Takashi Miike

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Starting this because the Horror thread got kind of off-topic. Anyway, discuss the awesome Japanese director with an amazingly large and sometimes controversial output!

Here are some posts from the other topic that lead into this one:

Is Ichi the Killer also a Japanese horror film? I've seen it labeled as such, though some people tell me that its not really a horror movie, though I do generally hear that its good, so I might check that film out as well, regardless of its genre. All that I know is that it has to do with the Yakuza and some psychopathic killer.

Ichi The Killer is one of my favorite movies of all time (feel free to draw whatever conclusions about me you want to from that statement), but I wouldn't call it a horror film at all. It has a couple of fairly disturbing scenes involving torture and rape, but honestly, it's more of a really fucked up Yakuza comedy than anything else. The uncut version is extremely gory; don't bother with the R rated cut.

I must warn you that most of Miike's "horror" films are similarly mislabeled. Gozu is more of a David Lynch tribute piece than anything, Audition is basically a romantic drama with a grotesque twist near the end, and anyone who refers to Happiness Of The Katakuris as a horror film has clearly never seen it. All three of these titles are brilliant, though, and I highly recommend them. His Masters of Horror episode, Imprint, is an amazing accomplishment on the horror front, though. Check it out.

I actually have seen Audition, though it was a long time ago. The ending is definitely a shocker but other than that its not really a horror film at all. In fact what makes the ending shocking is how the movie plays out like a romance up until the last 10-20 minutes. Though, I will say that those last 10-20 minutes are some of the most disturbing that I've personally ever seen in a film, and its usually really hard to make me ever find anything disturbing.

I'll definitely keep an eye out for the other films that you mentioned, though. I guess part of my sudden interest in J-Horror is how dry the horror genre well is here for modern American horror flicks, and while there are some good and classic ones that I haven't seen yet, I've already seen a number of good ones so I was running out of stuff to watch.

It's worth noting that Audition is one of my least favorite Miike films that I've seen (somewhere around 20, including ones that have never been officially released outside of Japan); I definitely liked it more than Izo, though. If you're interested in his work, I recommend checking out Ichi, Happiness of the Katakuris, The Bird People In China, The Black Society Trilogy, and his remake of 13 Assassins. Another great one is The Guys From Paradise, but it's pretty damn hard to find.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Heh, That's a ton more recommendations, but I'll try my best to find what I can of them. I may have to see if I can find some of the harder to find titles online, but some of those movies are well known enough among film buffs to be easily available if I look for them. I'll stick to your J-Horror recommendations first, and then move onto Miike's stuff specifically.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Now if only the library near here had more than one Miike film...

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Yeah, I had to use Netflix and torrents to watch most of his films. Ichi the Killer, Audition, and Imprint are all available on the Instant Watch thing. They used to have Gozu, too, but they removed it. Thankfully they do have a ton of his DVDs available, but we haven't paid for that part of the service in over a year.

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THIS SOUNDS AMAZING

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Now, this actually sounds like an INTERESTING horror movie (or if its not a horror movie than psychological thriller or whatever you want to call it). That's actually a REALLY good idea, and it really has me interested. I'll definitely keep my eye out for this film. Since it'll be a mainstream Japanese movie there's a good chance that we can get it licensed here, and even if not it should be easy to get through imports (though then I'd need to find subtitles for it separately).

[gunswordfist]

he starred in the satoshi movie that had cg blood, right? that was a crime.