YAKUZA APOCALYPSE 2015, dir. Takashi Miike
There’s some funky stuff going on in this Takashi Miike jam.
The easy way to summarize it would probably be “vampire yakuza” but that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. This is one of those batshit Japanese films that aggressively defies categorization. It’s not quite bugnuts goofy like the Sion Sono movies, nor is it the melancholic black comedy of Takeshi Kitano. It’s kind of everything and nothing at once, so busy blowing you away with its unrelenting, anarchic craziness that there’s no room to use drama for anything other than a beat change. In short, it’s one of those Miike films, like ICHI THE KILLER or HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS, which, as Morpheus said, you cannot be told what it is. “You have to see it for yourself.”
The story itself is fairly simple. The film opens with a narrator saying, “Once, to be a man meant to be a Yakuza.” We see the truth of that in this town, where the tattooed gangsters are running the streets, and the boss is a beloved, generous figure among the townspeople. Then, an English-speaking priest with a coffin strapped to his back and his martial-arts-adept comrade (played by THE RAID’s Yahan Ruhian) show up into town, and decapitate the boss in front of this lieutenant, Kageyama. Kageyama fails to stop the pair, but while he’s holding his boss’s severed head, it suddenly reanimates and takes a chomp out of his jugular. He quickly starts thirsting for blood and picks up on the fact that he’s hominis nocturna, but he can’t control himself and starts biting and turning other folks en masse. Before you know it, the vampire yakuza, the normal yakuza, and the “syndicate” that the boss’ killers work for are fighting in the streets for the soul of the town. And then a dude in a frog suit shows up.
I could not possibly convey the various characters, gags, and fight scenes with any sort of obvious connective tissue. There’s a vertical double-barreled vampire-killing lightning gun. There’s a character whose ears occasionally explode with volcanos of pus. There’s a sort of punch-out Russian roulette, with two characters repeatedly socking each other in the face simultaneously until one of them gives up. There’s an underground group of gangsters who spend their days in a knitting class enduring physical abuse in an attempt to reform themselves. There’s a “Kappa” overlord with a beak and a turtle shell on his back who apparently smells like hot death. There’s an electric chair that Ruhian’s character straps himself into to juice himself up. And there’s a fairly serious love story involving Kageyama and a young lady who the boss saved from near-blinding assault.
Now, there might be some cultural/artistic reason why all these things are connected, or some sort of dramatic imperative for the guy in the frog suit (Kaeru-kun) to show up, kick ass, and kill people with his death stare. If there is, I couldn’t figure it out. All I could do was enjoy it for its superficial, kinetic pleasures, and have fun with the ride. And I did. I got a kick out of Ruhian dramatically holding the boss’ severed head as lightning crashed above like a scene out of HIGHLANDER. I laughed at Kareu-kun repeatedly losing his shit and beating up whatever was in his path, organic or otherwise. I was attentive as Kageyama’s “handler” explained the rules and tenets of vampirism on a pair of chalkboards riddled with crude illustrations, even if they didn’t really add up. I was tickled by the notion that the human yakuza hate the vampires because they are sucking the “civvies’” blood that they previously laid claim to. And when the hero and his adversaries face off at the end, I, and the rest of the audience was riled up, even if we likely wouldn’t give the same two answers as to why they were actually fighting.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, due to the level of silliness and the ensemble nature of the story, very few of the characters besides Kageyama get anything resembling actual development. Yahan Ruhian gets a cute intro, where he’s decked out in ‘90s-movie dork-out gear and glasses before throwing the vicious elbows and kicks he’s known for, but he settles into generic thug mode from then on out. There’s a female yakuza boss with a bizarre intensity and mysterious intentions, but two of her (male) underlings end up getting far more to do when she’s relegated to a punchline. Kageyama’s love interest is a total plot-point, and because her personality fails to register, his affection toward her ends up meaning nothing. It says a lot about this movie that the guy in the frog suit has the most charisma in the entire roster; sure enough, Kaeru-kun’s fast moves, crippling death stare, and of course, the hilarious suit itself add up to an iconic villain that has been the obvious mascot for the film. This is absolutely one of those films where the characters are as defined by their outfits than by anything they say or do, and maybe that distances the audience a little bit from the narrative, but it sure makes it easy to get a laugh by viciously killing any of them off.
Like films that sacrifice cohesion and character development for surprise and shock value, the film comes dreadfully close to outstaying its welcome, and I remember thinking that the film could’ve ended when it had about 15 minutes to go. But then, something else crazy happened, and it ends on such a ridiculous, crowd-pleasing note it’s hard to say it wasn’t worth the extra time. This will likely confound, and possibly even bore, most Western audiences, even with its crazy, close-shot martial arts battles and frequent gore-letting. But for those who love it when Miike, now a consummate, constantly-working professional, lets his freak flag fly—this is a great example.
YAKUZA APOCALYPSE is coming on October 9th.
