One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Cold Fish

A family drama, Shion Sono style.

That means you’re going to have a lot of severed limbs.

Quick Plot: Meet the Shamotos, a drearily unhappy family composed of a wimpy tropical fish store owner, his much younger second wife, and resentful teenage daughter. Mrs. Shamoto tosses store bought groceries in the microwave with the enthusiasm of an anorexic. Daughter Mitsuko shoplifts without care, and patriarch Nobuyuki longs for escape in the local planetarium.

After getting busted for stealing, Mitsuko befriends a garrulous businessman named Mr. Murata, who owns a cheerier tropical fish store across town and recruits the girl to join his staff of other attractive teens from troubled backgrounds. The Shamotos can’t seem to get a word in with the lively Murata and his bombshell bride, so by the end of the week, Mrs. Shamoto is having rough sex with her new friend, Mitsuko is cleaning fish tanks with a new kind of Japanese Stepfordism, and Mr. Shamoto is helping his new benefactor cover up his 58th murder by burning bones in a bonfire and covering up to the yazuka.

Indeed, making friends is an odd aspect of adult life.

Shion Sono is easily one of the most fascinating filmmakers working today. Everything from his premises--killer hair extensions! suicide cults inspired by bubblegum pop music!--to execution feels incredibly unique but generally, not forcefully so. Sure, Sono is adamantly avante garde, but rarely does his weird feel weird for the sake of weird.

Cold Fish seems most related to 2005’s Noriko’s Diner Table, the prequel to his better known Suicide Club. Both films are not easily categorized as horror, even if they feature extreme bouts of physical violence. Thematically, Cold Fish and Noriko’s Dinner Table are even more familiar. Both explore family dynamics with an emphasis on alienated teenage girls and their inefficient, inconsequential and clueless fathers. In both cases, a far more charismatic third party steps in to lead the daughters away like a modern Pied Piper.

Truth be told, I’ve only watched Noriko’s Dinner Table once (at the now defunct Two Boots Theater, sad face) and while I remember it being densely layered, I also remember it being a tad boring. Granted, its predecessor involved quite a few treats to keep you watching, from child cults to Goblin King impersonators breaking out into musical numbers. It’s a tough act to follow.

Cold Fish, on the flip side, finds an excellent pace. Though there’s a chilly distance between the audience and characters--primarily because Mr. Shamoto is intentionally barely a man--we care enough to jump on board almost immediately. And considering where the story takes us, that matters.

High Points

From Mitsuru Fukikoshi’s restraint as the near-dead Shamoto to Denden’s all-out crazy train Mr. Murata, the performances of Cold Fish are pretty pitch perfect

Low Point

Until a good hour into the film, everything we see is filtered through the Shamotos. Hence, once Mr. Murata’s driver comes to watch Murata’s wife and business colleague get it on, it’s a tad strange from a perspective point of view

Lessons Learned

Business is just entertainment (or a ploy)

The style of Japanese passion involves a lot of cupping of the boob

Getting stabbed in the neck with a pen kind of hurts

Stray Observatoin

This film may very well feature the most incompetent police officers since The Human Centipede. I say ‘since’ because even a bottle of seltzer makes a better cop than the Germans in Tom Six’s film

Rent/Bury/Buy

Part gangster film, part serial killer tale, and quite American Beauty, Cold Fish is typical Sono in being unlike anything else. It doesn’t ever go down the route you’re expecting it, making it something truly special for modern cinema. Eventually, it also gets incredibly brutal and quite disgusting, but for all the severed torso canoodles and bone sawings, Cold Fish doesn’t lose sight of the story it tells. Sure, it splatters a lot of blood over it, but at its heart, this is a film about a detached modern family letting itself be disbanded...and getting really bloody while doing so.

Gimme a Head With Hair (Extensions)

Ah, Sion Sono. Something tells me that your parents weren’t the peanut-butter-and-jelly-on-white-bread kind of folks, that your afterschool activities didn’t include soccer practice and that your family pet wasn’t a golden retriever.

