TAKASHI MIIKE’S FREAKY CONTRIBUTION TO MASTERS OF HORROR: IMPRINT
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2006/Director: Takashi Miike /-
Cast: Billy Drago, Youki Kudoh, Michie Itô, Toshie Negishi-
I really liked the movie Audition by Miike and have seen a handful of his other works such as Visitor Q, Gozu, Ichi the Killer and something called Izu I think. I guess I am getting a feel of what his work is about and it seems to be primarily shock style cinema. That is, jolt the audience with freaky and offensive imagery with an emphasis on anything taboo and deviant and blasphemous. No subtlty. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that in my book. I guess nothing in his movies is any worse than some of the scenes from Saving Private Ryan in a way. I am an above average fan of splatter and gore cinema from way back. The problem I have with Miike's films is the same problem I have with some one like lets say Dario Argento. I just have no friggin’ clue as to what the movie is supposed to be about. Audition and Visitor Q seem to have some effective linear narrative going on but the other movies I've seen just seem to abandon plot for well photographed but ultimately pointless scenes designed to simply disgust or offend the viewer. The movie itself becomes nothing but a vehicle for these disturbing images rather than the other way around. The plot and story simply become secondary to the shock scenes.
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This film was originally to be aired on cable TV's Showtime’s Masters of Horror but was banned (as the DVD cover so proudly advertises) due to the films excesses. It is no freakier than his other films but this was supposed to be made for mass consumption on prime time cable. Argento also had a film banned, or extremely edited, as well called Jenifer (a review is finished and simply needs to be posted). In any case I guess they took a look at this stuff and wanted nothing to do with it. I suppose my mind is numb now from a thousand and one gore films in my life and though it bothered me somewhat I was more perturbed by the lack of logical direction with the narrative.
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The basic plot is this; Billy Drago is an American who goes back to Japan looking for a prostitute named Komoko (Michie Itô) he fell in love with. After long searches he winds up on a haunted island full of ghosts and cutthroats and, well, whores. He finally finds some people who knew his prostitute lover Komoko and then the movie goes off into these conflicting story flashback things and you never know if it is the truth or not. The woman (Youki Kudoh) telling the story has a congenitally deformed face and later we discover that an evil, even more deformed twin lives on the side of her head up under her bun of hair ( and the little freak really likes shiny things). The flashbacks go into images of violent wife beatings, incest, child rape and abortions and images of aborted fetuses falling on the ground or floating in rivers. I guess that would about do it for American TV censors. A really intense torture sequence goes on longer than you think it needs to as the envious whores ram all sort of rods and pins into Komoko under orders to not damage her face. The torture is to supposed to extract the truth about a stolen ring, but it was stolen by the evil twin that no one knows about. Drago goes insane with rage as the convoluted and confusing story evolves and it seems as though the mutant whore murdered Komoko. He blows her brains out and winds up in a Japanese prison babbling over a fetus in a bucket. Anyway, that’s about the gist of it. You can decide if you can handle that stuff or not. I think I will have to watch it a few times to decide if it disgusts me or not.
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