Dope Director: Yoshihiro Nishimura (part 2)

Yoshihiro Nishimura, one of the young leaders of this nascent Japanese nouveau body-horror movement (which includes frequent collaborator Noboru Iguchi and action/stunt wizard Tak Sakaguchi), has an extensive background in SFX and SFX makeup. This is clear to anyone who saw Tokyo Gore Police with me at the IFC Center that night, in its world premiere at NYAFF 2008. But when I revisited my catalogue of J-Horror (both the "yurei" stuff like Juon by Takashi Shimizu and the deviant family-drama oeuvre of Sion Sono), I realized Nishimura's bloody thumbprint was everywhere. He started his own SFX company, 西村映造／Nishimura Eizo (shortened to Nishi-Zo, and w/ the wildly effective logo of a blood-drenched "西", the 1st character in Nishimura's last name, which I've seen as a t-shirt and I WANT ONE), back in 2005, w/ the tagline "special molding, special makeup, gore effect". That's his specialty.
For instance: the tidal wave of blood a few minutes into Sono's controversial 自殺サークル/Suicide Club — the notorious, cringe-inducing 'money shot' — plus the skin-carvings and whatnot, much of that is thanks to Nishimura. He collaborated in Sono's loose followup, the (in my opinion superior) 紀子の食卓/Noriko's Dinner Table and other Sono films (the darkly comedic エクステ/Exte w/ Chiaki Kuriyama, had a definite Nishimura undercurrent), and even the mostly restrained violence in Sono's opus 愛のむきだし/Love Exposure involves Nishimura's blood-letting. Of note: none of these aforementioned titles have that cherry sno-cone blood and gore I detailed in my previous post on Nishimura. Sono's style (even in Exte) is far more realistic, and Nishimura can adjust as appropriate.


Throw him together w/ the irreverence of Iguchi and Sakaguchi, though, and he shines. I caught Iguchi's 片腕マシンガール/The Machine Girl straight after seeing Tokyo Gore Police and learning Nishimura had a role in it (plus the cover art of Minase Yashiro w/ her slightly, ahem, modified school uniform, hoisting a badass gatling gun attached to her severed left arm, against a hellfire sky, had me sold. The mix of deep family ties w/ veins of feudal Japanese culture (here this ninja/Yakuza confab) and off-kilter dialogue (it helps if you understand Japanese, but the conversations are VERY funny in Noguchi's films) touched on a bunch of recurrent, typical Noguchi elements, and the gore (shuriken to the face, sawing people in half, and of course Yashiro's gatling arm) were the charmed combo of these two directors. Think Shinya Tsukamoto's Testuo, only less artsy and eons more splatter, in a schlocky, profane way.


Then I heard about 吸血少女対少女フランケン/Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl, Nishimura's awesomely titled new film, from a trailer posted on Nippon Cinema. If Tokyo Gore Police's trailer had me going, THIS one made me almost wet myself, metaphorically speaking. The music sounded like proper Quentin Tarentino, and then the arterial spray begins, w/ new star (and gravure idol) Yukie Kawamura (as Monomi, in schoolgirl uniform, natch) dancing in front of a salaryman's spouting jugular like he's a lawn sprinkler on a hot summer's day and she's attempting to cool off. 0:30 in and she lunges at the camera, fangs out, we get the absurd film title, and then the gore guru takes it even further. Like: one girl's skeleton pops out top her head, another girl's face peels off like an apple skin, Keiko the Frankenstein Girl (Eri Otoguro) leaps in, wielding massive matte knives, another girl's head bursts (the camera lens is continually soaked in saturated red fluid) and then, back to the jugular-sprinkler scene, to a chorus of trumpets, Monomi opens her mouth wide and lets the bloodspray wash allllllll over her. She eyes a skull (w/ eyes still in it) and smiles so sweetly that I almost forgot she 1) pulled the skull through a girl's head and 2) there's perpetual blood-spurting all around her. And Keiko is supposed to be the antagonist??


Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl is ostensibly a high-school romantic feud, b/w new student Monomi and Keiko, leader of the Gothic Lolitas, the trendy girls, as they both liked the sleepy heartthrob Mizushima (Takumi Saito, who goes on to star as another despicable heartthrob in Noguchi's Robogeisha, the bastard). Nishimura hyperbolized the Japanese high-school setting and subcultures w/ the garish Ganguro girls (who must be taken w/ an enormous grain of salt, and they're still barely watchable) and the Lolitas. Plus, there was a wrist-cutting group, extended from a commercial in Tokyo Gore Police to a club at this twisted high-school, which even included some sort of slash-off rally (Sayako Nakoshi, 'penis-nose girl' from Tokyo Gore Police, loses, slicing completely through her forearm). Kanji Tsuda (a prevalent nervy figure in contemporary Japanese cinema, like Steve Bucemi but younger and less profane) plays Keiko's father, who of course is a mad scientist a la Victor Frankenstein, only he dons this Kabuki garb before performing his gruesome wetwork. Jiji Bu (Tokyo Gore Police's medical examiner) returns as groundskeeper Igor, which I fear has become his typecast character, though he does it so well. And to really push it over the top, plus synthesizing it w/ Nishimura's previous work, Eihi Shiina cameos as Monami's mom. We learn quite quickly that Keiko is a back-stabbing (no pun) bitch, out to ruin Monami and win Mizushima over. And though Monami is, ahem, exceedingly violent in full vampiric mode (the face-peel and arterial spray are both her doing), she is an incredibly empathetic and cute character. Her dialogue w/ Mizushima in particular, saying "ピンポン！" (sounds like "Ping Pong!" but means "bingo!") to one of his assertions, is signature girlishness. When Keiko becomes Frankenstein Girl, thanks to her dad, outfitted w/ Gaguro girl legs (for stamina and speed) and wrist-cutter girl arms (endurance and weaponry), and she and Monami have it out atop Tokyo Tower, I found myself thinking: 'this is even more out-there than Tokyo Gore Police. Nishimura's done it.'


I saw the other Nishimura-contributing films at the 2009 NYAFF. Takanori Tsujimoto's duet Hard Revenge Milly and Hard Revenge Milly: Bloody Battle (think Luc Besson's Nikita, only ultraviolent and shot mostly in parking garages) screened back-to-back (the only way, IMO, to see 'em), w/ Nishimura's obvious makeup SFX, straight after Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl, and by then my brain had melted from all the gore. And b/c I couldn't help myself, I caught Kengo Kaji's ero-guro サムライプリンセス 外道姫/Samurai Princess (the extra characters in the Japanese title translate to roughly "demon woman") as well, which was replete w/ blood geysers (and again featured that weird melding of genres in alternate-universe feudal Japan). So what's next after becoming a Nishimura fanatic? Answer: a proponent. One who follows his oeuvre and professes it to others, enlightening them to the dopeness found amid the ruined bodies and bloodspray. Viewing a Nishimura production is akin to riding the "Twilight Zone Tower of Terror" at Walt Disney World: you know the free-fall is coming and when it happens you gasp and scream with a delighted terror, realizing deep w/in your subconscious that you're about to be dropped a second time. It's this nervous, giddy anticipation of that SECOND DROP that is most like a Nishimura film.


