Tokyo Gore Police

Based on his own 50-minute short film from '95 (intriguingly entitled Anatomia Extinction), Yoshihiro Nishimura almost puts the viewer, or more aptly reviewer, in a box with a nearly 2-hour flight of fancy called Tokyo Gore Police. One might either watch and be completely bored (admittedly I was early on), be amused, or relax into a drooling, pie-eyed state of fan-boy wonderment.

As an understudy of sorts of the great Sion Sono and with his own brand of art direction on full display, Nishimura's characters can just as easily relay/portray the psychosexual fancies of the progressive acrotomophilist as they can the revenge driven nihilist; both arenas well represented in several character forms. I'd venture to say most would invariably see similarities in this film to the films he himself is linked to, in the production sense, and maybe even a few other well known titles.

A bit cartoonish, an understatement maybe, the bombastic opening scene initiates us to the film's underdeveloped but adequate familial revenge core which pits a Charles Bronson-like super cop named Ruka (Odishon's infamously spurned Eihi Shiina) as daughter to a slain Tokyo police officer. Having witnessed her father's murder, she's fated to the specialized team within the department that exclusively fight so-called "engineers" - purpose-driven super-criminals who's DNA has been altered in ways that would make a certain Paul Verhoeven film scurry away with tail firmly tucked. Ruka's ultimate goal being to find the man who iced her father while tracking a loose link to the murder which may or may not flow through the underground Tokyo fetish scene. That's not to say it comes anywhere near the previously eluded to film's plausibility; a half-human robot cop is ho-hum compared to prostitute legs mangled to transform into crocodile jaws. Indeed. Speaking rarely and posing often, the stoic mutilateur Ruka sheds much blood with sword and chainsaw alike, with the skill and poise of a military-trained ninja.

An ungodly amount of dialogue comes by way of narration, most notably Ruka's, and that fact doesn't necessarily hurt, but it is fatiguing at times. And so what if Eihi doesn't quite exude reprisal poster girl Uma Thurman-esque energy - no role really escapes Nishimura's overpowering amplitude - witness characters embodied by Takashi Shimizu, Mame Yamada, and Sion Sono, among others, being similarly muted.

Tokyo Gore Police's roots may be subversive, I mean come on, the title Anatomia Extinction alone - yet there's more of a contemporary slant to TGP that's subversive enough; expressly, morality and social stratification. A privatized, militarized police force responds to the uncontrollable crime wave hitting Tokyo which leads to the aforementioned state response. Whichever came first, a most vicious circle it is to be sure. Real world parallels are unavoidable and surely intentional. The balance of the differing runtimes are undoubtedly home for more the most insane bloodletting you've ever saw. Now don't be alarmed, the movie is far from political screed as some may ascribe, but as far as it is, it fades in and out as an equal mix of comedic barbs and tired cold war era generics. This is strictly mondo fantasy post-neorealist action folks. Nishimura himself shouldn't convince me otherwise.

Rule #1

"Rule #1: There are no ghosts"

The above tagline suggested genre fun, perhaps on the cheesier side of the horror spectrum. While the product in question does deliver a touch more humor than your average Asian horror feature, it's not kitsch. In fact, it's finally more grim than goofy, even palpably, and unexpectedly, melancholy at times.

As a genre exercise, Rule #1 acquits itself pretty admirably, zigging where you'd expect it to zag and spicing up the recipe enough to keep its audience involved. Director Kelvin Tong is still working from a fairly standard formula, to be sure, but he tweaks the details imaginatively; instead of another ghost story centering on some long-haired, porcelain-faced spook or a graphically gory zombie flick, he mashes up the conventions and expectations of these well-tread subgenres, while further muddying this potent mix with liberal doses of post-noir style and urban ennui.

None of this would matter much if Tong's cast didn't also uniformly rise above the usual level of horror movie miming. Leads Shawn Yue and Ekin Cheng are terrific as a young cop and his jaded supervisor investigating supernatural crime (like fight club, ghosts don't officially exist, per that tagline), but the supporting and bit players rise to the occasion, as well. The writing isn't Shakespeare, natch, but it's also a decided cut above the genre norm--sharp and witty in parts and rarely cringe-inducing.

