|
Yoshihiko Matsui
Has professional ties to Sogo Ishii and Shuji Terayama, both Japanese cult cinema legends, but Matsui probably exceeds them in terms of avant-garde, inscrutable and mysterious cinematic creations. Due to having only three movies to his name and purposely blocking international exposure, Yoshihiko remains mostly a Japanese cult phenomenon and it remains to be seen whether his radical experiments can speak to anyone except Japanese nihilists and drooling cult-movie fans. Surprisingly, in 2008, he released a conventional thriller-drama about a gay teenager in trouble. Reviewed until 2016. A portrait of desperate and insane humanity at the end of its tether doing depraved and desperate acts. The theme here is that hunger breeds desperation and turns anyone into a beast. A killer cuts up women and stuffs their body parts inside a mannequin, the mannequin gets a vaginal slash and used by various people for desperate needs, homeless bums wail in the street and get attacked, another bum drags along the torso of a mannequin and lovingly dresses it in panties, a seemingly innocent brother and sister play together then lose it with a bloody incestuous rape, etc. Many other meandering, inscrutable scenes (e.g. midget sex) are patched together into this overlong experiment, soon wearing out its welcome despite a couple of moments of grim poetry. A hodgepodge of bizarre scenes featuring insane people doing weird things. For example there are numerous shots of pigs, gory pig slaughters, a man pretending to be a chicken, a girl dragging said man, a girl dragging a dead chicken, many people in masks, the burning of a dead goat, the sitting next to people on a bench while a weirdo with a road sign runs past scene, the voyeuristic scene of a girl playing with herself, many weird people in bizarre costumes in alleys or hounding our main character in the street, etc. Supposedly about failed love and it may be saying something about foreigners and social-racial difficulties but what it really means is anyone's guess. This is too incoherent to even be surreal. |
| © 1999- by The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre | Table of Contents |