The old saying about the fighting in academic politics kept popping into my head as I watched this debut effort from Japanese director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri. It goes something like, “academic politics is the most bitter and vicious form of politics because the stakes are so low.” The less you’re fighting over, the more heinous you’ll act. And the university students featured in this movie aren’t battling each other over much and they certainly trod on the crazy side of heinous as they engage in a variety of murderous behavior all in an effort to assert some kind of authority in a group that has about six people in it.
The end result is a splatter film that many fancy critics have heaped praise on for its examination of Japanese society and its reliance on a rigid hierarchical structure and what happens when it disintegrates when the leader of a group is removed from the equation.
But all this search for nuance and deep meaning made me think of yet another quote. To paraphrase the great Sigmund Freud, “sometimes a guy sticking a shot gun up a gal’s crotch and blasting her is only a guy sticking a shot gun up a gal’s crotch and blasting her.”
Apparently back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Japan experienced a situation on its college campuses that the United States also was afflicted with. I’m of course talking about rich college punks running their respective nations down and demanding that communism be installed as the reigning ideology.
Regardless of where it takes place, I’ve always found this so-called “student activism” to be the height of hypocrisy. How many of these nimrods are living off mom and dad’s money while they’re out protesting “the Establishment?”
Why don’t you quit sitting around your dorm drinking, smoking, and screwing and get out there and run for office, make sure all the students vote, and propose some workable solutions to whatever issues you have beefs with? Or isn’t that as much fun as wearing a bandana over your face and waving around signs with insulting and simplistic messages?
As luck would have it though, the left-wing student radicals in this movie don’t have much time to march through the streets or conduct sit-ins since they’re too busy killing each other!
The movie begins with the leader of the student group in jail. We are supposed to believe that he’s very charismatic and is the glue that holds the group together. That’s the assumption since things go down the toilet pretty fast after he’s out of the picture for good, but since he’s always in the cooler we never see exactly why anyone gives a crap about him.
Be that as it may, he puts his girlfriend in charge while he’s gone. On the one hand, that’s admirable since it shows his belief that women are the equal of men, but on the other hand she’s completely insane and humps just about every guy in the group depending on who she likes on a particular afternoon. This contributes to the group’s descent into madness as jilted lovers wonder why she’s in charge and openly question her authority.
After one particularly dissatisfied guy reports some of the group to the police and tries to get the other part of the group to join a different group, the woman leader (Masami) turns violent and her supporters follow her lead.
What follows is a veritable catalog of atrocities that would be right at home in any sleazy Italian horror movie. Heads explode, guys are castrated, people are stabbed, shot, beaten, and even impaled. If you like your movies to be rough going, the last half of this one will be right up your alley.
The movie eventually gets to the point where you’re just ticking down the people that still have yet to be slaughtered and you’re hunkered down in anticipation of some new gross out scene to come. Following the initial violence against those that betrayed the group which you can comprehend on some level, the movie just sort of shifts into a gory free-for-all which while keeping those with strong stomachs watching, only keeps you watching the way a freak show would, not because there’s a story still being told.
Artsmagic gives this an impressive deluxe two-disc treatment and the extras are mostly entertaining, especially the behind-the-scenes feature showing the filming of Kichiku.
While the movie is a grim march into oblivion, everyone involved in making it is shown having a good time, laughing and joking around. People are posing with the exploded head, reshoots are needed because a guy farts in a scene, and even while everyone is concerned that some special effect hurt the actress playing Masami, they are also wowed by the fact that the blood in the scene ended up sprayed on the ceiling!
It was the perfect antidote to the unending horror of the movie itself and was a fascinating look at a low budget production in action. There’s also several interviews with the principals as well as an introduction by “acclaimed writer on Japanese cinema” Tom Mes where he waxes on and on about the deeper meaning of the film.
Make no mistake, this a stomach-churning effort with surprisingly convincing performances by all the film students involved and the movie itself looks better than what anyone’s idea of a “student film” probably is, but the question remains as to whether all of the brutality served the story or vice versa. I tend to think whatever message the movie had was drowned out in a shower of blood, guts, and chunks of head.
© 2010 MonsterHunter
