In which V. posts a review written some time ago about a Most Curious Film.

I've been digging around through some of my old writing in a somewhat hopeless attempt to get a portfolio together for a job, and I came across this review for a great absurdist Japanese film called Visitor Q. It defies explanation, so I thought I'd stick it up here for posterity.

Okay... Visitor Q... this was one seriously bent film, and I'm not entirely sure where to start...

OK so there's this guy, who is with a prostitute, only she's also his daughter, and he ends up having sex with her despite some halfhearted moral objection, and she keeps taking photos of him with a digital camera. And in the end he doesn't have enough money to pay her and she makes fun of him for not lasting very long.

So then he's waiting for a bus (I guess?) and some weird guy with big hair cracks him over the head with a rock.

And then you see his wife and son, and the son beats the crap out of his mom for getting him the wrong kind of toothbrush, and then he goes to his room where he has a closet full of whips.

And then his mom shoots heroin, and some bullies from school shoot firecrackers into their house, and they both act like this is normal.

Right, so then the dad is walking home, and the guy with big hair comes along and cracks him over the head again, and follows the man home, and the man says "this is a friend of mine, and he's gonna stay here for a while." But he doesn't really know the guy (who I guess is Visitor Q?).

Meanwhile the son keeps beating the mom with whips, and she yells "not in the face" all the time. And the dad just carries on as though this is commonplace, and Visitor Q asks for some more rice.

So then the next day, the mom goes and turns a trick with some stranger for drug money, and meanwhile the son keeps getting beaten up by school bullies and his dad follows him around and videotapes it.

The mom goes home and finds Visitor Q in the prostitute daughter's old room, and he squeezes her breasts and a LOT of milk squirts out everywhere and the son comes in from school and can see the milk squirting all the way down the hallway.

And the dad is having lunch with a girl who is supposedly a reporter, and he says he wants to do a story about how fathers react to bullies and he's the father and his son is bullied, and she says "no you're stupid!" and reminds him of the last story he tried to do in which he ended up being ass-raped by a gang of street kids with some odd sex toy, and he showed the tape of this to people anyway and made a fool of himself. So no way is he gonna be allowed to do another story.

So by now you should be getting the idea that this is a fairly screwed up film.

So the man goes home to dinner with his wife and son and Visitor Q, and there's more "not in the face! blah blah blah" and the wife throws a knife at the son, and the bullies throw more firecrackers through the windows, and the dad gets it all on tape and rants about how he's a father and this is his house and his wife is lovely and who is Visitor Q anyway?

And the next day he's in a car with the reporter and Visitor Q and they are about to film him standing up to the kids who are beating up his son, and then the reporter says "oh, I just remembered, this is stupid!" and tries to walk away, but the dad chases her and rapes her and kills her, and they take her back to the house.

So he's gonna chop her to pieces, and he sends Visitor Q into the house for bin liners, and in what is probably one of THE WEIRDEST scenes I have EVER seen in my whole life, the wife says "oh, bin liners, here!" and takes off her clothes and she is wearing a garbage bag under them. And THEN she says "look, I can make my breasts squirt by myself" and starts squeezing them...

Meanwhile the dad is having sex with the reporter's corpse, and she... erm... evacuates her bowels on him, and he keeps having sex with her anyway...

And meanwhile the wife is standing in the kitchen, which is now flooded with milk, lactating away onto Visitor Q who is sitting on the floor under a plastic umbrella.

So rigor mortis sets in, and the dad gets stuck in the reporter's corpse... and he yells for help and eventually ends up in the bathtub still stuck in the corpse while the wife pours vinegar on him in a devoted and helpful manner while Visitor Q watches.

To sum up a series of bizarre events, he gets free, the wife helps him dispose of the body, and together they murder the bullies who were beating up on their son.

Visitor Q finds the son lying on the kitchen floor face down in the milk, and asks him what's wrong and the son says he is determined to study harder, and thanks Visitor Q for destroying everything.

Visitor Q goes and finds the prostitute daughter and cracks her over the head with a rock, and she goes home. She goes into her old room and looks out the window and sees her (still!!!) lactating mom in the yard wrapped in plastic, and her dad is having himself a drink, and this seems to make her happy... and, um... then she goes outside and... errr... joins in.

And thus ends the weirdness...