Miike Takashi's Detective Story

I'm doing something special with this post--rather than hunt up amusing screencaps from Miike Takashi's Detective Story and putting sarcastic captions underneath them, I'm going to provide my own facial responses to the various strange goings-on in this movie as I recap them.  Trust me; it'll be amusing.

As you may or may not recall, Miike Takashi is the controversial Japanese film director that directed the notorious Audition and inspired the likes of Eli Roth to rape our eyeballs with movies like Hostel, which then inspired movies like Captivity, so when you think about it, Miike really has some answering to do.  He also directed the unaired episode of Masters of Horror called Imprint, starring Billy Drago, whom I've mentioned here before, I'm sure.  He's well-known for what-the-fuck kind of moments in his films, though not more than any other Japanese filmmaker, in my opinion.

The movie begins with a shot of a white-haired man slipping organ meat into a blender, and then pouring the contents into small bowls and then using it as paint.

Knowing Miike, it's probably real organ meat, but it's kind of chunky and you got to think that it's going to make crappy paint.  The credits roll and we're shown the city and some youngish-looking dude jacking it to pictures of girls on his computer taken with spy cameras.  There is no connection between the scenes and then we're introduced to two more characters, only these ones are actually protagonists so we start to get somewhere.  Two guys with the same first name of Raita: one is a typical Japanese guy with a perma-wave in his hair who looks like he works with computers and the other is kind of a jackass in vintage clothes and a penchant for fountain pens and zippo lighters.  One is a computer specialist and the other is a detective.  In a wacky twist, they're neighbors, and during a night of drinking, a young woman comes to the door and asks to see the detective, but he sends her away.  A few minutes later she's attacked and killed.  The police find her with a baggie of water in her body cavity and a couple missing organs.  Then another woman gets it and she's left hanging in midair with one of the detective's pens underneath her body.

We meet the detective's detective team, a young woman named Mika and some dude.  The detective has left his cell phone in his neighbor's apartment, so he goes to return it at his office.  He meets the chick, who loves this artist named Yuki Aoyama or something like that, and offers to take her to the show and she agrees.  While they're there, she pees herself in the middle of the gallery, claiming she just "couldn't hold it."

While washing her panties in the sink in the bathroom, she finds another dead girl, this one with her lungs removed and dirt stuffed down her mouth.  The police, meanwhile, are trying to find the detective to arrest him, so he goes on the lam.  He goes to see a killer he put away before to get clues to the current killer a la Silence of the Lambs.  The killer is all burned up but wears what looks like a bucket with face holes cut out on his head.  He also has a butler who keeps taking on/off maggots on his arms, and perched nearby is a carton of McDonalds fries.

He tells the detective that the killer probably doesn't know he's crazy, and that if he realizes that, he'll solve the case "naturally."  The police track down the guy who was masturbating at the beginning as a suspect, explaining that scene, but it's a bust and they continue looking for the detective.  Some shit happens and he puts the clues together to start researching the painter, who's this spiritualist who puts significance on the elements and certain body parts.  He hires a colleague to get more information about him.  She returns telling him that the artist became more interested in the occult after his first wife died of craziness because he had an extramarital affair with a woman who he knocked up, and then with another woman he also knocked up.  Long story short, the detective's male assistant is actually the son of the artist and the killer, and, oh no, the girl is missing.  So the detective, his neighbor, and the colleague go to his retreat to face him.  The assistant wants to bring his mother back from the dead or something and has killed his father in the interim, and now he clips white hair barrettes on and tries to paint.  He killed the girls because they knew that it wasn't his father painting the newest pieces of art.  

They all try to fight the assistant.  The detective jumps over some railing and, while holding on, gets all of his fingers chopped off and plummets through some patio furniture, severely breaking one leg and getting a stake driven through the other thigh.  He still manages to walk back up into the house to see a little girl (the artist's second child) kill the assistant (the colleague had found her and brought her with her).  With the case solved and the killer dead, they go into the epilogue:

The detective is recovering at home and he asks his neighbor to quit being a computer guy and to be a detective with him.  He kind of agrees and then helps the detective take a drink.  He says his hands feel funny and he pulls off the bandages to see that all of his fingers have grown back.

Yeah.

Rabid

Reviewable horror movies are few and far between.  This is the only excuse I'll offer for three or so months between updates.  In any case, the selection this time is David Cronenberg's Rabid, a 1977 flick that should make pro-lifers feel all warm and gushy inside.  The plot focuses on a young woman who gets set on fire during a motorcycle accident and is given an experimental skin graft.  They take the same skin from her thighs, but treat it (off camera) so that it will look more like abdomen skin, and they do it by mutating the cells or something.  Basically, it's the same premise of stem cell research, and wow, are the results wacky.

So the girl is in a coma for about a month while the skin is getting treated.  Her boyfriend, who was driving the motorcycle during the accident is at home doing whatever.  One of the other patients hears the girl scream from a nightmare or something and comes to help her.  She is, of course, topless, which is good, because fifteen minutes into the film and I was getting antsy to see someone's tits.  Watch as many horror movies as I do and see if it doesn't happen to you.

Anyway, the chick hugs him and blood starts coming out of everywhere, so the viewer is forced to assume that her awesome rocking tits are murdering him, but it's not that interesting, I'm afraid.  It's actually a phallic-looking thing that comes out of her armpit, which kind of looks like another orifice, but which was no where near the actual skin graft site but whatever (see right).  For me, I've been gun-shy about Cronenberg's films and weird orifices when I happened to catch Crash (1996) on late night television one night and witnessed James Spader screwing an incision in Roseanna Arquette's leg.





