Review: YAKUZA APOCALYPSE (2015)

YAKUZA APOCALYPSE is exactly what you'd expect from prolific Japanese auteur, Takishi Miike, which is to say that it's a bunch of shit that you can't possibly expect. I love Miike because the guy just seems to do whatever the fuck he wants to do, like a filmmaking rōnin. A typical Miike movie night can feature highlights like a dick-headed robot, a dead hooker in a kiddie pool full of poo, and Quentin Tarantino eating an egg that he cut out of a snake that he shot out of a hawk's talons.

Miike has 99 directing credits to his name on IMDb, and that's only since 1991. That's crazy. To put that in perspective, Woody Allen, who's considered to be one of America's most prolific directors, only has 30 directing credits from that same window ('91-today). Granted, Allen is also a writer, penning the screenplays for many of his own films, and others', but still; what we would normally consider to be a prolific body of work looks like Kubrick's filmography compared to what Miike's been doing. It's not simply a matter of quantity over quality, either, Miike having directed movies like 13 ASSASSINS, which received near universal acclaim (the film currently holds a 96% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes), and would have probably won Oscars if the Academy weren't so dismissive of world cinema and generally shitty. Master Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa, was only ever nominated for one Oscar, despite the fact that he directed 7 of IMDb's Top 250, so there's probably no hope for Miike. Fortunately, though, Miike's work has garnered him a cult following, and YAKUZA APOCALYPSE will undoubtedly prove to be a memorably bonkers night in for those in the know, and if you don't know, now you know.

I'll do my best to piece together the story here, but to be honest, I'm not sure what the fuck is going on. There's a small-town yakuza boss/vampire who uses his supernatural powers to crush his local rivals. He's a good guy overall, though, ensuring that his men follow a strict code of conduct when it comes to dealing with civilians. Under no circumstance are they to be harmed, and this despite the fact that they're a viable source of nourishment for the boss. Moreover, we're told that civilian blood is actually better for him than yakuza blood, underscoring the boss' honor in abstaining from it. Honor is a reoccurring theme throughout most of Miike's films, but YAKUZA APOCALYPSE presents an interesting dilemma in its wedding of the vampire and yakuza genres, which sees a yakuza vampire's honor preserved only at the cost of his well-being. Granted, this isn't a new moral quandary. Edward Cullen found honor in loving Bella and abstaining from tearing open her neck and drinking her blood through a curly straw—he only tears through her iron vampire uterus to deliver their baby, you know, so I hear... I guess what makes the dilemma interesting in YAKUZA APOCALYPSE is that, being a yakuza, the boss doesn't have to subsist on rabbits and deer and shit, like Edward does. He's an honorable guy, sure, but being a yakuza, he's used to skirting the law. To quote the moral philosopher, Fat Tony, "...is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?" The boss doesn't think so, taking things one step further than Jean Valjean by keeping a basement full of half-naked, non-civilian men feverishly knitting and awaiting the moment that one of them is chosen to satisfy his thirst.

Then there's Kagayama, played by Hayato Ichihara, who is an ambitious young yakuza soldier held back by his sensitive skin, which keeps him from getting one of those cool Japanese tattoos and earning the respect of his peers. The boss likes Kagayama, though, and even brings him to his favorite bar, which is actually just a front for the aforementioned basement full of half-naked men. The bartender pours Kagayama a glass of blood and the kid downs the whole thing, pukes, then kills a second round like a champ. This seems to impress the boss, who makes Kagayama his yakuza vampire successor after an otaku/assassin, played by Yayan "Mad Dog" Ruhian (MERANTAU, THE RAID: REDEMPTION, THE RAID 2) rips his head off. Apparently the boss used to belong to an international crime syndicate, and when he refused to be brought back into the fold, they sent Mad Dog and a VAMPIRE HUNTER D wannabe with Katt Williams hair after him.

