Rating: 3/5
Hooptober 8.0 | 29/34 | Asian horror 2/3
I watched the uncut 4K restoration
If you don't kill the bad guys, who will?
Japanese streets blur by—images jitter and freeze. The experimental, distressed aesthetic, matched with the pumping electronic rock music, is peak early-2000s — think David Fincher on a shoestring budget.
Somewhere in Shinjuku, a pimp beats a sex worker bloody and rapes her. Ichi watches from the window, masturbating. The scene resolves on a dying plant on the porch drenched in cum. From the cum rises the title of the movie.
Jiji, a yakuza boss, calls for Ichi to make a hit. We later see Jiji’s cleanup crew enter an apartment drenched in blood and littered with Anjo’s organs. “He did it again. Disgusting as ever,” one of them says.
Anjo’s faction arrives the next day in an empty, spotless apartment. Anjo is missing, as well as three million yen. Kakihara surveys the room. He has bleached blonde hair, scars across his face, and a Glasgow smile from which he exhales his cigarette smoke.
They decide that Anjo ran off with the money and a sex worker, but Kakihara doesn’t believe that is Anjo’s nature. He goes to the club to question folks. The boss’s girl, Karen, assumes Anjo is dead. Jiji, posing as an elderly man, says he heard a rumor that Suzuki kidnapped Anjo.
So, Kakihari abducts and tortures Suzuki, suspending him from meat hooks and forcing needles in and out of him. When that doesn’t work, he pours boiling oil on Suzuki’s back and scalp. Finally, Suzuki’s boss arrives to see what is happening and clear Suzuki’s name. The boss demands money they don’t have, so Kakihari cuts off the tip of his tongue to pay penance. He might have enjoyed it.
Following some leads, Kakihari finds one of Jiji’s crew begging for heroin. He reveals Ichi was the killer. And that Kakihari is Ichi’s next target.
The movie continues down the brutal train of sexualized violence, whether it be rape, sadomasochism, or slicing a guy in half and jerking off to it.
Initially, I believed this was another movie that I should have watched in high school if I wanted the full impact. That said, I’m glad I watched it now, where the CG and gore have aged, so it’s not quite as scarring. It’s still gonzo splatter and gross.
Before watching the movie, I thought Kakihari was Ichi since his face was on all the posters and promotional material. Putting Ichi in his “1” costume would likely draw fewer audiences.
While Kakihari seems comfortable with his sexual violence, Ichi is at odds with his behavior. We don’t understand why Ichi does any of it except for a memory of bullying and rape, which Jiji exploits to coerce Ichi to kill for him.
When Ichi isn’t killing or visiting brutalized sex workers, he plays Tekken Tag Tournament as though it is his rest.
The same as ever.
The movie sometimes feels like it has something to say — Takeshi, the child Ichi accidentally defends, is a catalyst for someone who thirsts for revenge. He has no other example of how to handle the bullying he experiences except violence.
Throughout the film, characters who seem level-headed break out into violence, not knowing any other way to process their feelings.
There's no love in your violence.
Like most media that portrays sadomasochism, it removes consent and distorts it into mere misogyny. But here, I think it’s intentional. Because, despite the tools that Kakihari uses, he is not practicing S&M — the pleasure is one-sided. He wants reciprocation, but nobody can meet him on his terms. Also, Ichi’s programming makes him confused about what consent means, culminating in him trying to conclude that because someone doesn’t want to be raped, they must want to be raped. Ichi believes that’s what he wants, too. Ultimately, he only kills.
The movie’s comedic moments are unexpected. Jiji removing his clothes, and his face is superimposed on a bodybuilder? I’ve seen movies that use absurd gore to make it comedic. If this movie wants any of its gore to be funny, the intense and disturbing tone gets in its way.
The film’s biggest weakness is its pacing. It has a lot of… everything that it wants to put in the movie. It doesn’t know how to make it flow together. So, when they introduced the twins 80 minutes into the movie, I was over it. I stuck it through, and it had enjoyable moments.
Like, I think it’s clever how Kakihari fetishizes Ichi — how he imagines something somehow worse than him that can finally inflict the amount of violence on him he desires. The ending is near perfect.
I really want to lose myself in despair.
There’s a brilliant movie buried in here. If the movie were 80 minutes (really, if it were Riki-Oh) I might have loved it.