Ah, Japan. The home of Kurosawa and Ozu and Miyazaki and Koreeda and Shinkai and the weirdest shit you could ever imagine… or not imagine as it happens, because these movies are so far out of anything we have ever seen.
I love how differently different people can experience Japanese film. There’s the world of Drive My Car, Tokyo Story, Seven Samurai and Sansho the Bailiff. There’s the world of Akira, My Neighbor Totoro, Belladonna of Sadness, Your Name and Grave of Fireflies. Then there’s the world where these people somehow find funding for very extreme movies. Not necessarily even extreme in the sense of violence or sex (although both of these are major components of some of the movies below), but just things that go far beyond what we could expect to see in a Western movie.
While many European countries have a very specific feel regarding their movies, I guess sometimes we just forget that Japan has a population of around 120 million meaning that they have a big enough market to produce a wide variety of movies. The weird thing is that it seems that many of them are more or less forgotten, but they still keep making them. Its almost as if the business is secondary and the art is primary.
Well, this isn’t strictly true. For example, there was a tradition of pink films, which meant that promising new filmmakers would get a decent budget to make whatever film they wanted as long as they included enough sex or nudity in the film to get a certain crowd to see the movies.
Considering the guilty pleasure theme of the series, this section might very well be the one where I most often thought about whether I actually want to admit to liking these movies, but lucky you, I didn’t leave any movies out for this reason and decided to wallow in the glory of these movies instead.
On a final note: I was going to include a number of Sion Sono movies in this series and even planned to have a separate section for him, but as I was reading up on him, I find out that there are a lot of accusations of sexual misconduct. While he did take the original publication, Shūkan Josei, to court over these and settled out of court, various other outlets have also published this story with details. One of the accusers actually took her own life. A Japanese actor called Yuki Matsuzaki has continued a campaign to bring all of this to everyone’s attention. In the end, I decided to just leave Sono out.
R100
Japan, 2013, dir. Hitoshi Matsumoto
A half-star review from Letterboxd: Jesus ! Only for gents who fantasise about paying ladies to punch the shit out of them when they least expect it.
A five-star review from Letterboxd: Have to give this fucked up pervert shit all the stars because I’ve never seen anything like it and couldn’t have known what I was getting into. Highest recommendation. Run your brain with this at your earliest convenience.
R100 supposedly means that the movie is too hot for anyone under 100. The movie is actually unrated. Probably because they couldn’t risk people making fun of this having any other rating. Well, it has been rated in some countries and the ratings are generally local versions of 15 or 18, but in France this is allowed for general audiences with warnings.
The tagline for the movie promises whipping, punching, slapping, choking, kicking and beating (which feels redundant), but what the tagline does not disclose is that these are all sexual acts in the context of the movie. More specifically sexual acts as paid for by the main character (of sorts) through a dominatrix subscription service. The service is for one year and getting out of it is worse than getting out of Adobe’s subscription service. Also, the acts above are just a taste of the creativity in regards to the specialities provided by the dominatrices. For example, one of them is named Saliva Queen and another is Voice Queen.
I’m calling the main character just a “main character of sorts”, because he doesn’t really have that much in the way of agency since he has basically given that away to the service. This is the main plot of the movie: The service providers keep intruding his life at the most inopportune moments imaginable.
However, all this is also a film-within-a-film. There is a framing story of an elderly man explaining to us that you need to be hundred to really understand the movie, and there’s an audience which definitely doesn’t get it. I guess there is also an audience out here who can identify with the audience in the movie.
In the last section I mentioned thinking about whether I really want to admit to liking these movies and this is the movie I was thinking about when I wrote that. Not that this is even explicit. It’s just a weird take on sexuality, a kind of sexuality we generally think of as perverted.
On the other hand, it is also the kind of practice people often experiment with when they want to be a little naughtier than usual. So, perhaps a movie like this is a positive, because it shows that it isn’t that serious. Or maybe this ridicules the BSDM culture in such a way that it distances people from it.
The question I’m trying to approach here is that is this kinkshaming? I don’t want to do that. This isn’t my kink, but who am I to say no to someone interested in doing something like this with consenting partners.
