Takashi Miike

(In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) While Japanese Horror scored some notable hits in the 1990s (most of them eventually remade in Hollywood, with only The Ring being particularly good), it’s a stretch to suggest that One Missed Call is among the best of them—even if it was remade in America a few years later. It’s all the more confounding that the film is from notorious iconoclast director Takashi Miike, whose other movies span the range from amateurish to utterly grotesque. One Missed Call plays like a very basic attempt to play on the usual tropes of J-horror—the pale girl with long unkempt black hair, the use of modern technology to motivate a scary story (this time, teenagers receiving audio or video of their death two days later and transmitting death through their contact lists), an insane asylum setting, complex family trauma, and the like. While it does veer into some media satire, there really isn’t much else to say—there’s a sense that we’ve seen all of this in much better ways since then, no matter if it was inspired by this film or not. What doesn’t help is the third act losing its way through Munchausen-by-proxy family drama and plot twists that seem to ground what was a Science-Fictional initial premise far too deeply in reality. But that, too, is a frequent trope of J-horror: Starting with a banger of a premise, and eventually dismantling through a trite “explanation“ that only serves to make the entire film less effective.

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2019) There are weird movies, wild movies, crazy movies and then, farther along that scale, Yakuza Apocalypse. But I’m already overselling it, because for all of the insanity of this Takashi Miike film, it’s often astonishing dull, and amateurish throughout. I may not have liked Miike’s other movies, but they had a polish and a filmmaking competence that this film clearly lacks. Even the wild imagination of the so-called plot (involving—let’s see what someone else made out of the plot on Wikipedia—a Yakuza vampire, a gunslinging priest, melting brains, a man in a frog costume, a bird-man and an axe-wielding kid vampire) is essentially incomprehensible, and curiously full of lulls when there are no lolz. Undisciplined and uncontrolled, it leads to a wet thud of a conclusion. The blender-dizzy mix of plot keywords isn’t backed up by a satisfying execution, and there’s a limit to how many “wow, this is weird” can substitute for basic narrative qualities. I don’t mind surrealism once in a while, but Yakuza Apocalypse is not how to do it.

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) Even nearly twenty years later, Ichi the Killer remains infamous as a film that goes well beyond whatever boundaries we expect even from hard-core horror cinema. Renowned for its excessively gory violence, twisted psychosexual themes and utterly amoral compass, it remains banned in at least three countries (including the normally permissive Norway), often pops up in lists of extreme movies and is often mentioned as a landmark to see how strong a moviegoer’s stomach is. And yet, while watching it, I found it curiously easy to remain uninvolved and unimpressed at the amount of gratuitous violence shown on screen. Gratuitous actually doesn’t become the right word—a better one would be grandguignolesque. Writer-director Takashi Miike has made a film to shock the rubes, and will stop at nothing to gross out the audience. Once you catch on to the trick, though… it’s not as if the film has anything like a conscience—seeing bad people do bad things to each other isn’t a path to the kind of empathy we’d need to be revolted at what’s on-screen. I could give you a long list of the terrible and unbearable sights in the film, but I fear that it would make it seem far more interesting than it is to watch. In reality, Ichi the Killer showcases such a relentless succession of atrocities that they become numbing—as if the brain throws up a circuit breaker in defence. As a result (and not helped along by a direction that cares far more about gory set-pieces than coherent plotting) the film does feel interminable, and increasingly obnoxious as it goes on. By the end, we’re so fed up with the whole thing that it doesn’t matter who kills who in whatever way—the film is over and that’s quite enough of a reward.

(In French, On Cable TV, May 2018) I had been warned against Ôdishon so often that by the time I saw it, it had lost much of its impact. Yes, it does feature a middle-aged man holding auditions to find a new girlfriend and then discovering that she’s a serial killer. It does feature a bag with disturbing content and some severe body harm. But if you know that it’s a romantic comedy that slides (and not-so-slowly) into psycho horror, it becomes significantly duller. Director Takashi Miike does have a reputation as a horror filmmaker—seeing his name attached to what initially looks like a cute comedy is enough to ring alarm bells. Then there’s the fact, not often acknowledged, that the protagonist is significantly creepy in how he manipulates young girls to sit for misleading auditions. That does take away a bit of the film’s edge, much as the ending does provide a final victory of sort, cleaning up many threads that could have been left hanging. I’m not going to pretend that this is an easy movie to watch, or that it’s comparatively tame compared to other movies—I’m maybe saying that I’m a jaded viewer, and that Audition’s shocks don’t go much beyond its plot summary. It’s still going to freak out many viewers.