Audition

 Just in case you're not aware of Takashi Miike's Audition: go watch it now. It's best to go in knowing as little as possible about it... other than the fact that it might be best to avoid it if you're not up for a little grisly mayhem.

 The film follows Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), a middle-aged widower and successful businessman who decides it's time to remarry. Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), a friend who works in the film industry suggests that the best way to meet and covertly woo prospective candidates is to hold an audition; he holds the right for a made-for-TV drama, and suggests that Aoyama sits in with him during the audition process; Aoyama, to his eternal shame, accepts enthusiastically.

 Early on in the process, Aoyama is impressed by one of the applicants, Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), whose introductory essay strikes him as unusually touching and mature (it's pretty morbid, but hey). He pretty ignores all the other hopefuls, and when he finally interviews Yamazaki, he basically blurts out some compliments - it's an uncomfortable scene, but she seems to take it well.

 From there, they start dating. As it turns out Yamazaki wasn't particularly interested in landing the role, and seems to genuinely like Aoyama. And for his part Aoyama, despite agreeing to the audition and some horrible sentiments expressed during the search (he compares finding Mrs. Right to getting a new car, for example), is revealed to really be searching for an actual connection. It doesn't excuse him, but this is probably the best possible result for the whole creepy, abusive audition scheme. 

 Except that there are warning flags all over the place. His buddy and partner in audition crime Yoshikawa just doesn't like Yamazaki, and can't follow up on any of the references on her resume. Oh, and we also get a few inserts of Yamazaki at home, motionless, waiting for the phone to ring, while a cloth sack in the background writhes. This is not going to end well.

 Yamazaki disappears while she and Aoyama take a weekend break at the coast, which takes us into the investigation phase of the film as Aoyama starts following up on what little he knows of his love interest. The search leads him to some pretty dark places, as the film's tone veers from light-hearted comedy to more standard Miike territory. By which I mean: we get a shot of a severed tongue flopping around in the floor.

 By the end we reach a grand guignol climax which is what the movie is best known for, and despite losing its luster to the casual violence of the causal violence we've been subjected to in mainstream entertainment within the last decade (not to mention the French New Extremity), it's still powerful, cruel, and shocking. Not the least because of everything that came before.

 I'd also like to highlight the fever dream that comes before that scene, which is creepy, illuminating and hilarious in equal parts (this may be the only time we'll ever see suspense being generated from a man trying to avoid a blowjob).

 It's hard to talk about Audition without unduly spoiling it or saying anything that hasn't been said a hundred times before. I think the most important thing, though, is that this is a legitimately great movie, and not just in the 'cult' sense that it's crazy and shocking. There'd be nothing wrong with that, obviously, but this movie doesn't need those qualifiers; The third act craziness is integral to the film, and it only adds to its tragicomic energy, all-pervading sadness, and surprisingly sophisticated themes.

 The script (by Daisuke Tengan, based on a novel by Ryu Murakami) takes its time and patiently maps out Aoyama's character through his actions. It has a subtlety and complexity that leaves more modern genre exercises that touch upon similar themes (like, oh, I don't know, Barbarian or Promising Young Woman) looking simplistic and too on-the-nose.

 This is a story about a man who uses predatory tactics for... well, not the right reasons, nothing could justify that - but there's nuance to his character and the script smartly underlines his humanity. It strikes a good balance between condemning his actions and personality (a key late scene shows some truly callous behaviour at a past conquest) and making us cringe at the consequences; The shitstorm that he unleashes is both provoked, deserved, and out of all proportion. Meanwhile Yamazaki ends up being a brilliant movie monster (kiri kiri kiri) that is also a broken, tragic figure who operates under mistaken assumptions and commits several unforgiveable acts - hardly a feminist avenging angel.

 Technically, it's unimpeachable. Director Takashi Miike and his usual collaborators make the first half of the story - a slow burn drama/comedy - endearing and very, very funny, with editor Yasushi Shimamura being a key player; Some short, slightly glitchy editing schemes, interspersed with more traditional, cinematic long takes, give the story a lot of energy, as well as becoming important later when missing chunks of  those scenes come back to give characters more context. It meshes nicely with some of Miike's non-traditional choice of shots like having characters in a conversation alternately talk straight to the camera.