Of course, the other side of the coin is that after our main character tries to get out of the arrangement, but can’t, that sure does feel like sexual assault, which we shouldn’t find funny even if it is happening to a man under these extreme circumstances. This gets especially problematic when the young son of the main character is involved by the service.
Still, I do find the constant orgasms hilarious, especially the way they are represented.
The movie also acknowledges the absurdity of it all. There are arguments regarding the commercial potential of a movie for over 100 year olds, for example.
Dai-Nihonjin (Big Man Japan)
Japan, 2007, dir. Hitoshi Matsumoto
A half-star review from Letterboxd: i was forced to watch it and it was like cruel and unusual punishment
A five-star review from Letterboxd: One of the most clever pieces of social commentary I’ve ever seen and also batshit insane
Putting these two movies by Hitoshi Matsumoto was completely accidental. I didn’t even realize these movies were directed by the same person before rechecking whether I had the director of this one correct. I will gladly accept this coincidence. Maybe I should look into his other movies as well. He apparently only had a six year film directing career with this being his first and R100 being his last. He mostly focuses on TV. He is also the star of this movie.
Masaru Daisatou is an eccentric man. At first we don’t quite understand why he is being followed by a camera crew but then a monster attack occurs and Masaru is called into action as Big Man Japan, a man that can absorb huge amounts of electricity in order to grow into a giant size himself. However, being a superhero is complicated. It doesn’t pay that well and you have to be careful with public relations when you rampage through a city fighting a cute monster no matter how dangerous it is.
The movie is a mockumentary. Masaru is followed by a crew and we have an interviewer behind the camera asking him questions about what’s going on. In some cases they are not allowed to follow him but they try to anyway, sometimes breaking his privacy.
The kaiju in the movie are quite inventive. They often look quite bad as they are cheap CGI creations with human faces planted on them but kaijus have never looked very good until recently, so that should not be a problem. They are weird though and the movie goes out of its way to make them kind of more real but also funnier, for example, when one of them does a mating dance.
Masaru seems to be a disappointment and an embarrassment all around as at one point his grandfather decides to leave his nursing home to help him and in the, sort of, climax of the movie, a whole family of patronizing superheroes beat a villain senseless in front of him.
Maybe this was just a bit too early as this did come out before Iron Man. Of course, it also parodies franchises such as the Power Rangers but my mind doesn’t automatically go there when I think of superheroes.
Wî â Ritoru Zonbîzu (We Are Little Zombies)
Japan, 2019, dir. Makoto Nagahisa
A half-star review from Letterboxd: SUNDANCE FILM NO. 2
Nerds Rope Cinema.A five-star review from Letterboxd: changed my entire outlook on life and the way i reflect on certain events of my childhood or whateva
Funerals need more humor. That’s an explanation early on in the movie by one of the boys after he has been accused of calling his mother “mommy”. This is right after another boy has been accused of crying as his parents are going up in smoke after their cremation.
The parents of the 13-year-old Hikari have just died. When they are being cremated, he meets three other new orphans who all happen to have their respective funerals on the same day. They quickly bond over their lack of emotion over the loss of their parents and decide to form their own family unit of sorts rather than try to learn to live with whatever new circumstances would await them. After having lived a while on their own, they form a band which quickly gains popularity.
Why are the kids not sad? Hikari explain in his narration that babies cry when they need attention. Since he doesn’t need that attention and no-one is going give it to him, what’s the point of crying?
There are also regular references to video games. The music is 8-bit, the group often walks following game-like paths and at one point when Hikari needs something from his home and wants to get it without getting caught by his new stepmother, he sees the situation as a game. In a more disturbing sequence one of the kids gets into a fight with an adult and is beaten badly. Still, that gets an 8-bit style “YOU LOSE” as a response.
This implies that the kids were basically raised by games as their parents were very distant. How are they supposed to learn to relate to anyone if they never see any examples of that? At one point we see a flashback to the father of the only girl in the group telling her that he is happy that he was called to discuss her being a bully at school, because at least he knew that she was not being bullied. This is the most interest we see in regards to the kids by the parents of any of them.
