Horror Movie Reviews
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Title: Kichiku Dai Enkai (2004) |
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Review of Kichiku Dai Enkai
- 1970s Japan, and Aizawa, leader of a small left-wing political student group has been arrested. With him behind bars, the group is taken over by Masami, his girlfriend. But when Aizawa commits suicide in jail, Masami's tenuous grip on the group explodes in a blinding fury of paranoia and bloody violence.
EXTRAS INCLUDE:
INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR, KAZUYOSHI KUMAKIRI
INTERVIEW WITH CAMERAMAN, KIYOAKI HASHIMOTO
INTERVIEW WITH ACTORS
INTRODUCTION BY TOM MESTHE
MAKING OF KICHIKU
REACTION TO KICHIKU
CHAPTER SELECTION
BIOGRAPHIES/FILMOGRAPHIES
INTERACTIVE MENUS
Description
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Comments for Kichiku Dai Enkai
- Posted on 2008-08-13
Your pateince shall be rewarded
Kichiku Dai Enkai is a splatter film from the late 90's that had a short run in film festivals before disappearing into obscurity. Not too many people know about this one, but it definitely deserves to be in the running for most disturbing film ever made. It's about the breakdown of a political activist group in the 70's and a general assessment of the state of the Japanese government at the time. After the leader of the group is imprisoned and commits suicide, the film captures the group in an almost documentary way as it follows their slow progression into paranoia and insanity before completely destroying each other. This film is not for everybody, it takes a little while for healthy amounts of red stuff to appear on screen, and it is not for the attention deficit, but patient viewers will be rewarded. If you feel like having your senses violated without having your intelligence violated check this one out, you will not be disappointed.
Score: 5
- Posted on 2005-10-06
A work of pure-and gory-genius!
Basically it shows a group of students as a reflection of society leading a hive mentality. Follow the leader. Do what leader says because leader is in charge and knows everything...even when leader is a psycho. It's NOT pure gore for gore's sake, but it honestly has a message how the hive mentality can lead to total annihilation. For a group...or an entire nation. Actually the main leader is in jail, and he leaves his girlfriend in charge. The main leader commits suicide. From that point she really goes wacko and leads the group to pure self destruction. And they all listen and obey her cause she's in charge...
The plot is well understood--not defragmented like a lot of asian horror--but very clear and precise. The story develops very nicely...and there is plenty of pure GORE to satisfy the true-blue horror fan. The special gore effects are really great. All in one bundle. I LOVED IT!!!
This is to be watched...and watched again!
Score: 5 - Posted on 2005-07-25
The goriest, nauseating, most disgusting and bloodiest movie of all time!
I caught this on TV at 9:00 PM last night-I thought it was interesting-yet, I found it stomach turnign! I totally had trouble trying to eat (because of the excessive gore)and about halfway through: I nearly threw up! I thought the storyline was neat though.-but I LOVED IT!
STORY: A leftist group leader in 70's Japan has been jailed- but then the girlfreind takes over as leader. Then one day, the group and the leader discover that He has committed suicde, so the group erupst into violent acts that leave Japan covered ith blood. Theres a storyline with out spoilers.
Thoughts: A great movie! I totally reccomend it to not oly gorehounds, but also to people who love asian movies.
Score: 5 - Posted on 2005-07-19
Eat what you Kill
Kichiku Dai Enkai ("Banquet of the Beasts) is a vicious, brutal, nasty, psyche-scarring flick that sneaks up on you from the woods over to your left, lets you enjoy your little mid-afternoon snack, waits until you curl up for a nap, and then pounces, tearing out your viscera and shoving them down your throat.
It's that kind of movie. If "Kichiku" were a dog, it would be a large, faithful family hound, maybe a Black Lab or a St. Bernard, known for its even-tempered disposition. It would be good with kids. It would be friendly and huge and totally reliable. It would even be a little timid.
And then, all Stevie King's 'Cujo'-style, it would get rabies, go apesh*t, and decide to turn your neck into 100% ground beef by way of its super-masticating choppers.
It is 1969, Japan: a staid society is in turmoil as radicalized students stage protests, shut down the universities, and riot, rebel, grow their hair, and---those steeped in the darker shadows of the Counterculture, anyway---foment bloody rebellion.
