenwriter, also adapted Miike's notorious Ichi the Killer (2001), and alongside that film's deliberate complexity in its various transgressive sexualities, it also had a huge emphasis even against other Miike films on puncturing the extremity with bafflingly normal scenes and quiet gestures, normal behaviour that feel alien in context of what happens around them even in the same scenes. How the characters act or even one-off figures who don't necessarily come off as wacky figures but people you might actually bump into in a small Japanese town, like the American wife of a store owner who needs detailed placards on the walls of their shop to help her speak fluent Japanese or the yakuza disposal site employees who are completely casual about their career in crushing human bodies into pulp and retaining their skins.

What helped me to fall in love with Gozu is that it's a film where an everyman is placed within a world that's both very mundane and utterly bizarre, and both sides are as strange as each other, where even the doubling size of his meals at a hotel gains a reaction from him and us as a viewer of surprise. Little details pull as much humour as the more twisted moments, giving Gozu a greater effect.

Personal Opinion:

Gozu is one of Takashi Miike's underrated and best films. Not because it's weird for the sake of weird, but because it makes both normalcy as weird as the bizarre, transgressive material and the sides meet together to create something as perplexing to follow as its ghoulishly funny, ending on a happy ending that's surprisingly sweet despite the yucks that taken place beforehand.

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