A film to Watch by the Light of a Silvery Moonshine
So we haven't had our Netflix since we moved, and we sometimes go into The Vault To find something to watch.
The Vault is how I think of the three books of DVDs that we have, which we . . erm. . . well, copied. Basically we had a very active Netflix account, and suddenly we had all these DVDRs with the film titles written on them in Sharpie. You do the math.
Some of them are things I just wanted on DVD but didn't want to pay for, others are things I wanted to see but didn't have time for, and still others are things Nathan found that I've never heard of. If you don't recognize the title on the DVD, it can be a gamble where the loss is a couple hours of your life. Sometimes it's a win, as when we watched Below and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser the other night. But we're not talking about quality made movies about haunted submarines or even an early Werner Herzog documenting the mystery of an eighteenth century foundling. God I wish we were.
We're here today to talk about an incredibly shitty Japanese horror film.
Jiguko, 1999 remake.
First of all, there is apparently a 1960 version, and it is supposed to be amazingly good. I use the qualifier 'amazingly' because it would amaze me to see similiar source material executed well. Apparently the 1999 director, Ishii, took the original premise and updated it with some current events from the news. Seriously. Japanese Hell, the 1999 version, was like a turd on a wedding cake. How it happened no one knows, and nobody really wants to deal with it. I think the guy who made it is known for schlock cinema, but there isn't any kind of John Waters-esque charm to redeem this film. It just plain blows.
The Premise: Enma, who I guess is the Devil and appears as an old woman in what COULD HAVE BEEN an awesome costume if it wasn't so clearly made of plastic and scotch-taped together, decides that people aren't afraid of Hell anymore and she needs to put the fear of eternally being dismembered into them. This story is not about losing one's spirituality or finding redemption; this is about doing as you're told because the alternative is an eternity of torture. (Hell, by the way, looks like a shitty stage production of some avant-gard modern dance troupe, who had to paint and make everything themselves. It is full of naked, skinny but attractive and nubile young people who writhe in 'torment' and just look like they're having a bad trip. They also look like they need a sandwich or two. The props and monsters look like what you find in the dumpster behind the Halloween store on November 1st; stuff so corny it wasn't worth storing it in the hopes of selling it next year).
Granny Devil takes her minions, a scrubbed and wholesome brother-sister duo, and appears in the real-world to Rika, some chick, and tells her she needs to see what's in store for sinners these days. There's some blather about her being the chosen one or something but it doesn't make sense and they discuss this bullshit way too long.
They carry Rika down to Hell and she sees some Demons, and believe me when I tell you that the whole thing looks like it has the production value of a Power Rangers episode. If not for the gore, violence, rape scenes and the Gates of Hell being a large plastic vagina, I wondered if this wasn't some kind of children's movie. I don't know what the director was going for but we kept thinking the cheap stage-dressing (it looks like Hell is actually a warehouse with painted walls) meant that the movie had been cheaply made as a propaganda piece by some church. Nathan suggested it being the film equivalent of a Jack Chik tract, but it didn't even make that much sense. Or maybe it was some kind of postmodern thing where they mingled the look of Kabuki with realistic effects; whatever it was meant to be, I consider it to have failed.
The next piece is kind of unbelieveable, but in order to understand it you need to know who Miyazaki is. If you already know, skip ahead to the next section. Here's his wiki, in case you want more than my summary.
Miyazaki was a man born with deformed hands. Because of this, he was made fun of and ostracized through most of his childhood, and if you know a bit about Japan, you know that the Japanese are not kind to anyone mentally or physically disabled. As an adult, he murdered four little girls, first molesting them, then killing them and 'playing' with the bodies. He was caught when he went to a playground and tried to insert the zoom lens of his camera into a 3-year-old's vagina. Naturally, people noticed this, detained him, and noticed he didn't seem quite right. When the authorities went to his house they found thousands of slasher flicks, S&M porn, child porn, and other things that they blamed his problems on. He was known as the Otaku killer.
Miyazaki's cameo
Well, he's depicted in this movie. They've changed his name, but it's him, down to the crippled hands-thing and the notes that he sent to the families of his victims, which were like little haikus and alluded to the nightmare things that their children experienced before death. The guy playing him acts in a profoundly weird way; he doens't mince, but his loose way of walking and movements seem like the worst kind of stereotype for homosexuality.
So he goes to Hell, and Enma has her demons torture him by cutting him into pieces over and over again. Keep in mind the production value looks like vintage Star Trek: they're clearly on a badly-painted soundstage and the 'saw' used to dismember the guy looks like cardboard. The painted styrofoam rocks aren't fooling anyone. Then Enma says 'resurrect' and the pieces fly back together, to do it to him again for the rest of eternity.