Kagayama finds the boss' disembodied head in an alley, but like most disembodied heads in Miike movies, it's still alive, and pricks his neck with a weird tentacle thing, because Japan, infecting him with the yakuza vampire disease. I keep saying "yakuza vampire" because we're not talking about the run-of-the-mill, sexy, brooding sort. No, when a yakuza vampire bites you, you become a total bad-ass, regardless of who you once were; in one scene, we see some infected cops gambling, drinking, and not giving a shit that everything's gone to hell. Unfortunately Kagayama doesn't show the self-restraint his boss did—in his defense, I'd probably want to stay away from the weird basement situation, too. He immediately pricks someone, who then pricks someone else, and so on, until almost everyone in town is yakuza vampire. The only people that aren't infected are a few regular yakuza and members of the international crime syndicate, including a kappa, a creature from Japanese folklore and that one episode of ARTHUR. The kappa in YAKUZA APOCALYPSE has a teardrop tattoo, though, so you know he's hard.

There's also Kaeru-kun, "the modern monster" and "world's toughest terrorist," who—and I shit you not—is a guy in a felt frog costume who absolutely destroys people with dazzlingly choreographed hand-to-hand, and, occasionally, baseball bat-to-face moves (after pacing around guys seated at a table, like De Niro in THE UNTOUCHABLES). He also has a crazy finisher, "the bulging eye stare down," which is a Hypnotoad-esque gaze that makes people cross their arms and swing side to side like a human metronome, until they die? I don't know, they never really explain it. I have to admit, having this crappy high school mascot-looking guy with magical powers and Iko Uwais-level fighting skills sort of comes across as Miike being weird for the sake of being weird, whereas his weirdness used to serve a real purpose, like in AUDITION, where the fucked-up bits with the sack and the body parts seem to come out of nowhere, disturbing us like a heavy stone hitting a still pond. Maybe he's not the filmmaking rōnin that he once was, and now serves audiences' ever-increasing expectation that he deliver a film more gonzo than his last. Or maybe he's just descending into complete madness. Don't get me wrong, I love the in-your-face insanity of a frog deflecting minigun fire with spinning nunchaku and riding a grenade explosion into the sky to fall back down and deliver a head-splitting karate chop. I just wonder if Miike will ever return to the subtly strange (or, at least, well-timed explosion of strange) approach, characteristic of his earlier and, in my opinion, better films, like AUDITION and GOZU.

So, everyone in town is going berserk and the leader of the international crime syndicate, this woman with a constant, audible drip inside her head that eventually develops into an earwax geyser, tries to go the HUNGER GAMES route and use food as a means of control. Yakuza vampires feed on human blood, though, so she starts growing civilians, an operation that we're given some insight into through a TELETUBBIES bit as it might be envisioned by someone who drops slightly more acid than the people who make TELETUBBIES.

Things don't really pan out, though, and the final fourth of the film is basically a knock-down-drag-out brawl between a bunch of weirdos that eventually results in Frogger the Destructor being summoned from deep within a volcano to go Toho Gojira on intentionally fake-looking miniatures' asses—it's just as ridiculous and wonderful as it sounds.

In the end, I'd recommend YAKUZA APOCALYPSE to anyone looking to watch something different. Just when you think you have a handle on things, Miike tosses in some other absurd character or scenario that will knock you for a loop. Martial arts and action movie enthusiasts will find a lot to like here, too, as YAKUZA APOCALYPSE delivers the same sort of frenzied, but coherently shot and edited action seen in 13 ASSASSINS. This is largely owing to Ruhian, Ichihara, and whoever's in that frog costume (I honestly can't find anyone credited anywhere), who are all fantastic, turning in awe-inspiring physical performances, the likes of which you just don't see in Hollywood action films, and allowing Miike to roll on the pandemonium without needing to use unintelligible fast cutting to hide doubles. That the fights are coherently shot and edited doesn't make them any less ridiculous, though: we see shit like a little kid fly through the air while brandishing an ax, like Matthew McConaughey in REIGN OF FIRE, and Kaeru-kun, who, to reiterate, is a fucking frog, get run over by a dekotora, a bizarre type of Japanese truck that looks like a casino on wheels—Japanese truck culture having apparently evolved beyond humble truck nuts.