Visitor Q

2001 Miike movie

Rating: 9/20

Plot: A family pulls together after a visitor stays with them for a while.

And by "pulls together," I obviously mean that they enjoy the products of a wildly lactating mother, beat each other with riding crops, engage in incest and necrophilia, experience gang sodomy nostalgia, shooting smack, and kill a few people. The movie's paced weirdly, almost unprofessionally, and Miike--you'd better sit down because I'm about to say something shocking--seemingly made the thing to see how much he could shock the viewer. It's possible that there's social commentary here, that Miike is saying something profound about Japanese family life or taboos or breastfeeding in public places, but it comes across as amateurish shock cinema, written and filmed in rapid time for a very limited audience, like a non-comedic Freddy Got Fingered or something. The tone, comical decadence, is consistent, but after a lengthy opening scene that only becomes disturbing after you watch a big chunk of the movie to find out how the characters are related, a riding crop scene, and some fireworks shenanigans, you really don't need to see the violence or the breast milk or the fecal matter later on. After a bit, you feel exactly like the character who gets smacked on the head with the rock in this movie.

There is a great ending shot though. I'll give the movie that.

I'm either rating this movie way too low or way too high which means I'm no longer qualified to watch and write about Japanese avant-garde movies.