Then, when their self-made music video goes viral, they become instant stars which means that they are quickly taken advantage of by a record company. The rep doesn’t even feel bad about it. He almost feels obligated to do it. And of course, the kids don’t have anyone to protect them.
This does lead to all sorts of weirdness. They perform in a music show called Music Hell which finds it necessary to use footage of each of their parents as a background. Hell, indeed.
The movie does overstay it’s welcome a bit. At two whole hours it’s just too long for a comedy.
Tôkyô zankoku keisatsu (Tokyo Gore Police)
Japan, 2008, dir. Yoshihiro Nishimura
A half-star review from Letterboxd: I’ve encountered gator pussy on the bayou
A five-star review from Letterboxd: cronenberg and chainsaw man had a glorious anti-capitalism baby who hates cops and loves freaks
unrelated but NEED to queen out with all the fem characters in this movie
A word of warning: The movie does include blackface and it is not used satirically or tastefully (obviously). What is it with Japanese and the need to do this? Sigh. I guess that’s a reason to discuss this movie in a series about guilty pleasures.
It’s hard to move on from that without feeling like I’m somehow trying to trivialize that but here we go anyway.
The production company for the movie is called Fever Dreams. That is quite fitting.
The movie starts with a flashback of Ruka as a kid wanting to be a police officer. Then we see her father’s head detonate in front of her. This does not discourage her as she has become an important asset of Tokyo’s privatized police force. She is tasked with taking down “Engineers”, mutants that can grow weapons from their wounds.
The movie is otherwise what it says on the tin. There is so much gore here. At first, it seemed like all the blood was because of the Engineers’ weird biology but then Ruka cuts off the hands of a man who molested her in the subway and uses an umbrella to protect her from all the blood raining down from that.
However, it is also so much more. For example, Ruka’s boss has a gimp on a leash with him at all times and that gimp has only stumps for all four limbs, so she has to move around slowly on all fours. Right after we first see this pair, we have Ruka’s birthday celebration with her colleagues as they present her with a cake. She’s wearing her school uniform inspired costume while most of the people around her are wearing their samurai-armor inspired combat gear.
There’s also an ever-present theme of self-harm. There are ads for tools for that. I mean, you wouldn’t want to cut yourself with any old tool when you can use a cute, fashionable blade that makes licking your own blood that much more enjoyable.
It is a messed up movie but it is also fun if you can handle it. There’s a name for subgenre of Peter Jackson’s early movies: Splatstick. This is exactly that. The horrific dismemberments are just a vehicle for jokes. They are so over the top that you can’t help but laugh.
This is also a very anti-copaganda movie. The police here make Robocop’s OCP look like Columbo. Ruka’s father was actually a figurehead in the movement against police privatization but corrupt forces that weren’t happy with that and had him murdered
In the real world, depending on where you are, there might not be a reason to do this. After all, some police forces already serve private interests but those private interests just don’t need to pay for them as they are paid by the people they are keeping in line. At one point in the movie the police just start executing people on the streets. How far are we actually from that in certain places?
There is a what I would like to call a Marvel-style tease for the future at the end of the movie but that has never happened and since this came out the same year as Iron Man, the tease can’t really be a copy of Marvel specifically.
Naisu no mori: The First Contact (Funky Forest: The First Contact) and Asatte no mori (The Warped Forest)
Japan, 2005, 2011, dirs. Katsuhito Ishii (Funky Forest), Hajime Ishimine (Funky Forest), Shunichirô Miki (both)
A half-star review from Letterboxd: weird but in a gross way. i dont think drugs would help the boredom either, i would probably even get a bad trip from watching this (Funky Forest) / There are some things in this world that are entirely unnecessary, this film is one of them. What is it with male filmmakers who have to make everything into genitalia and buttholes… (Warped Forest)
A five-star review from Letterboxd: Possibly the best film ever made, it has EVERYTHING. (Funky Forest) / This film is awesome because it’s so dumb. Lots of dicks, lots of wishing I wasn’t high when I watched it. (Warped Forest)
Well, first of all, “making everything into genitalia” is not solely a male endeavor. The women who do this are generally even more underground than the men but they definitely exist and there are plenty of them as in a way that is a form of reclamation of their bodily autonomy. Don’t take that away from them. Buttholes, on the other hand, I think that might be just us men.
