The 10 Craziest Takashi Miike Movies

We’re willing to bet you’ve seen a movie of this plot type before: A crooked cop becomes allies with a notorious mobster, which leads to a string of shootouts, double-crosses, and dead bodies. Sounds routine, right?

In most directors’ sights, yes. But Miike doesn’t know how to do “conventional.” In the criminal minded Dead Or Alive, he’s at his wackiest. There’s a scene set within a beastiality porno shoot, and another in which a dead hooker is found inside a bathtub loaded with feces. And then, just for shits and giggles, Miike spends time showing how a gang of thugs share a mutual love of bananas.

Through it all, Dead Or Alive is like Martin Scorsese by way of John Waters.

It says a lot about Miike’s talents that one of his lesser movies, One Missed Call, is leagues above Hollywood’s same-named and pathetic remake. It’s not that One Missed Call is a bad movie; it’s just not all that original.

Apparently Miike is a fan of The Ring (or its Japanese original, Ringu). One Missed Call is similar to that supernatural gem in both style and tone, the chills in this case deriving from voicemails left by a person’s future self at the moment of his or her death. With the usual J-horror imagery at his disposal (pasty ghosts with long, flowing black hair, for example), Miike reins himself in to show that he’s able to freak us out without any over-the-top gore.

In many ways, One Missed Call is Miike’s most restrained movie, but it does have one loony scene that’s amongst his best: A live TV show invites a potential victim onto its set in hopes of broadcasting the teen’s death on air, and all hell breaks loose. Even in a familiar J-horror ghost story, Miike finds space for extremely dark comedy.

Izo is tailor-made for anyone who equally loves samurai movies and flicks about time travel (we know you're out there somewhere). As the movie begins, the title character, a run-of-the-mill samurai warrior, is executed, which sends his spirit hurdling through time, leading to blood-soaked pit stops in different historical periods. From World War II to modern society, Izo slices his ways through as many ancestors of his crucifiers as is inhumanly possible.

Wildly ambitious, Izo brings several of Miike’s definitive traits to light, such as his ability to stage breathless violence, his fearless provocation (a few of Izo’s victims are little kids), and his knack for making otherwise ridiculous scenes hit with legitimate force through technical prowess.

For its first hour, 13 Assassins is a skillfully made but unexceptional samurai flick. Focused more on exposition than action, the first two acts offer a great deal of backstory and set-up, which, honestly, drags a little bit. But once the shit hits the fan, however, Miike’s mad genius surfaces and 13 Assassins earns its place amongst the director’s craziest works.

The last 40 minutes of 13 Assassins are devoted to one long, vicious, adrenaline-infused battle sequence; it’s a towering achievement for Miike. Hearing of a “40-minute battle scene” might trigger thoughts of boredom or repetition, but neither word is in our dude Takashi’s vocabulary. The sword fights are hardbody, the blood flows in sporadic yet well spaced outbursts, and the actors never slack off.

Back in 1998, Steven Spielberg earned tons of props for the opening battle in Saving Private Ryan; as much as we admire that movie’s extended fight, Miike’s piece de resistance in 13 Assassins is, for our money, far crazier.

The City Of Lost Souls is the Miike film that your girlfriend will appreciate…that is, if she’s the kind of gal who can stomach extreme gore and harbors a desire to bust guns. Consider yourself lucky if your girl fits that bill.

Miike does his best Bonnie And Clyde impression with The City Of Lost Souls, about a Japanese-Brazilian gangster who’s on the run, alongside his Chinese immigrant girl, from Japanese Yakuza and the police. It’s about as close to a traditional love story as Miike will ever get, which is one of the many reason why we love the guy so much.

Though this one doesn’t exist in the upper echelon of Miike’s catalog, it’s still a great example of the filmmaker’s naturally subversive energy. Just as much as he wants to deliver a tragic romance, Miike also loves showing off his visual wizardry (a toilet bowl swirly is shown from the bottom of the shitter panning upward) and anarchist mentality (a massive fight channels the freeze-frame effects of The Matrix).

Remember how controversial the footage of Snooki getting snuffed in the face on Jersey Shore was? That was a love tap compared to the physical exertions seen in Miike’s reality TV satire Visitor Q, arguably his most divisive movie. Some swear by its grotesque blend of comedy and macabre, while others swear it's a piece of trash. We lean more towards the former.

