(2001)
Overall: MEH
Basking in the bizarre and challenging as he is wont to do, Takashi Miike's Visitor Q, (Bijitā Kyū), was his entry into CineRocket's Love Cinema series of straight-to-video, exploitation movies. It is also one that pushes things to gross-out oddity territory with an unnatural tone that is at odds with every moment on screen. The low-budget, digital film aesthetic gives way to mostly long, single-take shots in unassuming locations; shots which feature the world's most dysfunctional family doing the most dysfunctional things The son gets brutalized by his classmates who kick the shit out of him, shoot fireworks into his house, and force him to shit outside in front of them, said son violently beats up his mother who is a heroin junkie prostitute that learns to lactate wildly, and the father cums too fast while having sex with his prostitute daughter before raping a co-worker after accidentally murdering her. Plus, lots of other equally heartwarming stuff. Clearly in the deranged, midnight movie, black comedy vein of other films that satirize family dynamics in the most preposterous and extreme fashion, Miike's fly-on-the-wall approach to the material is coldly detached, yet the goings-on here are so bonkers and over the top in their unpleasantness that it cannot help but to be funny at times. It also begs the question of "Who is a movie like this for?" since there is plenty here that will not satisfy any viewer's tastes, even the weirdest ones.
(2001)
Overall: GOOD
Arguably Takashi Miike's most aggressively provocative work in ultra-violence, (which is saying something), Ichi the Killer, (Koroshiya Ichi, Hitman One), takes a similarly over-the-top approach to its button-pushing subject matter as Oliver Stone did in Natural Born Killers. More of a stylized yakuza film than a cartoonish acid trip, Miike makes no attempts to glorify a cinematic universe where virtually everyone on screen is some variation of a sadistically deranged headcase. The gore is ridiculously excessive, but the crop of characters range from psychotic gangster, to bruised and battered female, to wimpish lunatic, to terrified goon; all of them being sadly disturbed instead of ultra-cool. Even as the enforcer-turned-gang-leader Kakihara, Tadanobu Asano comes off like an absurd madman with his sliced up mug, face piercings, dyed-blonde mop top, and loud wardrobe as he gleefully slices and dices up people, (and himself), for a living. Nao Omori's title character is the most pathetic and tragic of them all; manipulated into being some sort of yakuza-murdering anti-hero by Shinya Tsukamoto's odd handler who is inexplicably revealed to have a body builder physique under his trench coat. Plenty odd and not for the squeamish by any stretch of the imagination, it throws the viewer right into the blood-red muck, torture, rape, and mutilation with no life vest on.
(2001)
Overall: GOOD
No one can argue that Takashi Miike is not one to A) make a shitload of movies and B) take ridiculous chances with many of those movies. The Happiness of the Katakuris, (Katakuri-ke no Kōfuku) is his nonsensical genre mash-up reworking of the 1998 South Korean film The Quiet Family and it certainly pulls no punches in trying to be several desperately different things at once. Horror, comedy, musical and a parody of all three, the "burst into song" moments are as jarringly silly as the stop-motion animation ones, with everyone on screen being fully committed to a story about a family that runs a bed and breakfast at the foot of a volcano. They also constantly panic and bury the bodies of their guests that keep either accidentally or intentionally murdering people, if the family does not accidentally or intentionally murder them first that is. The singing is intentionally lousy and of the bad karaoke variety, as is the synchronized dance sequences which usually take on a stylized aesthetic that kicks the film out of the already flimsy verisimilitude that it is trying to maintain. While it is over-stuffed at a hundred and thirteen minutes with Miike seeming to have so much fun with the presentation that he fails to cut scenes out before they become monotonous, this still gets by on its wacky, "WTF am I watching?" charm.
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