But that's not the sad thing.
The sad thing is this is pitifully blatant wish-fulfillment. Imagine if you're watching What Dreams May Come or something and they showed Jeffery Dahmer being tortured, as in a large part of the story was dedicated to it. It just feels creepy, like you've cracked the door and seen someone acting out their favorite vengeance fantasy. But worse than that, it's unimaginative. It's lazy story-telling. You're banking on the stored feelings that people already have concerning that person, you haven't created a character for people to hate via careful crafting of motives or actions. They walked into the theater already hating the guy.
And EVEN WORSE than that is how uneffective it was. I didn't sit there and squirm, I didn't think it was awful, I didn't even blink. I didn't enjoy the sight of a wretched person getting what's coming to them, or care one way or the other. Imagine if Takashi Miike of The Audition had done this movie. THAT would have been effective. So effective I would have called in to work today just so I could rebuild my broken sanity. The problem with torture porn, or any depiction of violence or cruelty in an ineffective film is that people identify with the antagonist, which is why there is so much crap out today. You've actually achieved something if people feel for the victim. Most horror movies have a recurring antagonist rather than protagonist, the exception would be Halloween and the Alien series. Shit, I need to write more about that, but not today.
So we leave Miyazaki and go back to Rika, who's own story is shown in the Pool of Mirrors or whatever the hell the thing was she was looking into. She's joined a cult called Shinryko, which is the SAME NAME for the Aum Shinrykyo cult, known for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. This is the longest segment of the film: the activities of the lecherous and gruesome cult-leader Kasahara, raping his way through the nubile female members of his cult; disappearances of persons who either tried to escape the cult or began to question its motives and beliefs; the authorities' investigations being confounded by red tape; strong arm tactics used by the cult against civilians trying to rescue their loved ones; the Cult of Personality worship that includes selling the Dear Leader's used bath water and hair trimmings. It culminates in the Tokyo subway attack, and then shows the courtroom drama afterwards. I love when horror movies are ham-handedly topical, don't you?
I guess I have just become used to the arguably subtle offerings of J-horror and Asian horror in general. I mean say what you want, but usually there's SOME kind of cerebral stirring rather than just relying on shock and flapping boobs (there are a lot of topless women in this movie). There's a plot, and tension, and atmosphere. Even if the production value is low the director makes the most of what they have and manages to stretch the finances, or keeps the scope of the project fairly low.
I never thought these words would pass my lips but honestly?
This was worse than a Uwe Boll movie.
Rika learns her lesson that joining a cult means she'd be just as bad as the murdering child molester, and on her way out of hell (she's been escorted by one of Granny Devil's minions) they view the different flavors that Hell comes in. There's the Blood pit, where people fight eternally so the pool is always full of blood; some kind of hell where people are so hungry they cannibalize a dead body, eat until they throw up, and then eat some more --no joke I could make about bulimics in hell could match the comedy of the crummily-made 'body' they were devouring; Mud hell, which was just like the blood pit but muddy; then Poisoned Curry hell (I'M NOT MAKING THIS UP) where this elderly couple fought for eternity because they'd somehow accidentally poisoned the curry in their restaurant and killed people or something. I wasn't paying much attention at this point, and the sad thing was I wasn't even drunk.
Then right before Rika dips on hell, this Samurai known as The Wanderer wanders in and kills all the aforementioned demons. Apparently he broke the 8 rules of man and Wanders the earth as a punishment, but then he said something like 'I'm not ready to go to hell, I'm going to wander a bit more,' and leaves. Which sort of defeats the purpose of punishment to my mind, but hey, I'm not an expert on Japanese Folklore. I've read some Lefcadio Hearne and know the plot behind a few kabuki plays. That is it. I'm sure it makes sense to someone, and that someone is the director of this execreble film. Rika's tourguide demonstrates her thoughts on the scene by giving it a thumbs-up and remarking 'Cool!'
So that's it. Japanese Hell looks like a Halloween costume that a 9-year-old Julie Taymor made with her mom's glue gun and some glitter paint. Rika learns her lesson I guess and leaves the cult, which for some reason requires she and all the other women in the cult to suddenly take their shirts and bras off.
I'm sure enjoyment can be had from this archaic, unimaginative, cheaply made film; as I remarked to Nathan during it, 'I'm not drunk enough to enjoy this.' Coinosseurs of bad movies will have a field day.
I'm hesitant to recommend this even as a drunken party movie; if you took a shot every time something nonsensical or ridiculous happened you'd wind up with a roomful of people dead from alcohol poisoning. Any EMTs or police arriving to that scene with this movie playing would probably surmise it had been some kind of Heaven's Gate type mass-suicide event, and then the legend of this movie would spread.
And yet it IS one of those things you have to see to believe. . .
