Gozu

The writer Sato Sakichi cut his teeth on the anarchic Japanese TV series Vermilion Pleasure Night, which included a regular soap-opera spot about a family of inanimate mannequins experiencing various domestic dramas and crises. He first worked with Miike Takashi on the, er, ground-breaking adaptation of the comic-strip Ichi the Killer. Now they’ve teamed up again on an original script, designed to inaugurate a new breed of ‘yakuza horror’ movies. Sato has even written a role for himself in it. Naturally, he plays the scary, transvestite owner of a coffee-shop. Mob lieutenant Ozaki has lost it. Deranged and paranoid, he sees a harmless pet as a lethal attack dog. His boss decides he must be put down, and delegates Minami to escort him to the yakuza dump in Nagoya. It’s an onerous job for Minami, who feels he owes his ‘elder brother’ loyalty, but things look up when Ozaki appears to peg out in the car. But then his corpse goes missing, and Minami faces the challenge of finding it to authenticate Ozaki’s demise. His increasingly nightmarish quest brings him up against not only the scary coffee-shop owner but also the hyper-lactating manageress of an inn, the spirit Gozu (which has the body of a man and the head of a cow and is given to licking those it haunts) and a very unusual case of transgendered reincarnation. Business as usual for Miike, then. (Tony Rayns)