Time for a quick catch up with our old friend Takashi Miike with a look at Yakuza Apocalypse and an long over due viewing of The Happiness of the Katakuris. Because two viewings back to back are better than one. A variety of deranged pleasures can be found in both of these releases from a director whose work is often as unhinged as it is diverse. But how else to describe both a vampire gangster movie, and a family drama involving a series of unfortunate deaths which is also a musical? I can only try to describe some of the madness you can expect to find here, but I'll give it my best shot. Some things just have to be seen to believed.
It's hard to say if either one of these films has a synopsis which is less strange than the other, but I'll go with Happiness for an opener. A man from the city moves his whole family out to the countryside to start a new life running a guest house for travellers, which is pretty straightforward. But things soon start to go wrong for them in a variety of ways... and I don't just mean the total lack of business because of the remote location. The premise is taken directly from a Korean film called The Quiet Family, though I suspect it probably has less pop songs. One particular incident involving characters striking poses and singing all their dialogue after finding a suicide victim on the premises is a sign of just how bizarre things are about to become as it all unravels.
Cult films from Japan are rarely surprising any more, but every so often something like this still manages to appear as fresh and off the wall. Entire scenes are dedicated to characters dancing around as the family goes through both strange and mundane situations. Odd side characters show up pretty frequently, whether it's con artist trying to seduce one of the daughters, or a sumo wrestler trying to have an affair with a school girl. Of course none of this ends well. Weird visuals and weird acting are all par for the course here, and despite some scenes feeling like detached scenarios and an overall lack of pacing it's consistently amusing.
A lot of the publicity material seems to focus on zombies that appear for only one scene, and are actually some kind of nightmare vision after things have started to get out of hand. Presumably nobody knew how to advertise this in English speaking regions, and who can blame them. It's completely uneven and the tone changes gears quite regularly, but it's hard not to find it all very likeable. It's not a top tier crazy or the best quality film in Miike's back catalogue but it's a good time most of the time. I haven't even mentioned all the claymation effects or the sudden transitions in style the film takes every so often. But I think in the end some of this is best left for a first viewing discovery like so many examples of extreme cinema.
4/5
So about those vampire gangsters. Yakuza Apocalypse is also a surreal experience. But it has the opposite problem in that the pacing and structure are all pretty conventional, but so many weird elements pile up that the story doesn't know what to do with them all. First there's an out of town syndicate enforcer who dresses like a priest from the middle ages. Then there's his sidekick, a bespectacled foreigner with a backpack full of manga posters... who's a martial arts assassin (Yayan Ruhian from The Raid films). Later there are creepy knitting groups, natural disasters, and creatures from Japanese folklore. The best one of these is a guy they hire to clean things up in the third act. It's definitely a fake frog mascot suit, but it's also definitely a real monster of some kind... and it's also a martial arts expert.
All of this is meshed together in the guise of an action crime thriller, even if not all of these moving parts fit together properly. Kageyama, a young man who admires the local crime boss and his followers, joins their ranks as a low level enforcer. Although he's unable to get the traditional yakuza tattoos because of a skin condition he tries to uphold their code and do the right thing. In this opening section things are pretty bland, but luckily those pesky vampires get revealed quite early on. When the boss refuses to comply with an out of another criminal faction things go badly wrong, and Kageyama finds himself acquiring new supernatural powers as well as being stuck between his former colleagues and the syndicate members.
But this isn't Bram Stoker or even Anne Rice we're talking about here. This is a weird Japanese vampire and he drinks blood from the locals with a pointed tongue rather than fangs, and the word 'suck' briefly appears on their faces. Soon they come back from the dead... as surly yakuza thugs - as do their own victims. To describe how all of this madness comes to a conclusion isn't a simple task, but the real problem is the anti-climactic nature of the finale. This begins to tease a giant spectacle somewhere between The Muppets and Godzilla but it never delivers. It doesn't have much in terms of standard unarmed combat either. Which is a big shame considering the build up and the casting choices.
Beyond these unforgivable exclusions various plot strands are left unfinished or unexplained, though I guess that's not a big surprise at this stage. But the whole thing feels pretty underdeveloped and once the credits roll it's not very satisfying experience. Maybe they didn't know what to do with all this insanity, or perhaps it was intentionally cut short. The outcome is a variety of strange fantasy elements, some so-so action and just enough blood to satisfy the urges of most horror fans. And of course the crazy the frog suit, have I mentioned the frog suit? Those sequences alone might be enough for me to give this all a pass, but only just.
3/5
