revengerina

the other night i watched(oh! i just remembered i haven't blogged Tiny Furniture, I lost my list, okay, next one) a japanese horror movie. it was all, female revengefest. the movie looked good and crisp, sort of like A Single Man, like that kind of. I'm not sure when it's set but Japan looks like the 70s, and not necessarily in a good way.

So it all starts out with a man's wife dying. He has a young son who grows up to, ten years after his mom's death, goad his father into considering remarriage. The son is all over girls, the dad, not so much. The dad is a TV or some kind of producer, maybe film would make more sense because he mentions his latent desire for a second wife and his filmmaker friend suggests, "oh, hey, i have this movie i have to cast/make, and so let's talk about your things you want in a girl and we can see if maybe we can audition for the part of your wife! don't worry it won't be weird." Thus follows a whole bunch of conversations, dripping with misogyny, about how the best wife is young but not too young, obviously beautiful and talented at something like singing or dancing but not a professional, how subservient is definitely tops, how women are not as smart as men, etc, etc, choosing one from many is the privelige of the male of the species when you're talking about humans. So for the first half, it's all, whoa, there is misogyny among the upper crust in Japan. Gross! The producer/wifeseeker looks through headshots and resumes and he's thunderstruck by one girl, so when she shows up, he's obviously into her and they make a date.

Well, she fits the bill, alright. I dunno if she ever even looks him in the eye on one of their dates. She used to be a ballerina (can you think of any more crazy ballerina movies? I am into this genre right now). She's pretty in a creepy way. There's this shot of her slumped on the floor of a cruddy, brownish apartment, with a big white bag full of something next to her. It's like a gross-beautiful scene, like maybe something out of that horrible movie Se7en (hahaha, that looks so funny). She's waiting for him to call her. He isn't calling her because his filmmkaer friend said, there's something fishy about that girl! She had some reference from a record company but the guy had been missing for a year, plus the bar she said she worked at has been closed for awhile because the owner was murderered, cut into pieces, and the police found EXTRA FINGERS, an EXTRA FOOT and an EXTRA TONGUE. There's a nice scene where the wifeseeker imagines a tongue on the floor, flopping like a fish. Anyway, he does call, and when he calls, the bag rolls over, it's so scary. There is clearly a dude in there! These adorable people do it:


Eventually, the girl does go batshit. She was all, you must love only me. She killed his puppy. She chopped off his foot with wire that "cuts through bone and flesh so easily." She was abused when she was young. I guess it's a revenge story? She doesn't get away, though. The son saves his dad. It was too late for the puppy.