Tokyo Gore Police (2008)

 "Tokyo Police Corporation will give us more plentiful lives..."

Two years after the delightfully depraved Machine Girl, Yoshihiro Nishimura returns with this hilariously blood-soaked masterpiece of an over-the-top gore fest that has a point to it, as dystopias often do.

The film is making no attempt to hide the strong influence of RoboCop- we even have similar delightfully twisted TV adverts- in its Tokyo of the near future where the privatised police force have the silhouette of samurai and are a law unto themselves. There's a lot of savage satire of modern Japan, from corporate culture to sexual harrassment on the bullet train.

There's a lot of grand guignol here. The gore is neither realistic nor intended to be, which actually makes the film feel in less bad taste and less challenging for the squeamish, but there's no denying that it's over the top and pretty much as far as you can go. This future Tokyo is plagued by mutant "engineers", who, when wounded, sprout grotesque mutations from the injured body part... and yes, we see these for all sorts of body parts. Yes, including those ones.

The film is cleverer than it may seem, though. As soon as we get the Key Man's big, over-the-top supervillain origin story we're reminded that he's just a distraction, and that the true enemy is unaccountable power in the shape of police privitisation and corruption. The hero, Ruka, is an honest, good cop, but by the end of the film we realise she's the only police officer in the city who isn't corrupt and sadistic. In hindsight, the fact that the police chief keeps a limbless, disfigured gimp girl as a slave may offer a bit of a clue that these may not be the good guys.

This film is a masterpiece, as metatextual as it is gory, with the script cleverly making explicit that the final scenes are literally Ruka vs. a sequence of end of level bosses. This film very much is the gore fest of reputation, but it's so much more than that.

Audition (1999)

“All words are lies. Pain doesn't lie."

This is a famously disturbing horror film that it’s taken me twenty years to see (1999 being twenty years ago is wrong on all sorts of levels) and it’s well worth it. A sweet if gently misogynistic drama for most of its length, the film suddenly piles on the torture towards the end as all the unthinking misogyny of the earlier scenes gets its extremely painful comeuppance. This is an interesting film to see in the wake of #MeToo.

The plot is simple; lonely widower Aoyama wants a new wife, the subtext being that he wants her to do all the traditional feminine jobs of looking after him and leaving him just to work, while needing to be accomplished herself. At a friend’s suggestion he takes part in a series of auditions for a part in a film which never happens, at which the women are asked a series of bizarre and impertinent questions by their male interlocutors.

Aside from the auditions themselves, though, the misogyny is constant but subtle as Aoyama settles on Asami, a mysterious woman whose true past and true proclivities and abused past are hidden behind an exterior that seems to be quite passive and traditionally feminine. And then she disappears, things are not quite right, the direction turns very unnerving and adopts the grammar of the horror film, and the torture begins. A haunting and highly effective film with a serious point, and the harsh revenge of the abused and objectified woman. Superb, and Eihi Shiina is magnificently disturbing.