If you are into strange cinema..the type of bizarre cinema that has you head-scratching intensely at the insanity on display then this is the flick for you. I'm being flat-out honest, I don't know what the hell I just finished watching. Minami(Hideki Sone)is to dispose of his paranoid, mad-as-a-hatter brother Ozaki(Sho Aikawa)in a distant locale. This is as close to normal at the plot ever gets.

Somewhere along the way, Minami enters Miike's own twisted vision of Twilight Zone where everyone is strange. Lots of bizarre behavior. Take the brother and sister who run the Masakazu Inn. The sister enjoys feeding her guests breast milk(Visitor Q, anyone?)and oh so wishes to assist Minami in washing his back. You see Minami, somehow, loses his brother and spends the entire film on a wild goose chase trying to find him. He gets assistance from a man with a pigment of white on one side of his face. The man's name is Mr. Nose and he was the one who insisted Minami stay at the strange inn. Nose wished to stay in Minami's room saying he had no funny business in mind. Later, Minami finds out that the waiter attending to him in a small café had died two years earlier. Oh, and two men in the café have the same conversation regarding how hot the weather is. As you read the subtitles, it's the same line of dialogue aimlessly repeating.Minami finds out that his brother stayed in the very inn he had slept the night before. Questioning the sister of the Masakazu Inn about, she shows him a hidden storage room they lent Ozaki for the night. Minami decides to stay in the room to see if Ozaki might return. What does return is a man with a cow's head(!)drooling milk and delivering a message from Ozaki that the local dump would be their meeting spot. The cow head continues in licking Minami's face! Also, we get an image of the brother sucking on sister's tit as they sleep! Minami goes to the dump where two workers question whether he has something to dispose of. Minami just wishes to know where Ozaki is. They claim to have crushed Ozaki with his innards in a storage tank while his flattened torso is hanging in a special room in plastic! Oh, and this hot little chick, sitting in Minami's car when he returns in disbelief, claims to be Ozaki in female form.

Should I go on? Boy, the ending is the icing on the cake. It only stamps the madness we are witnesses to on screen.

The reason black comedy really isn't funny anymore is because all modern black comedies just repeat the same jokes. Though Gozu isn't going to have you laughing on your first viewing, it definitely will have you laughing in shock when you look back post-viewing, after everything comes together. Gozu isn't really hard to understand, it isn't complex, but it certainly isn't forgettable. If anything, it's set up a lot like a sick version of The Wizard of Oz: a straight path, with the lead character meeting eccentric secondary characters that help him along until he reaches the final solution to his problem. While this seems simplistic, it's impossible to not notice Takashi Miike's stunning originality throughout. While most Asian horror is riddled with cliché ghosts and evil mothers, Takashi Miike proves here that he is not only the most original Asian director out there, but one of the most original directors working in the industry today. And I think Gozu may be his masterwork.

I'm personally sick of movies that claim to be a mind trip, filled with "weird" ideas that turn out to be nothing but cliché mentions of time travel and every other genetic idea. I could list names of these films—Donnie Darko, 12 Monkeys, etc.—but the point is, weird isn't weird anymore in modern cinema. If you were been born and raised on The Twilight Zone like I was, all these movies are as generic as average spy thrillers. Gozu, however, may be one few films to come out post-2000 that I can honestly call weird. And, believe me, that is a good thing. Instead of rehashing tired clichés, Gozu brings the viewer to placed they've never even thought of before. The opening instructs the viewer not to "take anything seriously—it's all a joke", and the punch line has to be one of the most bazaar endings in cinema history. It's terrifying and genuinely grotesque, as well as hilarious. Everything in this movie is stuff writers/directors would sit around and joke about, but never, EVER, have the balls to actually film. That's what makes the story behind Gozu so refreshing and truly original. I can't believe I'm actually writing that final line in a review.

Miike's directing is stylish, as always. He knows how to set up a scene and inflict a terrifying mood. The entire film takes itself so deadpan seriously, and though that would usually be a fatal blow to most movies, Miike makes it work here. Somehow. Whenever a major plot point happens, it's done so flawlessly it's impossible not to be immersed in the moment.

So why didn't I give Gozu a perfect score? Because as much as I loved it, the movie needed to be shortened. Do not get me wrong: I love Miike's slow dialogue as much as I love his balls-to-the-wall action, but here it gets a little overbearing. Characters sit and stare at things without any purpose, and while it works, it's just not entertaining at all. The movie could have been shortened by at least 20 minutes, and if it had been, it would have been near perfection. Also, a few scenes became very repetitious and even mildly annoying. What I mean to say is, although the story is amazing, Gozu lacks a lot of entertainment value.

Overall, though, despite its flaws, Gozu is not forgettable. It's hard for me to remember a time when I would pop in a DVD and actually remember what I watched by the next morning. In a world of cheap carbon copies plots and cheesy horror elements, Gozu seems almost like perfection, even though it really isn't. But I have no room to complain. I'd take this over another black-haired-ghost-girl-evil-mother-terrorist-time-travel movie ANY DAY.

7/10

The synopsis on the DVD case compares it to something in the style of David Lynch. I would agree with that. It's definitely a surreal and strange movie. I would not rank it as high as Ichi the Killer or Audition , both of which I loved. This is Takishi Miike doing what he does best, trying to shock people but I think he's trying too hard with this movie at times to the point where it gets boring. The movie seems to loose itself in it's own strangeness at times but overall it's accomplishes what it's out to accomplish.

This movie is a nice piece of artistic filmaking and I must say that it actually made me much more uncomfortable then Ichi or Audition especially the last 30 mins or so.....watch it and you'll know what I mean.

Overall, if you are a Miike fan or a fan of David Lynch or that style of film-making then you'll appreciate this movie. If you have seen this and have not seen Ichi the Killer or Audition, do yourself a favor and go out and rent or buy those.