June 23, 2005

Need a crazy supernatural movie to look forward to. [WMV] Yokai is an upcoming movie by Takashi Miike due to be released in Japan in 2005. Most Miike films look like most of their budget was spent on weed, shrooms and crack to "inspire" the script. Yokai however seems as if a lot of money was left over to make it into the actual filming. One of his most presentable films Happiness of the Katakuris is a comedy/horror/musical with a volcano. Don't touch his films if you are squeamish for they are usually very extreme, but for the rest enjoy the insanity that is Miike.
posted by Proteus Moteus 18 years ago
  • Happiness of the Katakuris is a great little film.. I happened upon it a couple of years ago as i was exploring zombie movies.. This is perhaps, the ONLY zombie movie with dancing and singing zombies... worth it for that alone!
  • I love Takashi Miike films. Especially Visitor Q (one movie that really breaks every taboo) and Gozu are great, funny, extremely original, but not for the faint at heart..
  • I don't think there was any cannibalism in Visitor Q. It had pretty much everything else though. I saw his film Rainy Dog the other day, which, I am shocked (shocked!) to report, does not contain any dismemberment, rape, incest, face-slicing, necrophilia, body piercing, or disfigurement. I've kind of come to expect it from the guy. If you can find it, I would recommend his TV miniseries (!) MPD-Psycho, which is like a really fucked-up cross between Millennium and X-Files, on acid.
  • >:(
  • nutty: Interesting mix. Since Millenium was a spin off of X-Files wouldn't that make the result like tv show incest :P
  • Well, the X-Files bit comes from the fact that it's about a group of police detectives investigating the paranormal, the Millennium bit comes from the fact that it's about a serial killer, and the "on acid" bit comes from the fact that the serial-killer personality can transfer itself between people by calling them on their cellphone and playing an old psychedelic-rock song, and is occasionally represented by a sequence of an anime girl being drawn and scampering off...
  • so desu ne
  • Audition was too slow paced. Great idea, and I like that he kept most of the good stuff until the end instead of dropping clues the whole time, but the slowness was off putting. It seemed like each line spoken required 2-5 seconds of contemplation, and most of that dialogue was small talk that brought zero to the film. It was a half-hour idea stretched to two hours. Fill up that time with other conflict, not idle banter. Yokai looks really great, I can't wait to see it. If you like movies about yokai, there's one called Kibakichi. It's supposed to be a spaghetti western/samuria movie with a yokai werewolf wandering around ancient Japan, dishing out justice to everyone. I haven't got my hands on it yet, but it sounds good. I don't think it's made with as big of budget as this movie, though.
  • I like the little merchandising pop at the end of the trailer with the playing/trading cards.
  • Heh...haven't seen any of his films yet, but I just now happened to be looking at the entry for Chakushin ari on imdb, and noticed this quote from a user review: But Miike, who makes movies the way other people write 800-page books of philosophy, converts pop-culture dross into Renaissance-art gold...