The bizarre world of Japanese film-maker Takashi Miike has not become any less bizarre with his new film, first seen at Cannes earlier this year. The notorious pulp-arthouse auteur has created another freakily eclectic mashup: a yakuza gangster film and a vampire film – and also a comedy farce. (Miike’s 1999 masterpiece Audition, rereleased late last year, was also a mix of styles: a dating dramedy that morphed into extreme horror; this director derives his own kind of energy from these generic shunts.)
In this movie, a top yakuza is also a vampire; on being destroyed by vengeful martial-arts furies, he effectively passes on the mantle to his sensitive underling Kageyama (Hayato Ichihara), by biting him. Soon vampires are all around, and so is chaos: “We don’t care about winning or losing; we just fucking fight!” declares one yakuza. The wacky, knockabout silliness into which this film persistently descends (it even features a giant kickboxing frog) has tried the patience of almost everyone who has seen it. It is extremely mad, long and often tiresome. Yet it is acted with eerie and absolute conviction, and has an interestingly surreal quality; Miike has a claim to be one of cinema’s genuine surrealists. The undead-gangster trope reminded me of Abel Ferrara’s double bill The Addiction (1995) and The Funeral (1996).