None of this is to say necessarily that Rule #1 is, or will at some point be considered, a staple in the Asian horror canon, but it is memorable, which isn't faint praise in a genre where fun-yet-forgettable is more often the order of the day. It also suggests, more significantly, that Tong may sooner rather than later produce something closer to vital; his haunting, creepy final shot is worthy of Tsai Ming-liang. It's a sign-off note that further affirms rule number one of Asian horror movie-watching: don't judge a bootleg DVD by its cover, or its tagline.

The Wall Man

Here we have yet another Japanese film that squanders its potential by succumbing to the all too familiar trend of having more endings than it could possibly make use of. Ultimately The Wall Man is still an eerie, thoughtful and refreshing film in 90% of its facets, but it’s so frustrating to see yet another genre film from the East fall prey to this habit within its last half hour, that I had to note it right away.

I once heard that in the Bollywood industry, the films sprawl on and on with three to four hours being average runtimes for mainstream fare, because the audience sees quantity as the crucial form of quality. Which is to say, for them: the longer, the better. They feel they are getting their money’s worth. Here in North America the average attention span is decidedly shorter. Neither is a good thing, and I feel most artier fare seems to strike a good balance, which I’d say is about a 2 hour runtime. My point is, with recent Asian horror films (including Reincarnation, the latest review before this one) you have to wonder if the aesthetic is starting to become more like the aforementioned Bollywood one, in a way. Instead of a longer runtime, it’s more bang for your buck in the form of twist after twist, false ending after false ending, crazy revelation after...you get the idea. I don’t know, but it really needs to stop.

The Wall Man, directed by Wataru Hayakawa, deserves more attention than just a rant about its flaws, however. For something that probably had a relatively low budget, it looks quite beautiful—with intimate shots of hallways, apartments, and restaurants masterfully contrasted with the tangled mass of urban alienation that is the Tokyo skyline. Appropriately creepy atmosphere is built to perfection, and the cast is winning across the board. Notably the film’s main characters, a couple consisting of perky TV Tabloid reporter Kyoko (Masato Sakai), who hosts a show that investigates silly rumors, and her more cerebral boyfriend, abstract photographer Nishina (Mayumi Ono).

The whole “wall man” thing starts when Nishina dreams that Kyoko is investigating such an idea on her program. Then, sure enough, she receives a letter the next day asking her to do so. Civilians are interviewed about the titular man, and from their accounts he seems to be an urban legend of sorts, like Bloody Mary or The Boogeyman. The general conceit is that he lives in walls, is neither human nor ghost, and watches everything that goes on in your and anyone else’s home. He also likes to watch TV.

As Kyoko investigates, director Hayakawa does a brilliant job of balancing the humor and unbelievableness of it all, while still giving hints that maybe there’s more to the stories. Kyoko serves as the audience surrogate, who rolls her eyes at most of it—meanwhile her beau Nishina becomes enthralled by it to the point of obsession, sort of like Jake Gyllenhaal in Fincher's Zodiac.

There are moments of dialogue that reveal such potent and poignant emotion, the movie is allowed to truly reach greatness several times. It makes it all the more disappointing when the ending(s) undo much of the previous good. One scene in particular pushes the limits of how inane things can get before we give up entirely. I honestly think if an edited version of this was released—which, naturally, cut out the needless nonsense and streamlined it along—it would be one of the best Asian horror/genre films in recent memory. Alas, such an edit does not exist.

I still give it a reserved seal of approval. It’s worth seeking out, if you can. But like most urban myths, by the time you uncover everything, what you find beneath is still a letdown.

Reincarnation

What distinguishes many of the best films--of any stripe or genre--from the rest of the pack is that they simultaneously keep faith in the possibilities of the medium and work within its tested parameters as a means to re-energize them. This point applies doubly to horror movies, which can often be particularly arduous to sit through when they're clearly coasting on autopilot and painting by numbers; naturally, any movie that feels bored with itself can't help but stimulate the same feeling (or, rather, lack of feeling) in an active viewer.

For myriad reasons, an uncommonly high number of Asian horror flicks succeed where their Hollywood or Western counterparts fall flat. This rule doesn't fly across the board, of course, but even a significant number of Asian horror offerings that might rank as "bad" qualitatively still manage to satisfy a certain cinephilic craving. And once you're hooked, that craving soon becomes something like an addiction--scanning the shelves of bootleg DVD shops in Chinatown for something, anything featuring, say, a ghost shadowing teenagers in Tokyo or a supernaturally-possessed psycho stalking victims in Seoul.