 By the time wire saws and acupuncture needles come up, we're completely invested in the story. That's the key ingredient in the ending's uncanny intensity, aside from Miike's obvious directorial chops. Audition is often lumped in with J-Horror and... well, it's understandable - especially as it was produced as a follow-up to the seminal The Ring by some of the same companies - but it's more of a genre outlier, along with Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure. Any way you slice it (or pierce with acupuncture needles) though, it fully deserves its classic status.

Lighthouse

  While reading up on 1944's Dead of night, I discovered there's at least two other movies with the title. One is Bob Clark's excellent Deathdream, the other one is a 1999 British indie horror movie better known as Lighthouse which various people seem to defend online. The trailers looked terrible and it didn't get good reviews, but it's got to have something interesting for it to become borderline culty, right?

 Well... no. It's a derivative, clumsy, and pretty dumb piece of crap. But then again, it does get memorably bad at points. Maybe that's what people like about it.

 The black and white prologue introduces us to Dr. Kirsty McCloud (Rachel Shelley), overacting her heart out with all the solemnity of a B-movie actor playing a Very Serious Role, while the camera dramatically zooms into her face with a whoosh and cuts to her typing, news clipping, and footage of bloody crime scenes. She's muttering some vague platitudes about evil as she writes a report about a dangerous serial killer entitled A MIND OF EVIL. LEO ROOK? Which, I have to say, made me laugh - Guess I'm easily amused.

 So that's the level of scriptwriting we're working with here. The filmmaking is kind of ambitious, including a dissolve from desk lamp to a lantern and a tracking shot as a police team examine one of Leo Rooks?'s (mind of) evil lair, but sadly it's full of visual clichés and tacky shots. Not poorly made, exactly, but it's also pretty far from actually good. TV movie level craftsmanship, though it at least shows some ambition.

 So we know we're in trouble before the credits even come on. The story concerns a police transport boat running a few criminals over to wherever. The cargo includes, of course, the mind of evil himself, Leo Rook? (Christopher Adamson), who soon breaks free and steals a boat. He reaches the nearby Gehenna Island (appropriately named; it's about as hospitable as LV-426), kills off all the lighthouse keepers, and breaks the lighthouse light just in time so that the boat he escaped from crashes into the coastline.
 If you're thinking "wait a minute, how could the timing for that possibly work out?", well... that's not the last time the script fucks up. Not even close.

 The shipwreck survivors, which include Dr. McCloud, a few cops, and a few criminals, band together and start getting hunted by Leo Rook?. It's not a bad slasher movie setup! But unfortunately, this is not a good slasher movie.
 Its main crime is badly mishandling the amount of suspense buildup any given scene needs, resulting in too many scenes of the killer shambling, zombie-like, towards a victim that last for way too long, or letting people argue for a hilarious amount of time, so they don't hear someone banging at the door to be let in before he's murdered. Any accumulated tension quickly turns into unwitting comedy.
 There's a worthwhile scene in a bathroom which sets up a few moving pieces and then knocks them down, domino-like. It's really really dumb, but at least there's a sense that it's meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek. The same goes for the finale, which goes above and beyond in the amount of death dealt to Leo Rook? - a parody of 80's action movie villain deaths.
 I shouldn't forget to mention a "creepy" dream sequence that had me in stitches. It's... well, it's fucking terrible, and as nineties as it possibly could be.

 But there's not nearly enough good/bad stuff like that to sustain an hour and a half. It's... basically, it's about on-level with the average direct-to-video release of the time, which means it's kind of fucking dire, even as its general technical competence and some flourishes make me want to rate it a bit higher. Then I remember all the dumb shit you need to wade through, all the mediocrity, how generic it feels, and any goodwill drains away.

