loganx-2 Review of Strange Circus

Strange Circus (2005)

Sada Abe, Mapplethorp, and Giger walk into a bar...

[12 December 2007]

Speaking of violence, Sion Sono(director of Suicide Club)'s latest film Strange Circus, is an erotic horror story, steeped in incest, pedophilia, trans-sexuality, and screaming. Sometimes were in a carnival, other times walking down a blood covered hallway that looks like the inside of a giant monster, other times within a cello case watching our parents do the deed, or gazing at a creaky carousel which never quite works. These images are hammered down over and over again, punctuated always by more crying and screaming, until like many modern Japanese horror films, the narrator is proved to be unreliable and then identity's of the characters go switching around. Its a lot more focused than Suicide Club, more visual texture and beauty, cleaner, crisper performances mostly. I've heard this mentioned as part of the "ero-goru"(erotic grotesque nonsense) a growing genre in Japan in porn, literature, and film; Giger, Lovecraft, and Sada Abe mixed in a wet dream. This film does attempt to delve not only into the genre, but the production of the genre itself(who writes it and why), however by the end, were given a revenge story that doesn't seem to fit well with the subdued nihilist realism of the rest of the movie, unlike Suicide Club it doesn't invoke laughter or a sense of the tragicomic or socially relevant satire, it's just grotesque, then kinda stupid, still pretty, but less erotic. It almost had me, but it's insistence on cliché in the end(chainsaws and chains and fake limbs), make it lose any redemptive value. Gozu and Visitor Q, are better samples of the genre, if better is the right word.