Movie Review - R100

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Just when I think I've already seen the weirdest movie ever another comes along but this will take some beating (ironic use of beating given its subject) spoiler alerts - 2013 A Japanese film about sado-masochism that is surprisingly devoid of sex but full of dark humour and some of the strangest surrealism on screen. Mao Daitchi plays a sad middle aged furniture salesman whose wife lies in a coma she has been trapped in for three years. He raises his five year old son alone, but he is lonely. He enlists in a bondage agency with a sinister contract. Its army of dominatrixes can attack him any time and any place unexpectedly without his consent and his torment will go on for a year. He may not resist, fight back or end his contract. For half of the movie the poor man faces Cato V Inspector Clouseau style surprise assaults in restaurants, bathrooms, street fountains and public parks. Then things get more sinister as he is attacked while visiting his comatose wife and before his son. He now tries to break the contract for which he faces a truly repulsive torment from a woman called the queen of saliva who spends ten minutes of screen time spitting at him while he is tied up and blindfolded. This queen accidentally dies falling down his stairs and the agency assumes he murdered her. The girls now set out to kill him, guided by their general, an American dominatrix known as the CEO and played by Lindsay Kay Howard as a potty mouthed female wrestler. This results in a violent grenade defence by the hero in a besieged house, from which he somehow emerges heavily pregnant. The film has cutaway sequences to the movie’s producers panicking over the movie’s bad taste, bizarre plot inconsistencies, and the whims of its 100 year old director who has suddenly turned out such trash after years of making quality art house movies. A running joke is that the audience members should be 100 years old to fully understand the film. At just over half that age I rather liked it, but it is certainly a film that leaves anyone wondering what on Earth just hit them, and the prolonged saliva attack is genuinely revolting. Arthur Chappell