Camp Explosion During Final Days at the New York Asian Film Festival

Sunday, the [New York Asian Film Festival] celebrated its last day at the IFC Center this year with [Like a Dragon](http://www.subwaycinema.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=81&Itemid=80) and [Tokyo Gore Police ](http://www.subwaycinema.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=88&Itemid=80), a campy double header from veteran enfant terrible Takashi Miike and newcomer Yoshihiro Nishimura respectively. It was a great way to start the last leg of this year's festival just as it moved to the more austere auditorium at Japan Society until the festival closed yesterday, July 7. To begin, Miike's Like a Dragon gave fans an unhealthy but satisfying helping of cheese with a satisfying portion of nonsensical action. With more money than at his disposal than he's had in the past, Miike goes for broke with the costumes and special effects, gussying up Dragon's motley crew of yakuza, cops, burglars and hitmen with a lot of tacky but expensive-looking accessories.

Initially, Like a Dragon seems to have more plot than any video game adaptation needs, but by the end, Miike remembers who he is and chucks plot out the window, giving fans of his more brainless early DTV flicks exactly what they want. To appreciate Like a Dragon, all you need to know is that a lot of money and two women go missing and everyone from the cops to clueless bank robbers are involved in the chase.

Because Miike's still in love with his image as the unruly master of shock, he throws as much quirky and weird stuff at the audience as he can. The plot in all of its obsessive unnecessarily over-the-top detail goes like this: a one-eyed, baseball-obsessed killer in a snake-skin jacket hunts an ex-con that shoots blue flames out of his fists when he's powered up while two ski-mask-clad bank robbers hold up a bank that has no money in it. The cops watch them, drinking tea and beer but they should be looking out for a Korean hitman with a thing for [Kim Ki-Duk]. That hitman gets his guns from a masochist that lives in the basement of a gun store and wants the Korean to succeed in his mission to kill "The Beast of the Diet," a corrupt politician that travels by helicopter to his posh penthouse hide-out. Oh and I haven't mentioned the young couple that robs just for kicks.

Miike doesn't care whether or not half of what he throws at the audience sticks, but he should. Dragon works almost in spite of his compulsion to be zanier than ever. His exponential growth as a storyteller and his bigger budget makes Dragon a much more mature and well-crafted vanity project than most of his earlier pieces of campy self-indulgence.

Not being able to process all of the film's hijinks is half the fun of Like a Dragon, whose humor places it head-and-shoulders above [Sukiyaki Western Django], Miike's Frankenstein monster tribute to Sergio Corbucci's [Django](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060315/) and his own monster ego. It however isn't nearly as imaginative or out there as Nishimura's Tokyo Gore Police. Gore Police is an unholy hybrid of the media-crazed, right-wing police state environment of Robocop, Rob Zombie's splatter-heavy sensibility, [Minoru Kawasaki](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0442896/)'s absurdly dressed heroes and monsters and Miike's obsession with S&M and deviant subcultures. It is the new wave in the cinema of excess, the rightful cocky heir to Miike's throne.

As the title implies, Tokyo Gore Police is a sticky, fetid bloodfest where heads split open and sprays of blood spurt out of severed limbs with unrivaled force. It doesn't strive strive to be a consistent, original or particularly competent story but revels in its image as an unrepentantly depraved pastiche whose bloodlust is only matched by its bizarre sexual hang-ups.

But between meteoric gushes of blood, gnawed-off penises and the chainsaw limbs, Nishimura sets up a few genuinely suspenseful moments. Though only half of the grisly, make-up/effects-driven scenes work, the ones that do succeed because of Nishimura's on-again, off-again skill at ratcheting tension up with some genuinely strange and unsettling images. A prostitute with crocodile jaws where her lower torso used to be isn't particularly surreal or frightening, but seeing her crawl out of a frosted-glass door in a sleazy warehouse-cum-brothel has its lurid freak-out appeal, just like watching her fellow scarred prostitutes gyrate to the delight of a crowd of fetish junkies. It's oddly transfixing until one of them starts spray urine on the audience.

That willingness to literally piss it all away makes Nishimura the new Miike. He's above telling a good story because anybody can do that. No, in his mind, it's up to him to rock the boat and stir shit up but good. Most of his self-important tableaux of blood may be more silly than outrageous, but Tokyo Gore Police comes pretty close to making good on that promise.