Watch it for the trainwreck, but don't say you weren't warned!
The Vault is how I think of the three books of DVDs that we have, which we . . erm. . . well, copied. Basically we had a very active Netflix account, and suddenly we had all these DVDRs with the film titles written on them in Sharpie. You do the math.
Some of them are things I just wanted on DVD but didn't want to pay for, others are things I wanted to see but didn't have time for, and still others are things Nathan found that I've never heard of. If you don't recognize the title on the DVD, it can be a gamble where the loss is a couple hours of your life. Sometimes it's a win, as when we watched Below and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser the other night. But we're not talking about quality made movies about haunted submarines or even an early Werner Herzog documenting the mystery of an eighteenth century foundling. God I wish we were.
We're here today to talk about an incredibly shitty Japanese horror film.
Jiguko, 1999 remake.
First of all, there is apparently a 1960 version, and it is supposed to be amazingly good. I use the qualifier 'amazingly' because it would amaze me to see similiar source material executed well. Apparently the 1999 director, Ishii, took the original premise and updated it with some current events from the news. Seriously. Japanese Hell, the 1999 version, was like a turd on a wedding cake. How it happened no one knows, and nobody really wants to deal with it. I think the guy who made it is known for schlock cinema, but there isn't any kind of John Waters-esque charm to redeem this film. It just plain blows.
The Premise: Enma, who I guess is the Devil and appears as an old woman in what COULD HAVE BEEN an awesome costume if it wasn't so clearly made of plastic and scotch-taped together, decides that people aren't afraid of Hell anymore and she needs to put the fear of eternally being dismembered into them. This story is not about losing one's spirituality or finding redemption; this is about doing as you're told because the alternative is an eternity of torture. (Hell, by the way, looks like a shitty stage production of some avant-gard modern dance troupe, who had to paint and make everything themselves. It is full of naked, skinny but attractive and nubile young people who writhe in 'torment' and just look like they're having a bad trip. They also look like they need a sandwich or two. The props and monsters look like what you find in the dumpster behind the Halloween store on November 1st; stuff so corny it wasn't worth storing it in the hopes of selling it next year).
Granny Devil takes her minions, a scrubbed and wholesome brother-sister duo, and appears in the real-world to Rika, some chick, and tells her she needs to see what's in store for sinners these days. There's some blather about her being the chosen one or something but it doesn't make sense and they discuss this bullshit way too long.
They carry Rika down to Hell and she sees some Demons, and believe me when I tell you that the whole thing looks like it has the production value of a Power Rangers episode. If not for the gore, violence, rape scenes and the Gates of Hell being a large plastic vagina, I wondered if this wasn't some kind of children's movie. I don't know what the director was going for but we kept thinking the cheap stage-dressing (it looks like Hell is actually a warehouse with painted walls) meant that the movie had been cheaply made as a propaganda piece by some church. Nathan suggested it being the film equivalent of a Jack Chik tract, but it didn't even make that much sense. Or maybe it was some kind of postmodern thing where they mingled the look of Kabuki with realistic effects; whatever it was meant to be, I consider it to have failed.
The next piece is kind of unbelieveable, but in order to understand it you need to know who Miyazaki is. If you already know, skip ahead to the next section. Here's his wiki, in case you want more than my summary.
Miyazaki was a man born with deformed hands. Because of this, he was made fun of and ostracized through most of his childhood, and if you know a bit about Japan, you know that the Japanese are not kind to anyone mentally or physically disabled. As an adult, he murdered four little girls, first molesting them, then killing them and 'playing' with the bodies. He was caught when he went to a playground and tried to insert the zoom lens of his camera into a 3-year-old's vagina. Naturally, people noticed this, detained him, and noticed he didn't seem quite right. When the authorities went to his house they found thousands of slasher flicks, S&M porn, child porn, and other things that they blamed his problems on. He was known as the Otaku killer.
Miyazaki's cameo
Well, he's depicted in this movie. They've changed his name, but it's him, down to the crippled hands-thing and the notes that he sent to the families of his victims, which were like little haikus and alluded to the nightmare things that their children experienced before death. The guy playing him acts in a profoundly weird way; he doens't mince, but his loose way of walking and movements seem like the worst kind of stereotype for homosexuality.
So he goes to Hell, and Enma has her demons torture him by cutting him into pieces over and over again. Keep in mind the production value looks like vintage Star Trek: they're clearly on a badly-painted soundstage and the 'saw' used to dismember the guy looks like cardboard. The painted styrofoam rocks aren't fooling anyone. Then Enma says 'resurrect' and the pieces fly back together, to do it to him again for the rest of eternity.
But that's not the sad thing.
