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.

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.

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

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Takashi Miike may well be the savior of modern cinema - more than any other film maker I'm aware of, Miike keeps pushing the boundaries of the art form. He's also got a deliciously sick sense of humour.

Full Metal Gokudo is an early Miike movie (with the rate he produces movies, even 5 years ago is a long way back in his career). It's a made for video ultra-cheapy, probably made in a couple of weeks for a few thousand yen. The basic premise is Robocop meets a Yakuza movie... producing the Full Metal Gokudo himself, a low ranking Yakuza gangster whose body is reanimated by a self-proclaimed genius scientist, to be a crime fighting superhero. Though things don't quite go according to his plans.

Despite the very very low budget and terrible special effects, FMG contains buckets of that Miike imagination and intellect. Subtle, dark humour occasionally gives way to comic absurdity - and occasionally to something much darker and more disturbing. Nothing as sick as you will find in Ichi The Killer or Fudoh, but enough to trouble the more squeamish viewers no doubt. There's a little bit of a heart in the movie too though, for the viewer who can look past the gore and idiocy.

Mostly though, FMG is just a silly comedy. It takes a bunch of mostly loathsome characters and puts them in a ridiculous situation, then has fun seeing how everybody reacts. It's a movie that could only have come from Japan, and probably only from Takashi Miike himself. The ultra low budget means its never going to get mainstream popularity, but it's the perfect material to become a lightweight cult classic.

Full Metal Yakuza is a blatantly corny direct-to-video action movie, but I am enthralled by its hero, an aspiring yakuza, made to clean on his hands and knees by the very guys he idolizes, unable to achieve an erection when he's lucky enough to bed down sexy gang molls, bullied by young street punks who would be pulverized by any other yakuza, and then killed as a result of a double-cross. One understands, as one does with similar movies like RoboCop, The Guyver and other movies about a superhuman rebirth, that the premise of the movie is that his body finds itself in the hands of a scientist who keeps him alive by replacing much of his body with robotic body parts. So he has colossal strength and robotic genitalia. He then seeks revenge.

I was excited for him the way one is always cheaply stimulated by movies like this. But Miike, freed by the exploitative invitations of the blood-and-guts shoot-em-up video market in which he is working here, gets the inclination to go crazy, but in the direction opposite the one in which he normally goes. We go from slam-bang gangster cyborg vendetta to hues of more elevated art-house elements characteristic of Japanese cinema elements, such as the scene at the beach after a refusal to kill a gang boss. Outside of this movie's genus, violence and revenge are never as aloof and zany as they are within it, and Miike has certainly done leagues better with the same subject matter, as with Izo and Ichi the Killer.

The movie leaves us with the sort of jarringly extreme material that Miike regales later in his career, but with more directly exploitative ends. It's not that the movie combats any real analysis. It simply shrugs at the idea of significance, not caring enough to be remembered. And perhaps I wouldn't feel so apathetic about that if I didn't begin with such investment in the underdog protagonist.