TAKASHI MIIKE’S STEEL SPIKED SURREALISM

Reviewed by Mike Philbin

Forty-seven years old Japanese film maker Takashi Miike was born in the village of Yao just outside  Osaka, Japan. He eventually graduated from Yokohama Vocational College and spent his early years making straight-to-video V-Cinema pieces with (some say)Yakuza money.  He is rarely seen in public without his dark sunglasses.

Tackling the work of this prolific and mysterious film maker is no insubstantial  task, especially when one considers that Miike has made 50 feature-length films in the last ten years. The large body of Miike’s oeuvre deal with the Yakuza/Triad gangster societies prevalent in Japan, but a special something happened in 1999 - the theatrical release, and appearance at international films festivals, of both his latest gangster movie Dead or Alive and the sublime wife-finding movie AUDITION. Both very different films but the schism marked a departure into abject surrealism for Miike that I want to focus on.

Even taking into account the first five minutes of Dead Or Alive which has to be one of the most chimerically unrestrained of opening montages any film has ever presented to the viewer the main focus of this article will be six of Miike’s more intentionally surreal projects, starting with…

AUDITION (1999)

A widower of seven years needs a new wife. His teenage son knows this. His co-exec at the ad agency knows this. Eventually, the widower agrees to hold an audition for a fictitious film, the ulterior motive being to interview a  prospective wife. Right at the end of the audition a former ballet dancer, demure and polite, enters and she seems perfect. Audition is just the most boring, trite and traditional story of Japanese arranged marriage you will ever see. The viewer sits there for nearly the first hour going, “This is shit. It’s really boring. I hate this kitsch little movie.”  Suddenly, just as everyone expects the happy couple to retire to the comfort and smugness of their own shared future, the most horrific cinematic turnaround you’ve ever witnessed happens. I’ll put it like this, “kiri kiri kiri kiri kiri…” which is Japanese for, “deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper…” and when I say stainless steel torture pins, you’ll start to get a real bad feeling in your stomach, and your eyes, and your ankles.

LOVE CINEMA VOLUME 6: Visitor Q (2001)

Shot entirely on digital video, on the tightest of budgets and the smallest of crew, this film still manages to pile on the weirdness with scenes of necrophilia, incest and needle use. Just another day in any dysfunctional Japanese family. The dad’s having an affair with his prostitute daughter whom he meets up with in Love Hotels and films on his little handycam. The son verbally and physically abuses the drug-abusing mother who can lactate 100 litres of mother’s milk out of her swollen breasts. This beautiful family become the plaything of the eponymous VISITOR Q (bloody rock in hand) who penetrates the itching skin of this dysfunctional family like some sort of tick and actually starts to bring back a sort of peculiar normality. They all live happily ever after. In their own sick way.

MASTERS OF HORROR: Imprint (2006)

A westerner (played by Billy Drago) returns to feudal Japan to keep a promise made to a local geisha. A short piece so disturbing it was officially banned from airing on HBO because of fears that it was too horrific for the target American audience. Hollywood would deal with such a story like this: Westerner returns to Japan to find his one true love and thanks to sheer human tenacity, he finds the girl, marries her and has loads of fat little children. Not so in Miike’s view of the world. Imprint comes across like the most hideous nightmares you’ll ever have. You’ll think you’ve woken up in one of the seven levels of Dante’s hell but it’s all in the name of ‘visual entertainment‘. Such a story, in Miike’s hands, becomes 10% lies and 90% visceral torture that puts even Hostel to shame in terms of gratuitousness and overall gore. You watch the first few minutes of it and you go, “Yeah, those other geisha are gonna set her up and she’ll be punished.” But it’s the sheer relentlessness of the torture that really makes this episode of Masters of Horror stand out. Featuring a cameo by Shimako Iwai (the torturer) who wrote the original novel.

GOZU (2003)

It’s the only Yakuza film that I’ve incorporated into this feature because it just goes weird++, in fact there’s a weird air throughout the entire length of the film, especially when the eponymous cow-god Gozu turns up. A film which ends in a weird adult birth scene potentially stolen from the 1980’s film XTRO is made all the more poignant because of that nostalgia.  Interviewed about Gozu, Miike says: “If you were a child and rode on a bike to a place you’ve never been, you’d feel like it’s real but not really real. Gozu is like that. You go to a place you’ve never been but you don’t have to make any sense as to why or how you are there.”

THREE EXTREME: Box (2004)

Dumplings, directed by Fruit Chan (Hong Kong)
Cut, directed by Park Chan-wook (South Korea)
Box, directed by Takashi Miike (Japan)
In Japanese the term for BOX (hako) and the female sexual organs (haka) have a literal link, so the viewer is treated to the pseudo-sexual chill of the film’s heroine undergoing the revelation of her worst fears. Short but sweet with a sinister twist of Miike dreamlike malevolence.

ICHI THE KILLER(2001)

You’ll never see such a relentlessly gruesome film as this come out of Hollywood. Even a film like HOSTEL 2, the superior product in the long tradition of such slasher films, comes nowhere near the finesse and attention to torturing detail that this film manages. It stars a crying anti-hero, Ichi.

We gotta start by asking the question: What is it with Miike and stainless steel torture spikes. I mean, we’ve all watched hundreds of horror films with classical anti-heroes like Jason and Freddy and Jigsaw, I‘ve never come across a film maker with such a preoccupation with impaling living, pleading for mercy, central characters with 12-inch long pieces of steel. We just don‘t have such a concept in the west. Yet, here‘s a film maker whom one could imagine carries his own set around like Graham Kerr (the galloping gourmet of our youths) might carry a set of decorative carving knives in his tweed jacket pocket.

Ichi the Killer’s stand-out moments of cinematic jaw-dropping, awe-inspiringly-macabre horror include using boiling-hot cooking oil to torture a rival gangster already suspended by fish hooks and chains - fear not, this hapless chap also gets tortured with the steel spikes. A man is sliced down the middle by the heal knife of the hero Ichi. But best of all is another Japanese film maker Shinya Tsukamoto’s cameo - his eye-boggling transformation into a super-bulked up enemy for our hero just goes beyond anything you’ll see this decade from Hollywood. It’s just too strange. Too foreign. Too Scary.

Takashi Miike, The Open Critic Verdict

Takashi Miike’s bravery, artistry, scene setting and insistence on creative freedom are to be commended. His celluloid creations come across like MTV music videos for the sickest grind core and black metal bands in the world. But you just can’t look away. Miike is a guilty pleasure, one I’d like to share with the entire world.

Elsewhere

Takshi Miike at Wikipedia 
Takashi Miike at IMDB