Post a Comment. They're pink! Oh dear. You guys know me, right? You know that I normally like to say mostly positive things about films. After all, who am I to slate what might possibly be the culmination of someone's life's work, or tell someone that their metaphorical film- 'baby' is a hideous ugmo that should never have seen the light of day, rather, that it might have been doing the world a favour to have, ahem, well, strangled the abomination at birth?
I don't want to ever do that. Well, Sion Sono's TAG is described as 'a dream-like, mind-melting blend of action, fantasy and horror' and also 'a surreal horror that combines his Sion Sono's arthouse aesthetics with equal doses of pro-feminist action fantasy, and the kind of ultra-gory exploitation film-making that would make Takashi Miike and Yoshihiro Nishimura proud. Well, it's certainly gory, I'll give it that.
There's enough gore here to spread over, maybe, two or three horror films. No-one's questioning the amount of gore here. The amount of gore is not the issue. I can handle gore, any amount of it, if there's a compelling or intriguing storyline to hang it on. I'm afraid the lack of any cohesive narrative is probably my main problem with the film. Let me see, anyway, if I can attempt to explain the bit of plot that I was able to follow miaow! Mitsuko is a mopey-looking Japanese schoolgirl well, I'm sorry but she is!
Mitsuko is spared because, at the precise moment of the bloody decapitations, she's scrabbling about on the floor of the bus looking for a dropped pen. Talk about a lucky break. She exits the bus and starts to run, with this malevolent wind more or less in pursuit. Passing mangled and bloody corpses along the way, corpses who've obviously been introduced to this wind just a short time before, she eventually outruns the wind and runs herself all the way to her school, where her best friend Aki is waiting for her and everything, for some reason, is completely normal again.
I was interested enough up to this point. After this juncture, things just went cuckoo-bananas completely. Mitsuko and her friends decide to skip school and run to the nearby lake, where one of the friends attempts to sell them the notion of alternate realities a-ha! Then the girls decide to run back to school again for some reason this director really loves to film girls running , where a couple of female teachers, for no reason, pull machine-guns on the students and set them all running- running again!
