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 "I wanted to describe the agony of a wounded soul of someone decaying from the
inside." That's the quote from director Kei Fujiwara that explains everything
that goes on in this movie. There are "two horrific and blood-drenched stories
[that] intertwine" in this film. A cop is victimized by a body-parts selling
gang and his brother, Numata checks into it. Another story deals with a biology
teacher that "experiments on the limbless body of the missing police officer...
keeping him alive with the blood taken from high school virgin girls." They
said that this movie had to be released in a cut form in Japan, but you get it
all here uncut! 1996, 105 minutes, DVD
The best thing that can be said of Organ, a grubby, dingy, humorless entry in the Japanese Gross Out movie genre - a
genre
detailed in all its graphic glory in Jack Hunter's Eros In Hell (I would recommend it, but you'd just drool over all the films that are even
nastier than Organ that aren't readily available in the States) is that it
comes off as a bit nightmarish. It's nightmarish in the sense that it rarely
makes any sense and contains scenes that come off like someone's demented fever
dream. At least if your fever made you dream that a Japanese woman would be
turned on by the fact that your body is rotting and that your home situation is
such that your wife would feel comfortable peeing all over a newspaper laid on
the floor in your house and then cover it up with a sleeping bag (this happens
a little while after she was raped while her son was hanging around on the
stairs to the second floor playing a videogame). I'm assuming that this is all
supposed to be shocking and I was shocked a bit by this film, I'll admit. Of
course, I was shocked that it was such a scattershot and undisciplined piece of
poser gore cinema that seemed to have so little to say about anything. I'm
sure that
the filmmaker, Kei Fujiwara, the woman that starred in Tetsuo: The Iron Man,
and who plays the one-eyed wench named Yoko in this movie, thought that her
movie said something about child abuse and self image and obsession, but
somehow she manages to be both cliched and opaque all at once. I mean, what is
so new or interesting about the fact that kids who were treated brutally while
young, grow up to be the sickest maniacs out there? You don't have to think too
hard to remember films from a bunch of different eras that did that effectively
(Psycho? Or if you like this kind of blood and guts show, how about Japan's own Audition?). Even as Kei trods this well travelled path, she manages to drown any kind
of narrative impetus she might have gained from such subject matter by adapting
an irritating story structure that haplessly attempts to interweave two
different angles on her subjects. There's the one part of the film that deals
with some group of punks led by Yoko, chopping up people for their body parts.
There's another plot involving Yoko's brother who teaches biology at a school
for girls and how he conducts all these icky experiments. The back of the box
says this guy's name Sieko, but I could have sworn there was a guy named Jun
running around doing all this. In fact, I'm still not sure if the guy who was
the lead "surgeon" in Yoko's body chop shop was the same as the biology
teacher. That's okay though, because I spent most of the movie trying to
figure out who was doing what to whom with little success.  Confusion was the order of the day right from the get go. What I was able to
puzzle out from the beginning was that there were these two cops and they were
on some kind of stake out. They were hot on the trail of some body parts
selling operation and they watch as some dude's body is carted away in a car.
I guess they follow this guy and one of the cops somehow gets on the crew that
is hauling the body in for the guys who are going to cut it up. I don't know
how he was able to talk his way into doing this since I'm assuming that the
only other guy on the crew knew that this wasn't the usual guy he hauled bodies
with. By the way, this cop's name is Numata or something close. His partner
is Tosako (I think). What happens to Tosako? I think he got discovered by the
bad guys (don't know how or why), got beat down, cuffed and dumped in the back
of a car with another body. They leave the keys right next to Tosako, so he's
able to escape and eventually appears at the body chop shop with Numata.