I should know. Thanks to none other than this blog's brilliant founder, I'm among the converted. (Thanks, Teresa. Without you, I would've never got all the tongue-in-cheek references in The Eye 10 or One Missed Call.)

Like many Asian horror efforts, Takashi Shimizu's Reincarnation is convoluted. And moody. And tangential. And enjoyable as hell.

While less exhiliratingly wacked-out than his earlier Marebito (a film Teresa reiterated for so long that I needed to see, and that I'm very glad I finally did), Reincarnation is at least as effective as Ju-On, the remade and sequel'd 2004 movie-cum-franchise that made Shimizu a household name among North American horror fans. It's also as structurally inspired, revolving around a twentysomething actress cast as a little girl in a film depicting a hotel mass murder.

Right, this is a meta horror movie, with some interesting things to say about filmmaking and, specifically, about the problems with re-staging traumatic past occurrences (if not necessarily about the cultural fascination with all things grisly and disturbing that endlessly encourages such films to be greenlit and churned out). Teresa perceptively compared Reincarnation to Inland Empire--both films about the complex process of performance, both evoking a somnambulistic state where the logic and sequence of events matters less than the tonal dynamics at play--and I completely agree, except that Shimizu thankfully skips the more yawn-inducing stretches of Lynch's epic.

Even when the plot loses you (and after viewing dozens of Asian horror films, I still find my head spinning, at times), the tension and creep-value of Shimizu's mise-en-scene remains admirably intact. Which is really saying something, I think--you're not quite sure why she's running into that hotel room, or who or what she's running from exactly, but you're heart's nevertheless beating nearly as fast as hers seems to be. This is why we watch movies.

Or, at any rate, why I can't resist watching Asian horror movies.

Dream

With his latest film, Dream (sometimes translated as Sad Dream), Kim Ki-Duk is able to skirt the inevitable criticism his heavy symbolism and loose-ended surrealism often garners—because, hey, it’s about dreams. It doesn’t have to be rational, or even add up to an obvious conclusion. At first this works very much against the film; it’s so silly and unabashedly convoluted that it took me a couple sittings to get through. I like many of his films, and have avoided the ones that have less than stellar reputations. So, here I am thinking I’m finally seeing one of the crappy ones. I was exceedingly wrong. If you do make it past the half hour mark, and leave your cynicism temporarily at the door, you’ll be rewarded.

Dream stars Japanese actor Joe Odagiri, whom I gather is quite a big, and beloved star, but this is the first I’ve seen of him. He plays Jin, a character who speaks Japanese and is understood perfectly by his Korean-speaking fellow citizens (and vice versa) without explanation. He makes calligraphy adorned stamps and pines for his ex girlfriend. One night, a night which happens to occur at the very beginning of the film, he has a vivid dream which is acted out by a sleep walking woman in the same city (Ran, played by Na-yeong Lee). Together they take preventative measures—sleeping in shifts and later handcuffing themselves together—to stop these incidents. But they never seem to question how ridiculously insane the phenomenon is. This, and a straight-faced scene involving a therapist advising the two to fall in love with each other if they hope to be cured, may just have you rolling your eyes and checking your watch.

Somewhere along the way, almost as suddenly as waking up, Kim Ki-Duk injects the story with humor and charm long enough to regain attention and make the characters feel more or less human. And true to the auteur’s style, things become both stunningly, poetically beautiful, and (just as you’re starting to like, and care about everyone) horrific. The conclusion is, of course, a breathtaking head scratcher. As I mentioned before, some of Dream’s mysteries may be best left unlocked and allowed off the hook—for anything goes in the human subconscious, and who knows what’s what? Then again, these mysteries and contemplating them are more than half the fun. Why does Jin have no trouble understanding or being understood as a foreigner by everyone he encounters? Why do we never see the two characters with any friends or family, save for their respective exes? Is one, or both, of them a ghost or figment? What’s with the butterflies?

I don’t know, exactly, but I’d be willing to delve into this movie again. And I may even enjoy that prickly first half this time. Kim Ki-Duk seems to be getting increasingly romantic and tragic with his work (where it used to be mainly the latter), and his aesthetic suites it impeccably. What he’ll do next is once again something I will look forward to, with the same curiosity and eagerness I have for my favorite filmmakers.

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