There are some movies I’ve put together in other parts of the series and they are always a movie and it’s sequel (or two sequels in one case). This is different. These two are not technically related but if you see them, you’ll understand exactly why they are paired.
Why is that? Both of them are just these weird collections of things happening. There are repeating themes and kind of a story but whether that story matters is a completely different thing. You don’t pay attention to it anyhow but I guess you have to have some reason to stop it and a story coming to an end is one way to do that. However, even in the much shorter Warped Forest (150 minute vs. 82 minutes) there is many scenes that have nothing to do with the main plot.
While many scenes do feel like just pure non-sequiturs, as the explanation on IMDb tells us, but that same text also tells us that these are short attention span, but that doesn’t work as there are things that become linked, sometimes in very unexpected ways. There is a dream logic here. However, things that would in other contexts be presented as horrific are presented here as funny.
Funky Forest has three different directors and they did not really work together. They each directed different segements with Ishii taking on the most as the most experienced director of the three. He did not direct Warped Forest though, that was Miki, who actually directs commercials for his day job.
It actually took over ten years for Warped Forest to find any kind of distribution. I guess it was just too weird. Was it just a weird passion project? Funky Forest isn’t widely known either so making a spiritual successor to it wasn’t a good financial decision in any case.
Gusha no bindumera (Hellevator)
Japan, 2004, dir. Hiroki Yamaguchi
A half-star review from Letterboxd: Don’t watch this film if you are pregnant, have any kind of depression or any kind of mental illness. This film can be too much to handle, and it went extremely overboard with the gore, to the point that I don’t even see a point to this film, it just is sort of there to disturb the shit out of you. at least that’s how it was for me.
A five-star review from Letterboxd: One of the most 2000s movies I’ve ever seen in terms of fashion, future aesthetics, and use of drum and bass.
I wonder what the author of the half-star review would think if they ever saw a real gory movie? Sure, there’s some gore here, but not that much compared to you basic slasher, never mind something like splatterpunk movie.
The alternate English title for this movie is The Bottled Fools. There is a significant bottle in the movie, which makes that name confusing as otherwise you can assume the “bottle” is actually the elevator car.
We start in a society that’s falling apart. Gladly, this being a Japanese movie, girls’ school uniforms are still plentiful. Somehow elevator operators are once again a thing as the titular elevator is a fairly complicated apparatus to use. Luchino, a girl with a traumatic past and telepathic powers, is stuck in there with a bunch of other people when the elevator picks up a couple of prisoners from a maximum prison level.
That is the way the story is depicted in marketing, but it isn’t really truthful. It is true, but the prisoners actually die pretty fast and a new villain emerges. Except that the villain is not very confident and gets pushed around by the other passengers. The movie is still largely about being trapped in a small, hostile area with people you don’t know and can’t trust.
We never really get answers regarding how this society actually works. It appears that it is on the brink of collapse and has fallen into some kind of fascism and everyone, as far as we know, lives underground (except that early in the movie we have a kid asking her grandmother about what’s above level 1, so you know it will come into play). The elevator is not in shaft as we do get a view of it from the outside and we see other elevators go by in that moment as well, so clearly moving between levels is important and regular here. Many levels seem to have dedicated function.
The whole movie looks hazy. It’s little out of focus or in the flashbacks it’s very stark. It is good to have this juxtaposition, but I don’t really know what these are supposed to represent. Maybe clarity of the past versus the unclear present.
Onna no kappa (Underwater Love)
Japan, 2011, dir. Shinji Imaoka
A half-star review from Letterboxd: No chubby pussy jobs. Disappointing.
A five-star review from Letterboxd: I think Guillermo del Toro saw this and figured no one would notice if he took the musical numbers out.
The Internet says he came up with the story in December 2011, roughly eight months after the Tribeca premiere.