Numata delivers the body and the guy in the mask from the cover of the DVD
starts taking out messy globs of goo. Numata spazs out and tells the guy to
put it back. Tosako appears around this time and a fight between good guys and
bad guys ensue. At least I think it did. It was really hard to tell exactly
what was going on because Kei thought it would add to the atmosphere to film
all of this in the dark with characters we had only been introduced to moments
ago. I didn't know who was getting their ass kicked and couldn't decide if I
should be glad that some guy was on the floor rolling around in pain. Plus the
fight scene was badly laid out - sometimes somebody injected someone with a
needle, sometimes someone got electrocuted and I think that Numata tore
someone's eye out (but not the one-eyed Yoko - her mom did that), because he
was staring at this eye that was embedded in a bunch of sloppy viscera. Though
I wasn't too sure who got the best of who in that fracas, I was able to
establish a couple of things. Numata survived and somehow was on the loose.
Tosako did not escape and was now missing (presumed dead I suppose, but you
know how movies like this are), and the body chop shop was going to have to
close for a few days and reopen in some other poorly lit warehouse.  At this point, I had fooled myself into thinking that I had a handle on things.
I knew who the bad guys were (Yoko and Masked Body Chopper) and the good guy
(Numata) would be spending his time trying to find out what happened to Tosako
and bring these meanies to justice. And that is what happened to some extant
here, but they sure took the long and tedious route around to that end. The
next thing I know, we are at some type of school for Japanese schoolgirls that
dress in those sailor outfits that pedophiles and anime fans (someone e-mail me
the difference) seem to delight in seeing. There is a biology teacher here
that I thought was the surgeon from the opening scene. I figured he was going
to do the time-honored tradition of laying low until the heat dies down and
what better cover than a biology teacher obsessed with butterflies. I'm not
sure why he has to go into deep cover while his one-eyed freak of a sister is
still out there running around, hanging out with her criminal gang. In any
event, I'll just assume for argument's sake that this is the same guy (but who
is Jun then?) since it tightens the plot a little bit more. This biology
teacher (Sieko) also does a lot of "research" in a locked room where there
is a guy with his arms and legs chopped off that Sieko is keeping alive with
some type of drug. He's got the guy up on some kind of shelf surrounded by
lots of plants . Meanwhile, there are girls starting to go missing at the
school. And by missing, I mean they are out laying in the woods with their
guts all ripped up (this Sieko guy makes that teacher from Battle Royale look like Max Bickford, but since nobody ever watches that show, you probably
don't get the reference). For some reason, this chick that has some position
of authority with the school comes around to Sieko and calls him a pervert and
generally is suspicious of him. She also complains about the smell in his
office and asks him if he "jacks off" there. I guess this is what passes for
flirting in the land of the rising sun. Sieko has a student come to him and
complain about her poor grades and claims that she did poorly because her notes
that she'd tried to study smelled funny. While she's doing her whole "dog
farted on my homework" take, Sieko is pulling slimy goo out of his belly. Soon
he's shot the student up with some kind of drug and gutted her. Pretty rough
way to get extra-credit if you ask me. Since all this happened Numata has been kicked off the police force and his
partner has just been marked down as "stopped coming into work." None of that
makes any sense, but later it appears that some of the cops are on the take as
they say so maybe that was the reason it was all covered up. I prefer my cops
to be suspended or "too close" to the case, or kicked off the force, so I'm all
for Numata when he decides to take matters into his own hands and continue to
try and find his missing partner. The back of the DVD box says that this is his
brother, but interestingly enough Tosako has himself a twin brother that is
also a cop is running around trying to find his brother. Is Numata really
Tosako's brother? Is Numata really his name? Does any of it really matter to
your enjoyment of seeing limbless guys, psychotic rotting teachers, and gutted
schoolgirls? Let's put aside Tosako's twin for moment and concentrate on
Numata's quest for justice. It consists of him stumbling around, sweating,
filthy and at one point we have a nice long loving look at him barfing up all
this white junk that looks like week old cottage cheese. I think he had been
