By Terry Sherwood
Japanese film whose English title is Gore from Outer Space is a sequel to Crazy Lips, although “sequel” may be too orderly a word for what is going on here. It is less a continuation than another plunge into the same cracked universe: horror, science fiction, musical numbers, deadpan comedy and deliberate nonsense thrown together with very little concern for conventional storytelling.
The plot begins something like a traditional Asian horror film with woman named Satomi is accused of murdering her daughter. She is about to be executed and is about to receive solace from a nun to which she recounts her story reminiscent of Peter Cushing in the opening of Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein. Satomi insists that her daughter has disappeared, but her husband claims that they never had a daughter at all. In fact, the child even in a picture looks like a doll. For a few minutes this looks as though it might become a psychological mystery about a woman whose memories cannot be trusted.
Soon we have a psychic who can trace telephone calls, a blonde woman singing the American national anthem as she is carried out, a house without a built without a bathroom, FBI agents who love to slurp Jello from bowls and say they are not weird, UFOs, aliens and apparent breeding experiments. Then there is reincarnation, a spider and various scenes that may be dreams, hallucinations or simply jokes the director decided to throw into the movie. Satomi’s daughter may have been abducted. She may never have existed. Satomi herself may somehow be connected to the aliens. Trying to solve the mystery eventually feels beside the point. Toss in a musical number on the way to an execution back in real time.
Musical numbers are the least of the odd things happening. Godzilla series had them with the song “Save the Earth” based a song in the original Japanese version of the film in Godzilla vs. Hedorah or known in North America as Godzilla versus the Smog Monster. Many songs also appeared in DC universe entry the Joker: Folie a Deux .
The easiest comparison is The X-Files after somebody has taken apart its mythology and reassembled it incorrectly on purpose. The FBI agents look like parodies of American television characters, while the UFO conspiracy material keeps promising explanations that the film has no real interest in providing. There are also Lynchian touches in the dream sequences and abrupt transitions, where reality seems capable of changing without warning.
In that respect it reminded me more of the anarchic side of Seijun Suzuki, particularly Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill. Suzuki famously treated genre plots as something he could bend, decorate or simply ignore whenever a more interesting image or idea came along. Tokyo Drifter can suddenly stop feeling like a gangster picture and become a pop-art musical fantasy. Branded to Kill pushes that approach even further until the crime plot starts resembling surrealist comedy.
Gore from Outer Space has some of that same contempt for the rules. Characters appear, bizarre events occur, genres collide and musical moments interrupt everything. It is as though The X-Files crashed into Tokyo Drifter and the wreckage was turned into a low-budget horror comedy.
The difference is that Suzuki’s apparent madness is remarkably controlled. His compositions, colours, editing and rhythms reveal a filmmaker who knows exactly what he is doing even when the characters do not. Gore from Outer Space feels much more ragged. The slapstick running after a villain with cartoon sounds mixed with a serious assault on a political rally bus by a candidate who was a gynecologist really shows the level of difference in what is range of subjects in this picture.
That becomes the movie’s biggest problem. When absolutely anything can happen, eventually nothing is surprising. An alien can appear. Someone can burst into song. A character can become a spider. Another plot can suddenly begin. After a while you stop asking why and simply wait to see what strange thing the filmmakers will produce next.
I initially wondered whether I was missing something specifically Japanese, but I don’t think cultural differences entirely explain the experience. Japanese cinema has produced plenty of deliberately irrational genre films, and directors such as Suzuki. The Japanese body horror/cyberpunk film Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), directed by Shinya Tsukamoto, demonstrates that a movie does not need conventional realism to have its own internal logic. Gore from Outer Space seems deliberately intent on denying even that reassurance. Is it horror? Science fiction? A musical? A parody of American UFO television? Surrealist comedy?
Yes, apparently.