No good sir, I think not. I think you were born of midichlorians, that your sustenance is silicone packets mixed with Crystal Lite, that you created a life-size replica of Guernica out of lunch meat in the 8th grade and that your best childhood friend was a half leprechaun, half unicorn that only emerged at full moons and taco day.

The point is, you’re an odd duck. An avant guarde duck who seems to refuse to allow any notion of normalcy to come near your camera. Suicide Club managed to unite ear scrapings, The Goblin King, and tween pop music. Its followup/prequel Noriko’s Dinner Table focused on people who got paid to act like people in your family. And Strange Circus spent a good part of its running time trapped inside a cello case.

Is it any wonder that Sion Sono is responsible for a movie about killer hair extensions?

Quick Plot: A trio of night watchmen at a storage facility discover one compartment busting with stinky and thick hair extensions. Oh, also, the corpse of a mysteriously slain female with (not surprisingly) Pantene caliber locks. At the morgue, the clearly not quite right Yamazaki is so impressed with her mane that he brings the whole package home.

Meanwhile, a cheerier than a cheerleader on crack hair stylist student named Yuko (Battle Royale’s marathon champ turned Kill Bill assassin Chiaki Kuriyama) bicycles her way to work, a place she might as well call heaven. Yuko, you see, reallllllllly loves the art of haircutting. Think back to how enthusiastic the killer of Chain Letter must have been about chains, because that’s about as excitable as scissors and the blue stuff make the bright-eyed Yuko.

But you know what she doesn’t love? Her deadbeat big sister, an awful awful woman who constantly dumps her bruised little daughter in Yuko’s apartment. It’s ultimately not a major problem, since Yuko slowly bonds with Mami (and yes, hearing every character yell “Mami!” at a 7-year-old is confusing and weird) though their connection and shared fabulous locks eventually draws the attention of Yamazaki.

Dressed in rainbow spotted overall shorts and jazz hand gloves, Yamazaki has only been growing weirder since, well, dragging a corpse home and settling her comfortably in a hammock. For whatever reason, her hair has still been growing...and growing...and growing out of her head, eyes, mouth, and open wounds. Naturally one capitalizes on such a feat of nature by selling extensions to the local salon, which just so happens to be the place of employment of Yuko.

If the next thing you expect to happen in such a film is that the women who wear the non-vegetarian extensions begin sprouting hair in their own open wounds in mass amounts, then congratulations! You have successfully predicted part of the plot trajectory for a Sion Sono film. As facetious as that may sound, it’s actually surprising to finally be able to do such a thing. Based on the other three films of his that I’ve watched, Exte feels positively normal. 

Yes, there are killer hair extensions. And a character that spends his days singing to and about them. And a death scene that makes me thirsty for a milkshake made by putting Mr. Potato Head and my Tourist Trap DVD inside a blender.

+

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Delicious.

But aside from that, it’s kind of just a slightly odder than usual J-Horror with some black humor busting out of its bun. Certainly a well-done oddy, but not quite at the level of mind-blowing weirdness as Suicide Club.

High Points

The major spotlighted kill of the film is grandly over the top, with visual echoes to Uzumaki and a wonderful mix of humor and ouch

Low Points

As quirky as Exte is, there's something not all there about the whole package. It starts on such a light and chipper note, flirts with darkness, side-steps with wacko humor,then hits the hour and forty five mark where I realize that as much as killer hair is bizarre and the actors are charming, I'm really, really quite ready for it to end.

Lessons Learned

Whenever possible, use hand symbols, since safety is first

A mother should never hit her little one

Instincts don’t solve cases

The Winning Line

“Sis, are you going to be afraid of hair from now on?”

Rent/Bury/Buy

When it comes to hair horror, alls I know of is the Stacey Keach segment in John Carpenter’s Body Bags and now, Exte. Already on that front, you have a recommendation.

And hey, while not perfect nor as interesting as Sono’s more serious work, Exte is sufficiently odd enough to warrant a rental. The DVD is bare bones, as is way too sadly and too often the case. Because really, if there’s one conversation I’d like to hear, it’s Sion Sono explaining what inspired him to make a movie about killer hair.