 The acting is pretty bad, though given the material, I wouldn't blame any of the actors. It's got an early role for James Purefoy playing a generic heroic hunky inmate, and I especially liked Paul Brooke as a melancholy old drunkard. His easy camaraderie with Dr. McCloud was much better than the chemistry between the two principals.
 The visual effects are... well, they're OK for the budget level and time it was made, but they still look pretty bad. The all-practical gore fares a little bit better, but it's mostly arterial spurts, and there's only so much you can do with those. Given the film's originality quotient, you bet some blood's going to get splashed on a bare lightbulb at one point, bathing a room in red light.

 The photography is ok - it manages some atmosphere at times, though the illumination for the scenes is highly variable from shot to shot. I'm much less enthused by the filming choices on display, which feature Dutch angles and lousy-looking slow motion; It feels like everyone involved was very enthusiastic, but unfortunately it hews too closely to then-current trends and the execution remains pretty bad. Entertainingly bad, sometimes, but still bad. 

 Director Simon Hunter would later go on to direct Mutant Chronicles, a green screen/CGI fest that nonetheless managed to be a lot more fun than this. It was similarly derivative, but if I'm not misremembering, it wedded war movie clichés to an obscure, Warhammer 40k-ish RPG sci-fi setting and it let Ron Perlman and Tom Jane run amok.
 It's an easy recommendation over this one; Lighthouse is a movie that honestly deserves its relative obscurity.

The Mission (1999)

 The Mission is a Hong Kong Triad thriller from Johnnie To - an uneven director who's nonetheless provided more than his share of essential movies across the years and within multiple genres. This one's near the top of those.

  When a Triad boss (Eddie Ko) narrowly escapes an assassination in a bar, his brother (Simon Yam) puts together a crack team of enforcers; their mission, should they accept it, is to protect him from any further assassination attempts, and if possible to work out who's ordered the hit.
 In one of the movies brilliant touches, we've already seen the members of the team before they're properly introduced - shown as the camera roved the streets in introductory scenes, each one in his place of business ('his' being the key word here- this is very much the type of lad's film where women are only ever an inconvenience.)

 There's Curtis (Anthony Wong), cool as a cucumber, the experienced leader.
 James (Suet Lam), the weapons expert, whose defining trait is, unfortunately, being fat(-ter than the others) and eating all the time. He's still given the opportunity to be very cool and professional, though- not at all a comic relief character.
 Roy (Francis Ng), the hot-headed one.
 Mike (Roy Cheung), the pretty one, an ex-pimp. Suave and eager to move up in the world.
 And Shin (Jackie Lui,) the necessary rookie in the team, puppy-like. Roy's protégé.

 The film's considerable pleasures mostly stem from watching this team of likeable badasses come together and deal with situations both professional (there are multiple action sequences, a couple of which are stellar) and interpersonal. The script cleverly arranges for us to get to know the characters at the same time as they get to know each other, and lets us watch as they build ties of respect and affection for each other.

 The action is, as you'd expect from Johnnie To, impeccable. It's all gun violence, but it diverges from, say, John Woo by focusing more on suspense than on action beats. Here we also get to see the protagonists function as a team, all of them highly professional and coordinated - a shootout at a mall should be listed up there with the best HK action scenes, and it clearly shows off To's sensibilities.
 A couple of the gunfights consist a bit too much of people just emptying clips at each other, but there are plenty of cool moments and maneuvers so that it never gets boring. Great stuff, and especially impressive given the amount of money they're working with.

 Because it's very low budget, there aren't a lot of fireworks, and everything is kept mostly low-key. The director makes it work in the film's favour - this is a crime film that makes time for an absolutely joyful scene consisting of an extended take of a bunch of hitmen kicking around a crumpled ball of paper in an office while they wait for their boss to finish his business.
 And the filmmaking is immaculate and extremely atmospheric; Johnnie To had already been making films for almost two decades when he made this, and his talent and experience shine through the rough patches.

 The soundtrack is cheesy as all hell, but it's so insistent it's almost ingratiating. By the end of the movie it kind of grew on me; A weak point, but certainly memorable.

 The main problem with the movie is that, like so many of its brethren, it's criminally hard to get a hold of a decent copy here in the UK. It's on youtube in its entirety, but it's not a great transfer of the DVD; I'd been holding off  watching it for years, waiting for a proper disc release until I finally caved in. It's not ideal, but I'm so glad I did.