Iguchi's feudal mashup Robogeisha screened as just a teaser trailer at the 2009 NYAFF. In it we see Nishimura's droll cameo, as a customer of lead actress (and gravure idol) Aya Kiguchi's (he swiftly receives a blade to the jaw). Robogeisha's belated NY premiere came earlier this month (http://subwaycinemanews.com/archives/925) at Japan Society, where the Subway Cinema crew announced some of the upcoming titles to this year's NYAFF/Japan Cuts. Two very particularly awesome things (amid many, many awesome things) occurred here: 1) Nishimura's short film 吸血少女フランケン/Vampire Frankenstein Girl, a spin-off of...well, you know and 2) the trailer for 戦闘少女/Mutant Girls Squad, the combo Nishimura/Iguchi/Sakaguchi feature that is like a very cruel, very bizarro all-girl "X-Men", kind of, and is the centerpiece presentation of the 2010 NYAFF (last year's centerpiece was Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl). I've little to go on thus far regarding the latter, except w/ three directors we can expect an ensemble cast from their previous films (Kanji Tsuda already features rather skittishly in the trailer). And you KNOW I'm going to see it at the NYAFF. Vampire Frankenstein Girl felt more in Tokyo Gore Police's near-future Tokyo, a neon-drenched, nearly dialogueless 15-minute hand-held short, w/ Tsugumi Nagasawa ('croc-girl' from Tokyo Gore Police) as the titular character. Though she wore a Monami-style sailor suit, Nagasawa styled it more like a Kegadol ("injured idol", eyepatch and bandage fetish) and seemed uncomfortable w/ her role in life as a vampire. In her soliloquy at the beginning, she vowed to only target violent cases, like this pink-haired weirdo kidnapping and mutilating girls. His target? Two Ganguro girls and one wrist-cutter girl (Sayako Nakoshi), like they came straiiight from Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl. The pervert is also some sort of biomechanics wizard (or more appropriately, an "Engineer", like from Tokyo Gore Police), attacking the girls and hacking off various limbs. Nagasawa drops in to obliterate the pervert, like an afterthought, and is mauled by the now composite Ganguro/wrist-cutter. One highly-stylized fight scene and Nagasawa leaps through the torso of the Frankenstein Girl, lodging midway through. And so we have the titular character, fully realized, Vampire Frankenstein Girl, out to assassinate societal perverts. And as messed up as that image may be, by the credits role Nagasawa looks pretty pleased w/ herself.

Dope Director: Yoshihiro Nishimura (part 1)

Subway Cinema's announcements for this year's NYAFF are rolling in, and w/ the excellent news of the inclusion of Mutant Girls Squad, the madcap collaboration b/w directors Yoshihiro Nishimura, Noboru Iguchi and Tak Sakaguchi — apparently conceived over one very drunken night in NYC at last year's festival, though I could see such a collaboration as fated, in the stars — it is my duty to inform on the absolute dopeness of these directors and this fascinatingly violent underworld of extreme Japanese cinema.
There is a renowned, or notorious, contingent of directors called "The Splat Pack", including Eli Roth and James Wan, who, since 2002, have embodied this hellishly violent torture-porn movement where an MPAA 'R' rating is like the low end of the spectrum. I marginally compare this w/ New French Extremity, which is more blurredly demarcated and contains such transgressive (yet, in many instances, critically acclaimed) features as Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-moi and Pascal Laugier's Martyrs, though the greater sweep of this movement (and its other European peers), unlike "The Splat Pack" is broader than 'just' torture-porn.
So trust me when I write that there's a global market for extreme films (just check the power of Tom Six's The Human Centipede (First Sequence) — that such a feature could even exist in certain mainstream circulation, let alone the multiple sequels to Saw and Hostel, is evidence in itself). And Nishimura's oeuvre is decidedly extremely violent, but it's totally NOT torture-porn. His features don't have the elaborate budgets of "The Splat Pack", nor, I believe, would he go the torture-porn, super-realist route if he had the budget. Let me break this down for you: Nishimura's oeuvre is body-shock horror (splatterpunk a la David Cronenberg), laced w/ requisite Japanese motifs (the schoolgirl, the samurai), and it's incredibly dope. Stay with me on this!


