Full Metal gokudô

It is tiresome enough when so-called "professional" critics drag a film over the coals for not being an exact match to other work by the same director. It is oh-so-much worse when the same is done by amateurs who don't even know the full output of the filmmaker under this type of dissection.

With splashy films like Ichi, the Dead or Alive series, and The Happiness of the Katokuris having reached these shores and found their audience, the smaller films have started to tag along. Visitor Q and Audition have been highly praised by many, but these low-budgeters were made after Miike had gotten his quirkiness shaped into a formula. A great formula, in my opinion, but a formula nonetheless.

There are many more early films by Miike headed this way, and many of these, I suspect, will be much like Full Metal Yakuza -- stories told in a straight-up style with a view for pleasing an audience, rather than a cult.

While it is no "American Cyborg," FMY is a rip-snortin' 100% straight-to-video exploitation venture by a skilled filmmaker who manages to more than meet the requirements of the genre. The story concerns a Yakuza who awakes from what had seemed to be certain death to find that he now has a body that is partially steel, partially his own, and partially made from the parts of his dead sempai...can you guess? Yes, we are going to have a revenge tale. And, as silly as it is, it's a lot less goofy (and will no doubt age better) than that overpraised pastiche of revenge tales, Kill Bill.

Grab a six-pack, pop some corn, and forget about meaning while Uncle Takashi spins what is without doubt the best scifi Yakuza tale of the 20th Century.

Full Metal Yakuza (Full Metal Gokudô) 1997 Not Rated

This quaint little movie is one of the first by infamous Japanese director Takeshi Miike. A director known well in Japan for his work on Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) movies—but well known worldwide for his bizarre and shocking "horror" films. This is one of his unusual combination films. It's a Yakuza story, with elements of horror, science fiction, Mafia pictures, and Robocop.

The story revolves around one of Japan's crappiest Yakuza underlings, who, of course, wishes he was more. The head of his, uh, "mafia gang" has taken a liking to him regardless of his grandiose incompetence. Eventually, both are killed, then rebuilt a la Robocop into: "Full Metal Yakuza!" That's right, they're rebuilt into one mostly robotic super-Yakuza warrior—that's primarily the mind and personality of the wimpy warrior. Complete with appetite for nuts-n-bolts dragging around his gigantic penis. Go ahead, reread that sentence. You read right. The new RoboYakuza eats hardware like nuts, bolts, screws, nails, what-have-you for energy. And, he has a huge wang. Well, anyway, he goes around fighting and killing people that were enemies to him and his Yakuza master before they were killed. So it's a revenge story, too. One with cheesy dialog, rampant violence, amusing characters, and laughably horrible special effects. Movies made for PBS don't often look this bad! But the film is decently fun to sit through, so long as you like cheesy Yakuza movies, constant violence, and Takeshi Miike. But keep in mind, this has exceedingly low production value, and is cheesier than Wisconsin. 5/10

www.ResidentHazard.com

Even if this is not top notch Miike it is always going to be worth watching. The first ten minutes or so are a little confusing (as usual) with, here a yakuza, there a yakuza, one shoots one and another shoots another. Shot and sliced splendidly it has to be said with fountains of blood from headless necks and severed arms in the sidewalk! Soon enough all is clear and a fairly simple tale unfolds enlivened no end by the main character being formed of 'full metal'. There is humour throughout and also some gruelling scenes plus a little more sex than I recall seeing in other Miike films. Not as profound as some, although we probably miss the Japanese social nuances, but a fun ride with more than the odd gasp and wince.

Seriously, its worthy of a Something Awful or iMockery skewering. I can only assume that this movie was supposed to be a black comedy, made to seem cheesy on purpose ala Troma. However this just ended up being bad. Not like a 'so bad its good' kind of bad. More like a 'Please God, make this movie stop' kind of bad. I mean I 'got' what Miike was trying to do. This was supposed to be some unholy combination of a yakuza film and the imagery of a kitschy Japanese 70's beat-em-up serial. Complete with bad costumes, writing and sound effects. This train wreck of a movie finally hits rock bottom in the final moment, which MAKES NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. I mean as horrible as the rest of the movie is you can understand what is going on. Then they drop that one on you and the film ends with you wanting to kill someone.

I've already seen Takashi Miike's 'Fudoh: The New Generation', 'Visitor Q' and 'Ichi The Killer' so I'm prepared for just about anything from this amazingly prolific and eclectic director. But as 'Full Metal Yakuza' is an early Miike movie, made with a small budget for the direct to video market, I expected it to be a throwaway action comedy with little evidence of Miike's future brilliance. However, much to my delight, it actually still managed to surprise me, and despite being a cheap riff on 'RoboCop' (one of my all time favourite movies) Miike doesn't play it safe, and you can see bits of 'Ichi the Killer' in there waiting to burst out. This was Miike's twentieth(!) movie give or take, and despite having already released his breakthrough film 'Fudoh' it was still a long way before he was to be discovered by Western movie buffs in a big way. Miike was mainly working in the direct to video market which at the time gave film makers a lot of creative freedom if they made low budget genre movies that were able to sell a few thousand copies. He certainly took advantage of that freedom as the movie mixes silly comedy, bloody fight scenes, tacky special effects and costumes with a brutal gang rape sequence which Hollywood action directors just couldn't have gotten away with. Miike says he wanted the audience to be confused in how they were supposed to react and I think he succeeds big time! There are a few familiar faces in the cast from other Miike movies and those by Beat Takeshi and Shinya Tsukamoto, but the star Tsuyoshi Ujiki was unfamiliar to me. In Japan he is best known as a rock star with Kodomo Band. Uliki plays Hagane a bumbling low level yakuza who is killed when he gets caught in an assassination attempt on his boss whom he worships. But in fact Hagane doesn't die, he is resurrected by an eccentric scientist who has created a new body for him made out of a combination of metal and spare parts supplied from his dead boss! The rest you just have to see to believe. Hagane is far from your typical Yazuza tough guy, and in many ways you can see his character as being a dummy run for Ichi. 'Full Metal Yakuza' isn't quite as amazing as 'Fudoh' or 'Ichi' but it's still pretty out there and highly recommended to fans of extreme Asian action.