Visitor Q is basically about the world’s most dysfunctional family. Dad has sex with his loose-legged daughter, and mom, when she’s turning tricks for heroin money, gets beaten with blunt objects by their bullied teenage son. An equally vile stranger, called Visitor Q, enters their lives and somehow brings them closer together, but not before pops has intercourse with a corpse and mommy lactates all over the kitchen floor.

The craziest thing about Visitor Q is how damn fun it is to watch. Miike stages the endless succession of depravity as if it’s a Farrelly Brothers snuff film. Though, admitting to loving Visitor Q certainly says something not so flattering about a person. And, yes, we’re talking about ourselves.

One can imagine Takashi Miike’s thought process prior to making The Happiness Of The Katakuris: “OK, so the critics think that my movies are twisted? Now I have to go completely overboard.”

Best described as a “horror musical,” The Happiness Of The Katakuris is cinema at its most batshit, as well as its most inventive. It’s about a family that runs a mountainside inn where patrons repeatedly die before morning sunrises. The plot moves through grandiose song-and-dance numbers, stop-motion animation, and perverse Claymation, all of which allows Miike to indulge in a playfulness and upbeat spirit not seen in the majority of his bleak pics.

Not all of the musical parts work, with a few of the sing-song interludes lasting much longer than is necessary. The Happiness Of The Katakuris is so outlandishly strange, though, that pardoning Miike’s mishaps requires little effort.

Like the best of gonzo filmmaker David Lynch’s movies, Gozu isn’t about logic or plausibility—it’s a purposely bewildering exercise in psychosexual horror. And it’s also one of Miike’s wildest and creepiest flicks.

What starts off as a gangster Weekend At Bernie's quickly descends into a surrealist freakshow. Gozu follows a Yakuza criminal who whacks his boss, watches the dead boss stumble off into a strange town, and then has to find the walking corpse. On his journey, the protagonist meets a cross-dressing coffee shop owner, a minotaur, and an American who reads the Japanse dialogue straight from huge cue cards. Why? The hell if we know.

But that’s the magic of Gozu. While it’s discomforting and enigmatic, Miike’s trippy film drills its way into your head and challenges you to decipher its irrationalities.

With Audition, Miike pulled off one of film’s greatest fast-ones on the lucky, yet unsuspecting, folks who saw it back in ’99, before the movie became the stuff of infamy. For almost an hour, Audition feels like a romantic comedy. The set-up alone is like something out of a high-concept date movie starring an Ashton Kutcher type: To rectify his dating woes, a widower holds auditions for women to win the role of his next wife, though the “auditions” are disguised as ones for a movie.

But once the protagonist falls for one girl in particular, Miike’s inner sadist comes out to play. We first realize that the chick is nutso in a brilliant shocker of a sequence—as Miike holds on a shot of the woman sitting in a grungy apartment, waiting for the phone to ring, a sack on the floor next to her suddenly convulses.

From there, her insanity materializes through acupuncture needles and piano wire, and we’re not about to describe how she uses those tools here. Audition’s final act is what single men’s nightmares are made of, and demands a previously uninformed audience. Just don’t expect to voluntarily date new girls for some time after.

If someone were to ask us for one Takashi Miike recommendation, we’d suggest a rental of the director’s cult shocker Ichi The Killer. The reasoning is simple: If one can make it through this absurdly violent and stomach-churning gorefest, the rest of Miike’s disturbed catalog should be easier to withstand than light drizzle.

Based on Japanese artist Hideo Yamamoto’s manga series, Ichi The Killer is an orgy of homicide, centered on a murdered crime lord’s top goon who becomes obsessed with one-upping his boss’s killer, rubber-suited Ichi. As Kakihara and Ichi’s connection increases, several prostitutes and thugs meet graphic demises.

Only, Miike isn’t the type to settle for mere gunshots or knife fights; in Ichi The Killer, he turns murder and torture into sadistic exhibitions. One scene involves a torture victim getting steel needles hurled at his face like his head’s a dartboard; in another, Miike unflinchingly shows a guy jamming skewers into his ears. If Ichi The Killer were nothing more than a sick bloodbath, it’d still belong on this list. But the fact that it’s a powerful drama in light of all the brutality makes it a truly one-of-a-kind experience.