My OperaMovie Review: Takasi Miike's Imprint
Saturday, December 30, 2006 12:06:45 PM
Imprint
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 subtley. 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 suppose 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.
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 suppose to be made for mass consumption on prime time cable. I understand that Argento also had a film banned, or extremely edited. 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.
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 that it likes shiny things. The flashbacks go into images of violent wife beatings, incest, child rape and abortions and images of 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 suppose to extract he 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.
What is harder to handle than the gratuitous gore and torture is the way nothing is resolved in the story, and one has to wonder what the story was all about. I do not seem to like the dialog being in English (this comes from living in China now for 2 ½ years maybe and knowing no one in this movie excpet Drago could speak English.)Furthermore Billy Drago’s acting is really hammy in a weird sort of way. Over the top, like he is not even going to try take the role seriously. The ending simply made no sense. For some unexplainable reason the mutant prostitute turns into Komoko after he shoots her in the head. You think maybe he is imagining it in his moment of insanity but the shot stays with Komoko now and the deformed whore is gone. So who is who and what is what? Was the deformed woman really Komoko? After all the blood and brains and rubber fetuses we are treated to an ultimately disappointing and confounding finale. Not for kids or people who have never taken anti-depressants. I was very disappointed but will still say it is worth a peek if you like shock cinema or need help with your bulemia. Just wish the story had not been so hallucinogenic.
Anonymous # Wednesday, May 18, 2011 6:28:32 AM