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Japan 2003
Directed by
Takashi Miike
129 minutes
Rated MA

Reviewed by
David Michael Brown
4 stars

Gozu

Synopsis:  After an unfortunate experience with a chihuahua, Ozaki (Sho Aikawa) is living on borrowed time. His friend and fellow yakuza, Minema (Hideki Stone), is given the task of assassinating Ozaki. The duo begins a road trip, on a bogus mission, and as they reach a strange town Ozaki is killed but Minema manages to loose his body. As he begins to search for the corpse Minema slowly starts to crack as his life begins to fall apart.

There are some films that just defy description, to the discerning viewer that would account for the majority of the films of Japanese maverick, Takashi Miike. Whether it’s the ultra violence of Ichi the Killer, the fetishic schoolgirl assassins of Fudoh: The New Generation or the outright strangeness of Visitor Q,  his films are designed to provoke an intense reaction and that will certainly happen when watching Yakuza Horror Theatre: Gozu or Gozu for short.

From the moment a yakuza snaps and vents his rage on the chihuahua at the beginning of the film the writing is on the wall, along with the remains of the pooch. What starts off as a seemingly normal Japanese gangster film with all the usual clichéd trappings soon descends into insanity, as the cracked world of our anti-hero spirals out of control. Visually, the film conjures up a surreal concoction of motifs, some familiar, many unlike anything you have seen before and this juxtaposition of the straight formulaic, albeit violent world of the Yakuza and the hallucinatory visions that haunt Minema are unnerving,  to say the least. The image of Gozu, the cow god, licking the face of a sharp suited yakuza is certainly a strange one but nothing will prepare you for the film’s justifiably notorious final moments that include Minema’s Yakuza boss’s sexual gratification with a selection of ladles coming (ho ho) to a painful conclusion. Even this scene, however, is topped by the film’s climatic scenes of rebirth. Recalling similar scenes in Harry Bromley Davenport’s Xtro rather than anything you would expect to see in a crime drama, it’s a shocking moment from which the film descends into insanity for good. Welcome, as they say to the twisted world of Miike.

The prolific director has slowly begun to make inroads into the American film market recently, directing an episode of the Masters of Horror series but his outlook is so tied up with the extremes of Japanese culture that this is one director who is unlikely to be making the trip to Hollywood to produce a remake. Heavens knows what the American studios would produce if they attempted to revisit the world of Gozu unlikely an idea as that may be. Imagine a gory, slime-filmed Weekend At Bernie's. Heaven knows which A-list celebrity would appear in the rebirth scene. Gozu is a truly extraordinary experience; a one-off film from a director who has made a career of one-offs.

 

 

 

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