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Organ, 1996
"F*cking butterflies"
A police officer named Numata and his partner Tosaka infiltrate an organ harvesting operation run by a twisted brother/sister pair, and immediately blow their cover. Numata is injected with something strange by the sister, while Tosaka is abducted by the brother. Thrown off of the force, Numata is determined to find his lost partner.
As advertised, this film is indeed full of fluids.
While the movie does cross a certain threshold of grossness (Watch while eating lunch? No. Watch while repairing shattered ceramic toilet lid? Yes.), what makes it more than deserving of its place in this Hall of Infamy is its inability to do anything amazing with all of that goo and gore.
Am I about to go on record and say that this move could have used more fluids? Yes, yes I am.
I think I understand why this film was picked. There is a kind of sublime horror to be found in a well-crafted narrative, and there is an equally powerful horror to be found in the right kind of giddy incoherence. This movie splits the difference, ending up as an unpleasant muddle that doesn't satisfy on either front.
There are frustrating hints of what could have been. The premise alone is certainly weird enough, and the idea of Tosaka being slowly tortured and mutilated in the brother, Saeki's, back room is awful. There are also neat glimpses of weirdness, such as a sequence where Saeki, having just murdered a female student, has a vision of a large cocoon on his ceiling opening to reveal a mutant woman.
But every time the film threatens to get really interesting, it's like the brakes get tapped. The woman emerges from the cocoon hanging upside-down and I was like "That was dooooooope", and then she pulls a long caterpillar from her stomach and I was like "Yessssssss" . . . and then she spends like two minutes rubbing the caterpillar on her body, just in case we didn't pick up on the subtle nuances of the sequence.
The gore is similar. It just never ramps up. The effects aren't bad at all. But it's all on the same level for the whole film. These sort of pudding-textured patches on peoples' bodies that ooze a bit. I kept waiting for something really gnarly and it never delivers.
Kei Fujiwara, who co-starred in Tetsuo: The Iron Man wrote, directed, and starred in this film (playing the murderous sister). I probably enjoyed reading about the making of the film more than actually watching it. Fujiwara put together a theater group who raised the money for the film themselves and also did all of the technical aspects. Scenes were almost all done as single takes.
Weirdly, for how outlandish the film seems to want to be, there's a lot of content that feels almost cliche: the disgraced police officer, the siblings with emotional damage from an abusive mother, the grown Saeki as a teacher who preys on his attractive female students.
Being kind of boring is always a crime for a film, but being boring while putting unpleasant content like sexual assault or child abuse on screen is even worse. It generates negative vibes and then doesn't do anything with that energy.
Ultimately, this film made me think a bit of Matango only . . . goopier and 25 minutes longer, and without the corniness that makes Matango viable so-bad-it's-good entertainment.
As much as I'm bagging on the film, there was enough potential in certain moments that I'd be willing to watch more from Fujiwara.
Infamy:
1/2
Organ, 1996
"F*cking butterflies"
A police officer named Numata and his partner Tosaka infiltrate an organ harvesting operation run by a twisted brother/sister pair, and immediately blow their cover. Numata is injected with something strange by the sister, while Tosaka is abducted by the brother. Thrown off of the force, Numata is determined to find his lost partner.
As advertised, this film is indeed full of fluids.
While the movie does cross a certain threshold of grossness (Watch while eating lunch? No. Watch while repairing shattered ceramic toilet lid? Yes.), what makes it more than deserving of its place in this Hall of Infamy is its inability to do anything amazing with all of that goo and gore.
Am I about to go on record and say that this move could have used more fluids? Yes, yes I am.
I think I understand why this film was picked. There is a kind of sublime horror to be found in a well-crafted narrative, and there is an equally powerful horror to be found in the right kind of giddy incoherence. This movie splits the difference, ending up as an unpleasant muddle that doesn't satisfy on either front.
There are frustrating hints of what could have been. The premise alone is certainly weird enough, and the idea of Tosaka being slowly tortured and mutilated in the brother, Saeki's, back room is awful. There are also neat glimpses of weirdness, such as a sequence where Saeki, having just murdered a female student, has a vision of a large cocoon on his ceiling opening to reveal a mutant woman.
But every time the film threatens to get really interesting, it's like the brakes get tapped. The woman emerges from the cocoon hanging upside-down and I was like "That was dooooooope", and then she pulls a long caterpillar from her stomach and I was like "Yessssssss" . . . and then she spends like two minutes rubbing the caterpillar on her body, just in case we didn't pick up on the subtle nuances of the sequence.
The gore is similar. It just never ramps up. The effects aren't bad at all. But it's all on the same level for the whole film. These sort of pudding-textured patches on peoples' bodies that ooze a bit. I kept waiting for something really gnarly and it never delivers.
Kei Fujiwara, who co-starred in Tetsuo: The Iron Man wrote, directed, and starred in this film (playing the murderous sister). I probably enjoyed reading about the making of the film more than actually watching it. Fujiwara put together a theater group who raised the money for the film themselves and also did all of the technical aspects. Scenes were almost all done as single takes.
Weirdly, for how outlandish the film seems to want to be, there's a lot of content that feels almost cliche: the disgraced police officer, the siblings with emotional damage from an abusive mother, the grown Saeki as a teacher who preys on his attractive female students.
Being kind of boring is always a crime for a film, but being boring while putting unpleasant content like sexual assault or child abuse on screen is even worse. It generates negative vibes and then doesn't do anything with that energy.
Ultimately, this film made me think a bit of Matango only . . . goopier and 25 minutes longer, and without the corniness that makes Matango viable so-bad-it's-good entertainment.
As much as I'm bagging on the film, there was enough potential in certain moments that I'd be willing to watch more from Fujiwara.
Infamy:
1/2