Controversial Movies: Art or Trash (Pt. 3)

This is part 3 in a 5 part series. Follow this link for part 1 and this link for part 2.

Hola hombres. It’s been a long weekend which started with a trip to “detox” which is like the drunk tank but you don’t get charged with public intoxication. When I get done with these controversial movies, I’ll give me two cents on the experience but until then, I want to keep the focus on cinema. For today’s movie, we are going to travel East instead of West to the land of Japan.

The Japanese are well known for having some pretty fucked up movies, especially for anyone who has watched anime beyond what is played on Adult Swim. But, as stated earlier in part 1, I’m going to leave anime out of this. Looking at other Japanese films, we have a couple genres which we see a lot of. First, we have the generic violence tweaked in a manner to mess with our heads. In this category, we have movies like Battle Royal in which around 30 teenagers are put on an island and have to kill each other until one is left. In 72 hours. Or they all die. No one said high school was going to be fair. I think a fat kid gets his first. On a side note, we Westerners invented that originally. It was called Lord of the Flies. And we killed the fat kid too because dead fat kids are make-you-shit-yourself hilarious. But I digress.

The other well known genre for Japanese cinema is gore flicks like Suicide Club which is made just to shock the hell out of you. How? Well, imagine 50 high school girls holding hands, singing a song in unison and being generally cute. Now, imagine that same group of girls jumping in front of a moving subway and spraying a blood wave 20 feet in the air. Shocked? Probably not, so here’s the clip!

If you drop your homework on the subway tracks, just let it go; cuz man, it's gone

Now that we have proven that Japanese movie makers are certifiably psychotic, you are wondering why I’m bringing up these movies. Well, it is to better understand the controversial movie I’m about to go over. It is a mix of that goofy over the top violent action combined with shit that just makes you wish you never got out of bed when you were 10 years old so the horrors of the world would have never entered your precious head.

Ichi the Killer

Woof, that creepy guy in the poster sort of scares me, but if you haven’t seen the movie, get a summary here.

I don’t know what is more shocking about this movie; the strong sexual overtones or the violence. To be honest, the violence in this movie is pretty campy. I mean, it’s gory and violent and people get hacked up worse than Kill Bill but honestly, it is so over the top and at times so poorly done, it is hard to be “traumatized” or at least turned off by the movie. One scene in particular when he cuts a prostitute(?) in half symmetrically, it looks like she’s glowing pink inside. The effect is terrible. I’ll bring up Cannibal Holocaust again because in that film, the cannibals chop a dude into pieces with stone axes and it looks sickeningly realistic and it was done with an 8mm camera and ~20 years prior to this film. For all the awesome CG work the Japanese do, it just boggles the mind why they would be so damn lazy on this effect. If you are going to chop a guy (and especially a woman) in half, then at least try to make it look good. It is the psychotic’s mantra: “you only go to hell once, so make it count.” (Editor’s Note: there is no psychotic’s mantra, only “Mike’s daily speech to himself in the mirror”.) Okay, so what else makes this movie “controversial” then?

Well, remember when I said “turned off by the movie” above? If not, then re-read it and start paying attention because there is one guy who is definitely getting turned on by this movie. Ichi, our main character, it seems has a little sexual problem. He can’t get off unless he’s murdering people. Imagine, gentlemen reading this, that you are 19 years old and unable to ejaculate unless you disembowel a room full of 30 year old men. Yeah, you’d be a world of hurt. And how do we know he has this odd sexual blockage? Ichi talks about it but the kicker is when blood sprays on the wall and it is shortly followed by a stream of ejaculate. Yep, he comes on the walls. Skeet, skeet, skeet! (Actually, that was supposed to be a caption for a image of the main title which is made out of Ichi’s semen but while looking for an image I ran into some disgusting shit that would probably get me arrested in most countries so I aborted).

Ichi’s odd fetish notwithstanding, there is also a good amount of rape in this film. A re-occurring theme of the movie is that Ichi was brought into his career of killing evil men because when he was younger he watched a girl he liked get raped and didn’t do anything to stop it (I won’t bring this up anymore to avoid plot spoilers). So, since that was his first “sexual experience” it is used to explain his violent ejaculation and I’m not talking about Scary Movie. Their handling of rape is pretty terrible because they always present the victim of the act as someone other than the actual victim of the rape. I could spend another couple of paragraphs going into what is wrong with this but it should speak for itself.

Probably the “funniest” scene is when Ichi is talking to a prostitute and she pretends to be this girl he saw get raped and did nothing to help and that she was turned on by the act and that she desires him and want to feel pain (for some Japanese reason). He gets overly excited about this and chops off half of her leg. She hops around on her non-stumpy leg, screaming and spraying blood until he finishes her off in the middle of a hallway. Is it actually funny? No but try to imagine the ridiculousness of the scene and you may chuckle. For those who have actually seen the movie, then maybe you laughed. I can’t be the only person.

Conclusion: This movie is pretty messed up. The violence isn’t realistic but the context in which it takes place most of the time is pretty random, relatively meaningless and over the top to the point where when they shipped the film to the censorship board, they must have included a picture of the director giving the bird. Combined with the sexual oddities of Ichi and the rampant prostitution and rape and you have a full fledged WTF movie. Fine, but is it art?

Well, this one is difficult. Yes, when it came to Caligula, I was pretty forward with my hatred for the lack of effort in making the violence realistic and contextually meaningful. With Ichi the Killer, it is pulling from the influence of anime and the original comic where this kind of crap is tolerated and in mimicking the source material, it does well. And even though it’s treatment of rape slightly pisses me off, I can’t fault Ichi the Killer with at least trying to do something different and within the grand scheme of things, it gives the movie an unique angle in which to view the protagonist. And also, like most Japanese films, there are some interesting themes and views on honor, society and modern life. That said, none of it really applies to a normal person and when you finish the film, those scenes seem generic within the realm of Japanese films and appear to be present for the sole purposes of giving transition between the action scenes. Even the scenes that try to be artistic come off as superficial and any true originality is kind of lost because of this. It definitely isn’t the worse movie you could watch on a Saturday afternoon but to reach a conclusion, I’m going to go with trash.

Part 4 will be coming soon (2/9 or 2/10) and prepare thyself for part 5 no later than 2/11. Although I said I wasn’t doing this in any order, I am saving my favorite controversial film for last.

What I Was Doing Whilst Typing: Listening to Man Of War. Remember kids, other bands play… Man Of War Kills!

~ by spraym on February 8, 2009.