Dir. Sakichi Sato
Japan
Film #10, of Wednesday 10th October, for Halloween 31 For 31
Sakichi Sato will be someone I
will entirely grateful to for two reasons – he wrote one of Takashi Miike’s
best films Ichi the Killer (2001),
and wrote another Miike gem Gozu (2004).
Tasteless on surface reflection, both films however hide fluxuating puzzles
that undermine conventions of what would be expected to happen and subvert the
conventions of ‘extreme Japanese cinema’ Western viewers were accustomed for
through directors like Miike. With Gozu,
turning in a pan-sexual, meandering road trip which, for all the lactation and
ladles up a man’s arse, played with what a mystery story should represent, what
character dynamics should be, and what one gets out of it all. Ichi the Killer played a riskier game,
full of misogynistic violence that got it accused of misogyny and cruelties of
their most graphic that lead to one sequence being removed for the UK release,
but within its centre a doubling-in and questioning of itself that undermined
the concepts of sex and violence through ultraviolent comic book logic. It also
dared the biggest gamble even for this area of cinema in having an ending
purposely disappointing for us and the characters within it, anti-climatic and
not sating the bloodlust it creates in the first three-quarters to remind you
of your fallacy. Sato with Miike made very brave films even for Miike’s
stereotypical image, making a film directed by Sato immediately interesting for
me.
When a zombie outbreak starts in
Tokyo, originating from a garbage mountain where corpses and industrial waste
is also dumped, friends and co-workers Fujio and Mitsuo (Tadanobu Asano and Sho
Aikawa respectively) find themselves having to deal with the results. Mitsuo also
desires to teach Fujio the martial art of jujitsu combat, a gift that Fujio
will both need and lead to a crisis of faith as the zombie apocalypse moves
forward around them.
A comedy horror manga adaptation,
it is worth mentioning that low budget genre films like this are very different
from their Western cousins most of the time in terms of quality. Usually they
are better made, to the point the technical side of their creation is better in
terms of composition and the image quality itself; I have little knowledge on
whether it’s different cameras and other equipment the Japanese filmmakers use
over the Western film crews, or if it’s different ways of using the same tools,
but generally there is much more better quality as a result. The Japanese view
of special effects too, that it is not realism that matters but the concept
itself, has also been the lower budgeted films’ godsend, the willingness to
accept the artificially of the practical and CGI effects and concentrate on the
effect and creation of them, allowing the area to meld with the films they’re
in far better than Western counterparts whose attempts at state-at-the-art
technology, or serviceable effects, usually become dated or painful to sit
through unless the techniques behind them are very subtle and/or clever, or if they
emphasise the fantastical of it instead like American practical effects at
their best. And of course, Japanese low budget genre films have more frequency
to obliterate any sense of good taste and rationality to their ideas, as in the
case with Tokyo Zombies when there
are at least a few child molestation jokes within it.*
The film had a promising beginning,
helped by the two main actors. Tadanobu Asano has become one of my favourite
actors, a screen presence that is able to stand out and improve any role, even in
the underrated Hollywood blockbuster Battleship
(2012) in a main role. His co-star
Sho Aikawa is just as solid an actor, visually recognisable if you have seen as
many Takashi Miike films as I have. Sadly Tokyo
Zombie, despite having a few chuckles and clever uses of background sight
gags, is not a good film at all. The humour, a laid back deadpan style that
works very well at first, starts to lose its quality as it goes on, eventually
descending into the repeated use of the word ‘retard’ at Fujio’s expense, by a
female character Yoko (Erika Okuda) who contributes little to the plot or to
like about her, or very flat jokes. The film also starts to lose steam greatly
after the first signs of the zombie plague, the interactions between the main
actors not enough to save something that is not going anywhere in the middle
section. Even when the film takes a drastic shift in plotting at this stage, going
from an animated piece into a what-if scenario of what would happen in an
outbreak like this acted out, the film still doesn’t work. The two leads are not
allowed to interact again with each other until the resolution, the female
character Yoko is pushed into the plot without any real purpose for actress Okuda
except to say ‘retard’ over and over again, and an odd additional push to drama
muddles the tone greatly. Considering how the film starts - a gently paced
story which is still filled with some twisted and stone-faced jokes that made
me question the DVD’s 15 certificate even if they’re less explicit as most
Japanese genre films can go to – it’s a sad drift downwards into a mediocre
state as the rest of it goes into. Of course, Japanese low budget genres films
are just as mixed in quality as the Western ones, but there is a sense, at
least from the ones released in the UK, that the quality is a little bit higher
for films like this in that they have something vaguely interesting in them or
catch you off-guard.
In terms of Japanese zombie
films, I’ve only seen a couple, one so long ago the judgement of it is probably
questionable now, but mostly they are more recommendable to you the reader if
you are interested in this area. Zombie
Hunter Rika (2008), a far more low budget film, is a lot more interesting
and amusing horror comedy, while Junk
(2000), despite being years since I saw it, still lingers in my mind occasionally
as a solid film despite being only suitable for a small audience. Tokyo Zombie should have been the best
so far for me of the bunch considering the talent involved, but sadly the
director-writer’s own creation fails far below the quality of what Gozu or Ichi the Killer presented. As I said before, I will be indebted to
him greatly for those two films...but not for this one.
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| From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/tokyo-zombie/w448/tokyo-zombie.jpg?1289450509 |
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* For British readers, considering the
white elephant in the room that’s appearing in our news frequently since the
start of the month involving the late Jimmy Savile, Tokyo Zombie's jokes on the subject felt a little too close to the
bone for me in hindsight of viewing it yesterday night. Neither does it help
that, while I take the real life case seriously and would never joke about it,
the jokes presented in the film are completely unfunny unless they weren’t
supposed to be jokes in the first place. It does however prove that concepts
like it are possible to view in different lights even during a nationwide
scandal, as evidence that I can separate the two from each other and not
concern myself about it aside from this additional comment. That’s all I’m
going to say on the subject, and I am not going to get into a discussion about it aside from admitting the connection.
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