My first exposure to Nishimura was Tokyo Gore Police (his first solo feature film after a string of collaborations, including w/ Iguchi and Sakaguchi, where Nishimura added SFX — geysers of blood and gore — to their respective films), which screened at the 2008 NYAFF. Oh it looked fierce, I mean "gore" is its middle name! (actually, the title, 東京残酷警察, directly translates to something like "Tokyo Brutality Police", which is incredibly effective for the angle of the film, but of that later) More precisely, I saw an extended trailer of Tokyo Gore Police on Twitch ahead of the festival. That he'd picked Eihi Shiina (notoriously of Takashi Miike's Audition, which remains one of the scariest films I've ever seen, and undoubtedly ever will see) as the lead for Tokyo Gore Police was reason enough to hook my attention. Her onscreen presence as Asami in Audition was so singular, so...lasting, well, I wondered what she would be like in another film, and if she could effectively dispel that Asami aura. The Tokyo Gore Police trailer opened that door.
Slow-building industrial techno soundtrack. Shots of Shiina (as character Ruka) driving a modded squad car through neon-drenched new-future Tokyo's streets at night, cut w/ shots of gore straight out of Return of the Living Dead. Then came the blood. The appearance of blood in Nishimura's world is signature and greatly contributes to this unrealism. Blood looks like diluted cherry sno-cone syrup, and when it comes it geysers, showers, spurts in all directions like an open fireplug in summertime. The camera-lens on the trailer was soaked in this blood spraying from either a woman's or a long-haired man's (I couldn't place the gender in this non-sequential shot) head. A bondage club scene, replete w/ rubber-suited characters and grotesquely modified girls. Then Ruka in some sort of modified kimono (as in, super-short) in a swordfight with a black-cloaked man, perfectly in synch w/ the soundtrack. Then a car-crash through a pile of cadaver limbs, again a brilliant knock to the realism quotient while echoing '80s zombie films. Then the title screen — Tokyo Gore Police — and I'm left wondering 'what in the hell just happened?'. It was obviously ultraviolent, but in an almost comedically extreme way, like live-action "Itchy and Scratchy" only more-so and more Japanese. Like the director wasn't even trying to get near the ballpark of believability. But what kind of story could rest on such a coked-up splatter film? Like I wrote before: I was hooked. I had to see it.
I doubt I was the only one at the IFC Center that night who was surprised that Nishimura created not only a solvent plot but also a rather emotive back-story for Tokyo Gore Police. Shiina's character, Ruka, the lead "Engineer Hunter" (these twisted, bloodthirsty, genetically-modified humans) was a self-harmer, a cutter. Her family life, shown in flashback, seemed to be both loving and painful, as her mother tried to commit suicide on Ruka's birthday. Her father, a clean-cut Keisuke Horibe (who I knew for his thuggish, misfit roles in Katsuhito Ishii's Sharkskin Man and Peach-Hip Girl and Party 7), was a police officer, Ruka's role model and an upstanding figure for civic duty. He was murdered in front of Ruka's eyes — which we later learn was like a double-cross — and that propelled her to join the police force. By this point, the Tokyo Police Force is like this all-invasive Shogun-slash-SWAT brigade, supposedly protecting the citizens from the onset of these "engineers", who were apparently behind Ruka's father's murder. And w/ the impetus for Ruka joining the force, Nishimura cuts loose.


