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YAKUZA APOCALYPSE

Posted By Julius Kassendorf on November 9, 2015 in Reviews | 7 Responses

In the early 2000’s, prolific director Takeshi Miike bridged the gap from Japan to the United States with a rapid series of gonzo movies that seemed to defy genre. 1999’s Audition begins as a romantic comedy before it spirals into hallucinatory brutal horror that bested many American horror movies in its emotional brutality. 2001’s Ichi the Killer is a feuding yakuza film filtered through a dark comedy with horrific violence and an emotionally damaged center. 2002’s The Happiness of the Katakuris is a dark comedy horror musical and family drama centered around a cursed inn run by a tight-knit family. Miike’s primary identity in America was defined by his heightened sensibilities and his seemingly darkly comic creations.

Yakuza Apocalypse follows, self-consciously, in this trend. The ornate, constantly-changing, plot is impossible to grasp nevertheless summarize. It has something to do with a man who rose to the top of a Yakuza family through a The Raid: Redemption style slaughter, which he survives because he’s a vampire. Eventually, the altruistic boss, followed closely by a clueless sycophantic follower, Kagayama, is targeted by a pair of vampire hunters who seem to want to bring him back into the fold? And then there’s a kappa goblin and a demon and a prisoner knitting circle and…

Even though Yakuza Apocalypse is an original IP, the stream-of-consciousness plot of chaos feels like a whole manga series was poorly compressed into two hours, leaving little room for explanation or sanity. Factor in Takeshi Miike’s usual film-on-the-fly style and a budget seemingly low enough to make Lloyd Kaufman sympathetic, and Yakuza Apocalypse seems more like a pre-made cult movie than a film of gonzo genius. The bizarre elements that infiltrate and drive the plot have little rhyme or reason for their own existence, never fully justifying the film’s 2 hour running time.

Still, if a yakuza movie with furious martial arts, a kaiju monster, and a woman growing underwear-clad children in a garden seems like it might be up your alley, I can’t dissuade you from seeing the movie. This is a movie that still goes up to 11, and you never know what the hell is coming around the next corner (though, because it is Japan, there is a trigger warning for rape). For what it is, it’s damned entertaining, but it doesn’t have nearly the absurd poignancy (or even coherency) of Miike’s original cross-over hits.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged Black Comedy, Foreign, Japan, Takeshi Miike, Yakuza Apocalypse

About the Author

Julius Kassendorf

Julius Kassendorf is the founder of The-Solute, and previously founded The Other FIlms and Project Runaways in 2013. There, he dabbled in form within reviews to better textualize thought processes about the medium of film.

Previously, he has blogged at other, now-defunct, websites that you probably haven’t heard of, and had a boyfriend in Canada for many years. Julius resides in Seattle, where he enjoys the full life of the Seattle Film Community.

Julius’ commanding rule about film: Don’t Be Common. He believes the worst thing in the world is for a film to be like every other film, with a secondary crime of being a film with little to no ambition.

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