By Simon Thompson
Director Hirohisa Sasaki and writer Hiroshi Takahashi’s Crazy Lips is a bizarre, gleefully tasteless horror comedy that throws a lot of darts at the wall, none of which stick. Given that I love John Waters movies, Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, David Cronenburg’s early works, Troma Studios, Toei Pinky Violence, as well as Shinya Tsukumoto and Gakuryu Ishii -exuberant bad taste isn’t something that I shy away from, however the difference between these and Crazy Lips is that their harsh imagery is used in service of a salient point.
Crazy Lips focuses on a young woman whose brother has been accused of a series of grizzly murders. Desperately wanting to prove his innocence, she turns to a psychic for help, which triggers a series of disturbingly bizarre events.
Ostensibly a satire of the pink film craze of Japanese cinema in the 1970s (pink movies, in Japan, like blue movies in the west, refer to either pornography or films with far more explicit nudity than general distribution will allow), whatever satire that Takahashi’s script attempts is buried underneath a complete lack of narrative focus or established tone. To use the example of another Japanese horror-comedy Takashi Miike’s fantastic The Happiness Of The Katakuris, Miike’s movie immediately sets up its bizarre atmosphere and surreal world, as well as clearly showing the viewer what its sending up (the South Korean film The Quiet Family/ The Sound Of Music).
Sasaki and Takahashi on the other hand approach narrative and tone, with all the focus of two stressed project managers at 4am fuelled by a combination of White Monster Energy six packs and a few cheeky lines of coke. You would think that the scattershot narrative style would at least make for an interesting mess, however it’s the complete opposite, where the concentration deficit actually makes watching this movie dull.
To be fair to Sasaki as a director, this movie does succeed at looking like a 1970s Japanese pink film in terms of the colour palette, blocking, mis en scene, and congested camera angles. Other than that, Crazy Lips is an edgy, structureless muddle that limps to its conclusion. Although just an hour and twenty minutes, watching this movie feels like five hours due to both its lack of interesting ideas and make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach to storytelling.