The first few minutes of Tokyo Gore Police are major-intense for first-timers to this particular realm of extremism. The unhinged juxtaposition of Ruka, sitting in her squad car and slashing her wrist, against shots of this snarling violent tumbleweed (amazingly cameo'd by Tak Sakaguchi), wielding a gore-soaked chainsaw in sped-up animation, is enough to separate the hardcore from the not. And that's not to say Nishimura makes it any easier on us once the action settles down (no way, many of his gems, like the exploding head, leg-geysers, and acidic breast-milk, show up in this film). But trust me, once the balletic choreographed action b/w Ruka and this crazed engineer begins (courtesy of action/stunt guru Sakaguchi), particularly the point where the engineer grows a meat-and-bone chainsaw from a truncated limb (like the combination nightmare of early William Gibson w/ Darren Lynn Bousman) and the two go at it in a full-on chainsaw fight — like 10 minutes into the film, a chainsaw fight!! — then we're cruising. And then Ruka wields TWO chainsaws, re-appropriating the engineer's fashioned limb, carving the baddie up ice-sculpture style in slo-mo, blood splashing in all directions as the music crescendos and she strikes a pose.
The world of "Tokyo Gore Police" dwells mostly at night, in a Chiba City-like neon Tokyo, captured by Nishimura's saturated-color lens. And besides the closet-sized bar, where Ruka confides w/ her fast-friend bartender, played by Ikuko Sawada, most of its locations are discomfiting alien. Police HQ resembles an empty parking garage, the setting for Ruka's surreal birthday party, surrounded by the hulking, armored chief (Shun Sugata, rasping through a speaker on his throat to offset his character's ruined larynx), the grotesque "Igor"-like medical examiner (Jiji Bu, a fixture in Nishimura's world), and a bunch of salacious-looking dudes (who I'll bet wouldn't dare lay a finger on Ruka, knowing her penchant for swift retribution). The only other woman in this motley group is the Chief's "pet gimp",  (pole dancer and frequent collab Cay Izumi, who's a tengu in Iguchi's Robogeisha), rubber-masked and -suited and plodding along on her limbless stubs, until the Chief removes her mask so we see her prismatic hair and pierced tongue before she begins pleasuring him. The gimp takes on Ruka in a wild fight-scene near the end, again thanks to Sakaguchi, where she's outfitted w/ katanas for limbs and coked up on stimulants, careening off the concrete walls and pirouetting at Ruka like a kinetic Ray Caesar creation. Sakaguchi also contributed the swordplay scene b/w Ruka (bedecked in the modded kimono, which while benefiting her flat stomach and long leg, and looking generally badass, tripped me up as an odd uniform choice, but, hell, she worked it) and the Key Man, the black-cloaked dude and head engineer in the trailer.


Nishimura punctuates this gore rollercoaster with commercials, adding a bit of bright, twisted levity to the stew. And yeah, they're gory, too (one is a 'wrist-cut kit' for high-school girls, another cautions against seppuku, directed by Noguchi and Yudai Yamaguchi). These plus the soprano-cooings of Marie Machida, the DJ/police correspondent (I'm still not quite sure, but her HQ seems to be the bondage club) further this darkly humorous atmosphere. And we have Nishimura entirely to thank for the heady trip down the S&M rabbit hole, the bondage club doubling as an engineer base, where particularly lecherous officer Yukihide Benny (omnipresent in basically all Nishimura/Noguchi films) frequents. Kariwanz, aka Ms Karin and her "dog" partner Wanco, created the eye-popping, hazardware-colored fetishwear for the club (plus the outfit and mask for "dog girl"). Here we meet the three performers (actually Key Man's henchwomen), all young Japanese actresses and recurring Nishimura characters: Cherry Kirishima ("snail girl"), Sayako Nakoshi ("penis nose"? her face is reshuffled w/ an eye for a mouth and vice-versa, plus the penis-nose. She reappears prominently as a "wrist-cutting" champion in Nishimura's other films, sans penis nose, of course), and the lovely Tsugumi Nagasawa ("teeth-breasts", think of The Corinthian from Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman", but fang-laden breasts instead of eyes). The sex-addled cop picks Nagasawa, and after a bit of fellatio and gunfire — and in perhaps the most iconic moment of the film, if I had to pick one — her lower half morphs into crocodile jaws, a Venus Flytrap-like vaginal dentata, sicced on Tanaka's manhood and other limbs. It's to Nishimura's credit that, despite the budget, this incredibly unlikely morphing actually looks pretty convincing...you know, in a completely wacked-out sort of way. And when it's all over, the city burning just like the poster claims, w/ the Key Man taken down and the corrupted police force in shambles, our heroine Ruka emerges alongside her new recruit, the "dog girl" now with machineguns for limbs, and I became a devoted Nishimura fanatic.


(Nishimura-san PART TWO — on Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl and more — coming soon!)