The sad thing is this is pitifully blatant wish-fulfillment. Imagine if you're watching What Dreams May Come or something and they showed Jeffery Dahmer being tortured, as in a large part of the story was dedicated to it. It just feels creepy, like you've cracked the door and seen someone acting out their favorite vengeance fantasy. But worse than that, it's unimaginative. It's lazy story-telling. You're banking on the stored feelings that people already have concerning that person, you haven't created a character for people to hate via careful crafting of motives or actions. They walked into the theater already hating the guy.
And EVEN WORSE than that is how uneffective it was. I didn't sit there and squirm, I didn't think it was awful, I didn't even blink. I didn't enjoy the sight of a wretched person getting what's coming to them, or care one way or the other. Imagine if Takashi Miike of The Audition had done this movie. THAT would have been effective. So effective I would have called in to work today just so I could rebuild my broken sanity. The problem with torture porn, or any depiction of violence or cruelty in an ineffective film is that people identify with the antagonist, which is why there is so much crap out today. You've actually achieved something if people feel for the victim. Most horror movies have a recurring antagonist rather than protagonist, the exception would be Halloween and the Alien series. Shit, I need to write more about that, but not today.
So we leave Miyazaki and go back to Rika, who's own story is shown in the Pool of Mirrors or whatever the hell the thing was she was looking into. She's joined a cult called Shinryko, which is the SAME NAME for the Aum Shinrykyo cult, known for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. This is the longest segment of the film: the activities of the lecherous and gruesome cult-leader Kasahara, raping his way through the nubile female members of his cult; disappearances of persons who either tried to escape the cult or began to question its motives and beliefs; the authorities' investigations being confounded by red tape; strong arm tactics used by the cult against civilians trying to rescue their loved ones; the Cult of Personality worship that includes selling the Dear Leader's used bath water and hair trimmings. It culminates in the Tokyo subway attack, and then shows the courtroom drama afterwards. I love when horror movies are ham-handedly topical, don't you?
I guess I have just become used to the arguably subtle offerings of J-horror and Asian horror in general. I mean say what you want, but usually there's SOME kind of cerebral stirring rather than just relying on shock and flapping boobs (there are a lot of topless women in this movie). There's a plot, and tension, and atmosphere. Even if the production value is low the director makes the most of what they have and manages to stretch the finances, or keeps the scope of the project fairly low.
I never thought these words would pass my lips but honestly?
This was worse than a Uwe Boll movie.
Rika learns her lesson that joining a cult means she'd be just as bad as the murdering child molester, and on her way out of hell (she's been escorted by one of Granny Devil's minions) they view the different flavors that Hell comes in. There's the Blood pit, where people fight eternally so the pool is always full of blood; some kind of hell where people are so hungry they cannibalize a dead body, eat until they throw up, and then eat some more --no joke I could make about bulimics in hell could match the comedy of the crummily-made 'body' they were devouring; Mud hell, which was just like the blood pit but muddy; then Poisoned Curry hell (I'M NOT MAKING THIS UP) where this elderly couple fought for eternity because they'd somehow accidentally poisoned the curry in their restaurant and killed people or something. I wasn't paying much attention at this point, and the sad thing was I wasn't even drunk.
Then right before Rika dips on hell, this Samurai known as The Wanderer wanders in and kills all the aforementioned demons. Apparently he broke the 8 rules of man and Wanders the earth as a punishment, but then he said something like 'I'm not ready to go to hell, I'm going to wander a bit more,' and leaves. Which sort of defeats the purpose of punishment to my mind, but hey, I'm not an expert on Japanese Folklore. I've read some Lefcadio Hearne and know the plot behind a few kabuki plays. That is it. I'm sure it makes sense to someone, and that someone is the director of this execreble film. Rika's tourguide demonstrates her thoughts on the scene by giving it a thumbs-up and remarking 'Cool!'
So that's it. Japanese Hell looks like a Halloween costume that a 9-year-old Julie Taymor made with her mom's glue gun and some glitter paint. Rika learns her lesson I guess and leaves the cult, which for some reason requires she and all the other women in the cult to suddenly take their shirts and bras off.
I'm sure enjoyment can be had from this archaic, unimaginative, cheaply made film; as I remarked to Nathan during it, 'I'm not drunk enough to enjoy this.' Coinosseurs of bad movies will have a field day.
I'm hesitant to recommend this even as a drunken party movie; if you took a shot every time something nonsensical or ridiculous happened you'd wind up with a roomful of people dead from alcohol poisoning. Any EMTs or police arriving to that scene with this movie playing would probably surmise it had been some kind of Heaven's Gate type mass-suicide event, and then the legend of this movie would spread.
And yet it IS one of those things you have to see to believe. . .
Watch it for the trainwreck, but don't say you weren't warned!