My initial and stronger reaction was: "What the heck was that?" My secondary reactions follows. And my tertiary is the wrap-up.
Japano-bizarro vertigo-fest filmed รก la Eraserhead and Night of the Living Dead and owing much to the Cronenberg-Romero-Lynch triad. Grainy, jerky off-centered, over-exposed and jumpy. The story a teratological blend of cyberpunk and self- and other- loathing rarely, if ever, seen this side of Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a dollop of the frigid and horrifying eroticism of Tennessee Williams in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. Then inflate it with the excesses of Cronenberg's Crash, Dead Ringers, and Naked Lunch.
What passes for a plot lumbers by mercifully undisturbed by such things as logic and sequence. And so the film speeds along like Koyannisqatsi on an overdose of caffeine and designer club drugs careening wildly from one oddity to another without ever pausing to smooth out wrinkles and attempt to make sense.
And in writing this I know I've told you nothing about the movie--and yet everything essential. Finally a film for hardcore fans of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.
In sum--far more unpleasant than the gestalt formed from blending all of the references above together and filming them in black and white. And weirdly interesting. Although only recommended for the hardcore Asian film fanatic or the collector of the odd and outré.