Also, the demon turtle cock will haunt my dreams. (Not really, but you know, I need to attempt to seem normal just a little bit.)
I mentioned pink films in the introduction. They are Japanese films that bring together the artistic goals of new directors and the commercial goals of producers by letting the directors do what they want with the budgets they get as long as they include a certain amount of titillating content in the movie. There is a series of double feature BluRays from Third Window Films named Pink Films. These include movies with such titles as Abnormal Family, Women Hell Song, Forbidden Technique (for which they were unable to locate a Japanese soundtrack, so they use the German dub instead) and Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands, also known as Dutch Wife in the Desert in the US. Apparently, there is a long and complicated history with sex dolls being called Dutch wives, in case you want to look into that.
I did not want to cover too many of those, so I chose this as my favorite. Asuka works in a fish processing plant and is set to marry her boss, when her old boyfriend, Aoki, from her teenage years comes back as a water spirit after 17 years and Asuka needs to figure out how to keep him a secret while he wants to get back into her life. It is also a musical with very 80s and quite clumsy synthpop songs that are not even sung by the characters on screen.
Is it a pink film? Well, considering that the rule seems to be that there needs to be something sexual at least every 15 minutes and we see breasts leading into a sex scene around 14 minutes in, with underwear at 27 and a half minutes leading into nudity just before the 30 minute mark which in turn leads to a sex scene, but then, when we get to 45 minutes, just a conflict between our three main characters and some kissing that’s essentially sexual assault. We have to wait for five minutes for the next sex scene. The final one is 25 minutes after that. Some of the sex is quite unnecessary for the story, but some of those scenes are actually fun and in one case quite explicit for a Japanese movie and in another quite integral to the story.
As I’m writing this, I have recently been watching a lot of folk horror movies and while this is pure comedy, there are definitely similarities. There’s a certain weirdness I love here. How do you stave of death? Well, you find the Anal Pearl which you can shove up your ass and when the God of Death (who is a young man in a dress who chainsmokes and is partial to sake) confronts you about this, you can sumo wrestle him into obedience.
Gokudô heiki (Yakuza Weapon)
Japan, 2011, dirs. Tak Sakaguchi, Yûdai Yamaguchi
A half-star review from Letterboxd: Ridiculous.
(Author’s note: That was the only half-star review as this is apparently more obscure then I thought.)A five-star review from Letterboxd: It’s a masterpiece if you take in mind that they had 12 days to shoot the entire thing
Wait, what? Only 12 days? That is incredible. A little research tells me that apparently it’s true and that’s the reason there’s two directors, so that they can divide jobs among themselves.
The son of a Yakuza boss has been working as a mercenary, but is called back home when his father is assassinated. Back home he goes on a rampage as he tries to find his father’s killers and reinstate himself as the boss. At some point he is taken out, but that isn’t enough to stop him as a government agency rebuilds him as a cyborg.
That actually happens around the half-point of the movie. He is pretty much unstoppable way before that. Like the way he is taken out is that he catches a rocket from a launcher and is trying to keep it in place, so he can’t catch the second rocket fired at him. He loses an arm and a leg in that confrontation.
The movie is extremely violent. The effects are mostly pretty cheap, but they are wild enough that you don’t really care. Like there’s a moment in which our “hero” keeps firing a machine gun at an assailant at such force that the body remains in the air for quite a long time. That is pretty much what the film is. We just have short scenes of someone talking shit or bullying someone between extended sequences of very heightened violence. Weirdly, it is still rated TV-14 despite extreme amounts of blood. According to FCC, TV-14 programs “may contain one or more of the following: intensely suggestive dialogue (D), strong coarse language (L), intense sexual situations (S), or intense violence (V)”. That would be check, check, check and check. I guess the definition for TV-MA includes that a program was designed for adults and this is definitely quite childish, but in the best possible ways.
I mean, shooting a rocket from a vagina isn’t exactly mature content. At least I don’t feel like it was my more mature side that laughed at that.
Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro (Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell)
Japan, 1968, dir. Hajime Satô
A half-star review from Letterboxd: Pure crap
(Author’s note: Again, the only half-star review. I would have thought there would be more, but I guess this is quite obscure as well.)A five-star review from Letterboxd: Forehead pussy alien blob creampie
Sure, put it in the Criterion Collection!
A plane is being hijacked by a gunman While this is going on, a weird light approaches the plane from the front and just barely misses it, but the instruments on the plane and one of it’s engines are destroyed, forcing the plane to crash on a barren island in some unknown location. On the island, the hijacker takes a hostage and tries to flee, but encounters a flying saucer, which seems to take him under it’s control.
Plane hijacking was an occurrence that was much more common back in the day then one might think, like in the late 70s there was a hijacking in Finland where a man flying from Oulu to Helsinki, hijacked the plane, demanded a bunch of money (675 Finnish marks, to be exact, which, with almost 50 years of inflation, would be close to a million euros), released the hostages, flew to Amsterdam and back to Oulu, where he was apprehended. I have no idea why he decided to do all of this. Actually, around the time this movie came out, there were more than one attempt per week on average. Despite this, there hadn’t been many depictions of this in movies, which is weird as it is a highly stressful situation one might think would lend itself well to movies even back in late 60s.
The movie definitely has a message. A couple of times the movie stops to show us photos from wars as well as footage of a nuclear detonation, which would have been strongly in the living memory of Japanese around this time, and the alien informs the humans that they are going to wipe out humanity and humans have made it easy for them by expending resources on infighting. If it’s plan is to take over random humans and use them, basically one at a time, to kill all of us, this all is going to take quite a while. Still, for the purposes of this weird little gem of a movie, it works fine.
A bit of a spoiler, but near the end of the movie, it turns out that they were just a walking distance away from a highway and a hospital. However, apparently the aliens were using a bit more efficient methods there as they have already killed everyone.
Tomie
Japan, 1998, dir. Ataru Oikawa
A half-star review from Letterboxd: Stop making live action Junji Ito stories they are never good
A five-star review from Letterboxd: yeah so like objectively this is ass, right? doesn’t do junji ito justice, right? but like… the dreary late 90’s japanese aesthetic has me in a chokehold right?… and the lesbians… the dialogue… tomie kawakami save me…
Tsusiko is attempting to regain her memories with the help of a hypnotist. While under, she keeps mentioning the name Tomie over and over again. Meanwhile, a homicide detective keeps stumbling on the same name as well.
The movie is quite dark both in presentation and content. Tomie is kept in the dark for most of the movie or we only see her from behind. The murders we see are quite brutal, although we usually only see the aftermath. When we see blood, the movie makes sure we can’t miss it by making it very bright red.
This is based on a Junji Ito manga, but outside of this film, I’m only aware of his works indirectly through people talking about him in their video essays. Based on those, his work is a series of nightmares that work as metaphors for loss of humanity, dangers of obsession and the uncaring nature of the world.
Spoiler follow. So, where does Tomie lie in here? Tomie is a teen girl. Early in the movie we find out that four people in Tsusiko’s former class ended their lives and six others, plus the teacher, ended up in a mental hospital. This was because of their obsession (check) with Tomie. She wraps people around her finger and manipulates them for long enough for them to completely lose their minds.
But that’s not all. Tomie also falls under the ‘loss of humanity’. She is an immortal being and as such is not interested in human morality. She doesn’t seem to mind that her supposed friend had just tried to bury her body nor that she light Tomie on fire just a little later in an attempt to stop her from regenerating.
The movie spawned a franchise with eight sequels, with the last one coming out in 2011, which is surprising as they don’t seem to have been big hits and are so obscure that there are only two reviews on the first movie on Rotten Tomatoes, but I assume they are relatively cheap to make. Each of the movies has a different Tomie and apparently the role was coveted among young female actors back in the day. The names of these movies are often quite typical for sequels and include such gems as Tomie: Final Chapter, which came out right before Tomie: The Beginning. There’s also, of course, Tomie: Re-birth, Tomie vs. Tomie, Tomie: Revenge and Tomie: Unlimited.