drugged and that was causing him to do his impression of any frat guy on any
Thursday-Sunday night. This has also caused him to desert his family though
the fact that his wife is someone who pees on the floor probably had more than
a little to do with that. Numata pretty much stays like this the entire rest
of the movie until he somehow locates Sieko (or is that Jun?). Tosako's twin
also is on the case and hangs out in a car staking out this gang's
headquarters. He has a guy with him that was with Numata at the very beginning
of the movie when they were both hauling bodies around. Numata has also met
this guy again when he was at some kind of place that I'm assuming was a flop
house. Also working there as a janitor is the guy that is Yoko and Sieko's
dad. I think this guy might have been Jun. We learn during some flashbacks
that Sieko and Yoko didn't have the greatest mother in the world. She poked
out Yoko's eye and she tried cutting Sieko's nuts off. She did some other
stuff, but I'm not sure how this relates to the fact that when Sieko takes his
shirt off, he's rotting from the inside. Speaking of that, the chick that was
flirting with Sieko at school earlier, shows up at his office and has figured
out that he is one scary dude. It probably had something to do with the fact
that she found Tosako in the locked room. You would think that would put her
off a bit, but it doesn't and she starts trying to get with Sieko. Then she
takes his shirt off and sees his rotted chest and you would think that that
would put her off quite a bit, but it doesn't and in fact she gets a knife and
delights in slicing up his tumors and pusy wounds. It's let my boss always
says: There ain't a dog that can't find a woman that won't lay down with him. 
The movie finally concludes when Yoko, Sieko, and their daddy all reunite and
kill each other. Numata visits Tosako in the hospital and we see that he has a
really icky-looking body like Sieko. The doctors think it may be some type of
side effect of the drug that Sieko was keeping him alive with. Numata leans
over as Tosako tries to whisper to him. He whispers, "why me and not you?" or
something to that effect. Ahh, that's how we like to see our gory films end.
With a statement about the unfairness and most of all the pointlessness of it
all. I stopped being shocked a long time ago by fake body parts and pig guts
drenched in Karo syrup, so the furor of this film is bit lost on me. The
biggest crime this film commits is in its ponderousness. It would qualify as
some type of relentlessly sadistic nightmare if didn't inch along with boring
scenes of Numata stumbling around, the gang of thugs arguing and way too much
time in Sieko's lab where he would poke himself and admire the gut rot that
came out. Okay, we get the point, he is a yucky, yucky man. Having Tosako
kept there without any arms or legs was great the first five times we saw him,
but give it a rest. Overselling the same old gore is counterproductive and
numbs the audience so that they don't care about what they see. Am I suppose
to be impressed that your actors are willing to walk around with all these
gooey appliances on their bodies? Keeping us off balance is vital in these
types of movies that rely on their visual shocks more than any type of story
that makes sense. You can't achieve that if I'm wondering why I have to sit
through Tosako's twin fight the gang and then watch gang members try to kill
each other. It's supposed to be a film about a guy rotting physically and
spiritually. Showing his messed up mental state with a corresponding physical
manifestation is an alright idea. Setting it in a nightmare world of people
subjecting themselves and others to a variety of physical depravities puts a
further spin on things that could make your film memorable and stand out, but
you still need to have the discipline to stay the course. Jettison the
annoying and distracting dual plot device and concentrate on Sieko's descent
into rotted out madness. We don't need or care about Nubata or Tosako's twin.
A more linear story would have made the picture a lot stronger. You don't
always
need that, but if you're already writing off most of the viewing public with
the gallons of gore and odd subject matter, the rest of us that stick around
would appreciate being rewarded with some kind of story with a little focus.
Sieko could have been a great and twisted movie freak if the film dealt more
with his situation instead of checking in on him now and again. With the
incompetent storytelling, it turns out that the gore and
body parts aren't the only messy thing about Organ. You should also note that you get an extended preview of Organ 2 (has that ever come out?) on the DVD and it looks even worse than this.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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