Some more so than others, including the shadowy Aizawa's revolutionary gang, because if a movement for Progressive Social Change is about anything at all, it's about Justice, Freedom, Equality, and the right to go Jim Jones on your camp followers, fold, spindle, mangle and mutilate them, and sample their brains and guts. Right?
Right! Pol Pot and Mao Tse-Tung didn't go all soft and weepy over cracking a few souls for the good of the People, did they?
Neither does Miyame, girlfriend of jailed gang leader Aizawa, who has now taken total power over the gang. Aizawa dispatches henchman Fujiwara to check in on his little group, and to bear tidings of the Fearless Leader's imminent release from prison. And, you know, just to make sure the pot hasn't boiled over.
Which is a good thing, as it turns out, because the pot is bubbling furiously. Miyame has a few other plans percolating in her moral pressure cooker besides Truth, Justice, Motherhood & Apple Pie, including seducing as many of Aizawa's gang as she can get her hands on, assuming iron-fisted control over the group, dancing around in a creepy demon-mask, and giggling hysterically between bouts of depraved violence.
Oh yeah, and getting her hands on a stash of guns.
Before you can say "think global, act local", Miyame has seized total control, isolated her little band in the mountainous woodlands, and is engaging in her own little experiment on the finer points of human anatomy combined with scraping the last vestiges of human decency or scruple from her increasingly bloodthirsty pack. And then the Fun really begins.
"Kichiku Dai Enkai" is divided into three parts, three 'Dai Enkai' parties: you could think of the whole movie as Appetizer, Lunch, and Dinner. Each 'party' begins with a Dance (Miyame with her demon-mask): following each dance, there's a sort of wilding, a descent into savagery.
There's no room for dessert, in this case, and you'll probably be full afterwards. That or Dead.
Director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri has created, concocted, distilled and injected a Dark Night of the Soul here, a savage howl of anger and Evil and savagery and cruelty.
Kumakiri is working on the low-end of low budget filmmaking here, and he does so masterfully, marshalling his scanty resources in such a way as to occlude the paucity of funds, or name-actors, or high-end effects. Lose yourself in this flick---in the spare, atonal shrieks and drum rattles of its soundtrack that punctuate the traipse into madness, in the grainy film quality that permeates, suffuses, and melds into a world of seamy, stinking dorm-rooms and seamier bungalows.
And the acting: for a low-budget flick, the acting is superb. It works. The students are zoned-out, goofy, giggling, smirking: kids who have too little supervision, too much time, too much access to gonzo drugs and not enough access to common sense.
Particularly good is Miyame (played by Mikami Sumiko), who sinks her choppers into her role as crazed tigress and purring, calculating dictator. It would be a tough gig in more accomplished hands: Sumiko is not an attractive creature---she's puffy and dumpy at best, with a lumpy, clayish head---but she has a raw, feral, bestial charisma, and charisma comes across in any tongue.
A warning: "Kikichu" takes its own sweet time bringing things to boil; it is almost serene, monastic, meditative. It took me three tries to get into its well-paced, reflective mood, and I'm glad I took the time to settle into the madness.
Gorehounds, in particular, will be well paid for their patience: as a tableau of pure, unfettered human cruelty, I don't think any film has approached "Kichiku" in sheer, bloody brutality. It has just about everything: depravity, torture, decapitation, dismemberment, exploding heads, castration, even cannibalism. It all positively stinks with the realism of yesterday's mass grave.
And as in any breviary of bruality, there is beauty among the madness: Kumakiri is an amazingly competent director, spinning out some truly haunting sequences, among them a trot down a bleak dorm-hall that conjures up a death camp hallway, or a doomed man, tortured eyes staring skyward, glimpsing the serene beauty of a sunset through the trees.
Kumakiri has captured, in this raw, bleak, damned world, precisely what Wes Craven might have accomplished---or might have been trying to accomplish---in his "Last House on the Left" or "The Hills Have Eyes". "Kichiku" is parts a glimpse into the inner workings of a gulag, a death camp, and the shadow-haunted forests of the "Blair Witch Project".
"Kichiku" is a sick, feral thing of beauty, and it is very hungry, and very human. Proceed with caution---but do proceed.
JSG
Score: 5
