Gozu review

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It's hard to imagine anything that could be more bonkers than the coke-snorting opening of Takashi Miike's Dead Or Alive, The Happiness Of The Katakuris' dancing zombies or the sex-war slashing of Audition. Until you watch Gozu, that is. This Yakuza horror-thriller takes Miike's genre-bending brilliance in a completely new direction.

It begins ordinarily enough when low-level gangster Minami (Hideki Sone) is ordered to send his mental boss Ozaki (Sho Aikawa) to the Yakuza graveyard in the sky. Things quickly go wrong, though, as the corpse vanishes and Minami's trapped in a crazy suburban town full of transvestite coffee-shop owners, lactating ladies and enough psychosexual tension to send Sigmund Freud somersaulting in his grave.

Spiralling towards an unforgettable conclusion, this can only be described as Asian cinema's answer to Blue Velvet... Only considerably weirder.

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