FREAKSHOW Survive Style 5+

Join us every Monday as we look at a cult movie. Our film of the week this time features a man who keeps murdering his wife, a bloke who thinks he’s a bird, and, er,  Vinnie Jones

2004
Director: Gen Sekiguchi
Cast: Tadanobu Asano, Shihori Kanjiya, Kyôko Koizumi, Hiroshi Abe, Vinnie Jones
Available on region one and region two DVD
Watch the trailer here

One of the central characters in Survive Style 5+ is a woman who works in advertising.  Whenever inspiration strikes, she titters girlishly as she commits her latest bizarre idea to dictaphone. You can’t help imagining that this quirky, unpredictable Japanese film was conceived the same way.

It follows five different storylines. Alongside that one-woman ideas factory, there’s a family whose salaryman father is hypnotised into believing that he’s a bird; a trio of juvenile delinquents; an English assassin who demands that victims explain their “purpose for living” (Vinnie Jones, playing up to his hardman stereotype); and finally a man who repeatedly murders his wife. Yes, repeatedly: no matter how he offs her (bashing her brains in with a spade, dismembering, burning) when he gets home he finds that she’s inexplicably returned from the grave – more outlandishly dressed and pissed off every time.

Add some memorable dialogue (“You are killing me with the smell of armpits!”), some eye-frazzling visuals (the production design is a riot of different styles), and a soundtrack that combines spurts of electropop and punk rock with cossack music and a bit of the old Ludwig Van, and you have a film with a “what the f**k?” factor that’s off the scale; the sort that almost makes the works of Takashi Miike look staid.

If all that sounds terribly, well, Japanese – in a shrill, kitsch, Hello Kitty lunchbox kind of way – then fear not. Skillfully interweaving its different storylines, Survive Style 5+ recalls a surreal Robert Altman film (or, indeed, an indie flick like Me And You And Everyone We Know) and thanks to thoughtful use of silent longueurs and slow-mo it’s surprisingly graceful at times. Hollywood’s quirky new wave – the likes of Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman and Wes Anderson – have a soulmate in the East.

Ian Berriman, reviews editor of SFX and cult movie nut, has watched Rat Pfink A Boo Boo four or five times, but never seen On The Waterfront. The nutter.

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