Review: Yakuza Apocalypse

Hayato Ichihara plays a Yakuza #2, whose boss has been turned into a vampire, and the boss runs afoul of a gang of weirdos who kill him. These weirdos are a backpack-wearing assassin (Yayan Ruhian), a bizarro turtle/bird hybrid with hideous halitosis, and an English-speaking (ish) witch hunter with a small coffin on his back (Ryushin Tei). Before he dies, the boss bites Ichihara too, turning him into a vampire. He is forced to feed off the blood of others, and before long has turned a whole bunch of civilians into vampires, who now claim to be ‘Yakuza’. This causes a problem for the actual Yakuza, now headed by a woman (played by Reiko Takashima), who can no longer exploit the masses, who are now competitors. And then the supposed world’s greatest assassin (Masanori Mimoto) turns up…in a giant felt frog suit!

 

Completely insane, you won’t need to be told watching this bizarro 2015 action/horror-comedy from Japan that it’s a Takashi Miike flick. Sure, it’s comparatively mild in the sex and violence department to say, “Ichi the Killer”, but who other than Takashi Miike (“Audition”, “The Great Yokai War”) would give you a martial arts ‘boss fight’ where one of the participants is dressed in a giant frog suit? Oh yeah, it’s that kind of film. It’s kinda fun and watchable in a WTF sort of way, but the final martial arts battle featuring “The Raid” Indonesian bad arse Yayan Ruhian is so bad and deflating that it results in the film being just shy of getting a recommendation. It might seem like such a minor detail, but trust me, that just goes to show how bad that one fight is. It’s the main fight, the final ‘boss fight’, and since Mr. Ruhian is the main reason I was attracted to the film in the first place, I’ve gotta say I was completely disappointed in the end. Perhaps you’ll like the rest of the film well enough to forgive the final transgression, but as much as I enjoyed the build-up, it wasn’t exactly the director’s best and I just can’t get over how pissweak that final fight is. The best way I can describe it to you is that it’s like the martial arts showdown equivalent of a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors (Lizard, Spock?) and no fun at all.

 

Scripted by Yoshitaka Yamaguchi (writer-director of something called “Samurai Cat”), I also have to confess that I got lost from time to time working out who was who, so that didn’t help either. Still, it gives diminutive bad arse Yayan Ruhian essentially a lead villain role, and he acquits himself very well up until that final fight. Turning up about 20 minutes in wearing nerd glasses and a backpack, he makes an immediate, impactful impression as he rips a guy’s fucking head off. I mean, goddamn is this guy not to be fucked with or what? For a small guy he packs a mighty wallop, and you even get to hear him speak English from time to time. He’s not that bad at it, actually. Lead actor Hayato Ichihara is also really impressive in the martial arts department, I hope to see him in more films, preferably of the action variety.

 

The film starts in cheerfully bloody fashion that sets up expectations pretty well. It’s not one of Miike’s more extreme films from a sex/violence POV but it’s certainly not one for Grandma, not by a long shot. It’s also got a totally wacky sense of humour. The yakuza themselves are all a little bent and neurotic, but then Miike takes things the extra mile and a half by coming up with the clever idea that once the vampire bites a civilian, that civilian becomes ‘Yakuza’. The idea being that if everyone’s now a Yakuza, there will be no civilians for the ‘real’ Yakuza to exploit. That’s certainly an interesting (and funny) way to take down a crime syndicate, and I appreciated it because I’m not really a fan of the standard Asian gangster story. Miike don’t do standard, as is evidenced by the aforementioned boss fighter in the frog costume, who then takes the costume off before his big fight to reveal a ripped body…and another, smaller frog head. Now there’s a character I’d like to see in a “Mortal Kombat”-style fighting game. Before we get to that disappointing fight, the frog guy does get to perform some impressive martial arts, wield a baseball bat, and even brandish some nunchuks. Hilarious and weirdly cool at the same time. It’s the strangest thing, the film is at once funny, wacky, silly, morose and nihilistic. It’s certainly its own beast, you’ll never have seen anything like it, but when you find out that it’s a Takashi Miike film, the bizarro mix at least makes some sense. I suppose if you stripped away all of the gangster stuff it might slightly resemble the South Korean horror flick “Thirst”, but that’s still not a very good comparison. Meanwhile, don’t even get me started on the guy with the beak and turtle shell on his back. Even for Miike that’s strange.

 

Although not as extreme in violence or sex, this is bug fuck crazy stuff from the inimitable Takashi Miike. However, a thoroughly deflating final fight and some character/plot confusion hold it back from being anything more than an occasionally fun timewaster with a wacky sense of humour.

 

Rating: C+