No, I'm not fucking kidding.


The guy that the chick, um, stuck, turns into a rabid monster and eats a taxi driver before crashing to his death over and overpass. The girl escapes and tries to eat a cow through osmosis and then feeds from a drunk farmer. For some unknown reason she returns to the hospital, eats another chick in the hot tub, and stashes her in a freezer.


An outbreak of skin-graft-rabies starts in Montreal after the girl feeds from her doctor in the same way. The chick's boyfriend is convinced it has something to do with her, so he goes looking for her, since she kind of escaped (again). The security of this place sucks. She eats her best friend who took her in and finally the boyfriend catches up to her. He tells her she is the cause of the outbreak and she pushes him down the stairs, like you do. Then, to prove whether she was the cause or not, she sticks a guy and then locks herself in a room with her. The guy gets the rabies or whatever and kills her. The movie concludes with a shot of her corpse getting thrown into a garbage truck by a bunch of guys in haz-mat suits.


Fucking Canadians.

The Echo - Surprisingly not horrible

My Netflix selection this week is Yam Laranas's The Echo, which after last week's crushing disappointment with Jennifer's Body was actually pretty good in comparison.  It was still the same tired plot that I'll explore more thoroughly below, but at least the effects, the mood, and the pacing were decent.  That being said, let me completely rip the thing apart for my amusement.

The movie starts off with some dude whose name I've already forgotten trying to find a job after he's been released from prison for killing a guy.  The parole officer, if you're curious, is played by the old lady in Feast.  You can tell that he's supposed to be the down-on-his-luck hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold character from the perpetually hangdog look on his face.  He says he'll be living with his mother, who is actually dead, presumably starved to death because she was living in a closet.  And we've all been there, right?

I'd crack a gay joke, but that'd be too obvious.

The guy finds bottles of anti-psychotic drugs in the medicine cabinet and assumes his mother was bat-shit insane.  If I found half eaten cans of beans in my mother's closet, I might draw the same conclusion.  I'd like to add that my mother once peed herself when she fell down the stairs.  (Now you're famous on the internet, Mom!)

There's also a huge ass hole in the wall (not to be confused with a huge asshole in the wall) where he can hear the goings-on in the other apartment.  First all he hears is a grinding sound and he assumes it's the pipes or whatever.  Then he finds a paper towel filled with fingernails and blood on the keys of a piano, which is a detail that never goes anywhere.  He gets a job as a mechanic and meets up with his old girlfriend, who is a waitress putting herself through art school to become a fashion designer.  She even has a matching sassy blonde sidekick to complete the cliche.  She and the guy meet up and she cries a little.  I dunno, I was distracted during this part of the movie.

So the sounds start to escalate and the guy starts to hear voices in his apartment.  There's a man in the other apartment who's beating up on his wife.  He tries to intervene, but the guy's a cop and really big, so the main character shuts up.  In the meantime, there's a creepy little girl running around the apartment complex and some dude across the way that keeps peeking in through the main character's window.

Hijinks continue for about thirty minutes or so when the main character finally finds the balls to call the cops on the couple next door, but when the cops bust the door in--surprise, it's empty.  The rest of the movie is The Grudge, except in New York and a girl with a tiny piano instead of a kid that meows.

What the hell kind of movies do I watch, anyway?

The waitress girl goes to check up on the guy and first sees the woman knocking on the guy's door looking for help.  She comes back a second time and gets the shit beaten out of her by the ghost of the husband, but the guy rescues her.  Turns out that the woman and the girl were beaten to death by her husband and the entire complex pretended not to hear or assumed that someone else would call the cops, so the ghosts were understandably upset and were taking revenge on the tenants who ignored them.  The guy ends up breaking the curse by opening the door and watching the woman beat her husband to death instead or something.

The moral of the story:  call your landlord if you find a baggie full of fingernails in your apartment.  Or, you know, the cops.

Cheesy Horror is dead...

...and "comedy horror" killed it.  Its death knell comes as Jennifer's Body, starring Megan Fox.  I never thought I'd long for another I Know Who Killed Me, but I started praying about forty-five minutes into the movie.  The main difference between the two was that I Know Who Killed Me took itself seriously, making it an easy and enjoyable target.  Jennifer's Body is tongue-in-cheek and it makes fun of itself--thing is, it doesn't do it very well.

First off, whoever told Diablo Cody that she was a decent writer (looking at you, Academy) should be dragged out and shot.  There's more to writing dialogue than turning every line into a catch phrase.  Maybe it's me getting old, but most of the time I could barely tell what the fuck any of the characters were talking about because it was so laden with teenage colloquialisms, which Cody pulled straight from her ass.  From the look of things, Megan Fox knew about as much as me.  She delivers each line like it's in a foreign language.  Also, does anyone else notice that she speaks like her voice box is coated in mucus?  Anyway.

Someone on Netflix thought this movie was Sam Raimi-esque.  This person should also be shot.  Everyone seems to think that if a horror movie gets a couple of chuckles than it could pass for a Raimi vehicle.  The only connection I could make between this movie and Sam Raimi was that one of the characters wore an Evil Dead t-shirt--ironically, of course.  This gets into my hatred of hipsters so I'll drop it before I start to digress.

Goddamn you, Bill Kaulitz.

There are some horror comedies that are redeemed by good gore, but even here Jennifer's Body falls woefully short.  A couple of intestines do not a gore-fest make.  But, then again, this is a person who rented Cannibal Holocaust twice.

A special thanks goes out to Darbee, who without her generous donation, this blog could not go on.  Thanks!