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Visitor Q

Visitor Q

List Price: $29.95
Your Price: $26.96
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Strangely Uplifting
Review: My only complaint with this movie is the low visual quality, it being shot on video, but the movie makes up for it in spades. Full of nearly every perversion possible, this is a movie which is hilarious in an extremely twisted way, and strangely touching in it's climax. A must own for Miike fans, purveyors of asian cinema, or the twisted. No freak or asiaphile's dvd collection is complete without this and Ichi The Killer.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good, but not Miike's best.
Review: One must think of Miike as Visitor Q. Hits people on the head with a rock, but only to bring them back together - to shock and horrify and injure only so that people realize the unpleasantness surrounding them. Reality television is horrific, to be honest, and yet people watch their fellow man eat worms and testicles for a little prize money. How is necrophilia any worse?

Extreme, yes. Difficult to watch? Definitely, but the filmmaking is incredible. This film being made in only a week with a handycam that can be purchased at any electronics store, it shows the level of expertise that Miike presents to the viewer.

Oh, and the little mosaic blurred out genitals? That's because it's illegal in Japan to show unblurred genitals/pubic hair. Not because of Miike's own doing.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: The family that stays together...
Review: One of the more bizarre films I've ever seen, Takashi Miike's VISITOR Q is about a family that is as dysfunctional as can be. The daughter is a prostitute whose clientele sometimes includes her own ineffectual father, a failed news reporter. The son, who is beat up and tormented daily by school bullies, takes his anger out on his mother by beating her with a cane for any kind of minor infraction. The mother prostitutes herself as well in order to pay for her heroin addiction. (One almost can't blame her for seeking this kind of escape.)

Enter the unnamed visitor of the title. After bashing the father in the head with a large rock, he insinuates himself into the household. And then things get weirder.

I couldn't make heads or tails of this film. I'm sure it's some kind of commentary on the family unit in modern society, but I'm damned if I can tell what it's saying. On display you'll find incest, necrophilia, copious lactation (and urination), domestic violence, dismemberment, and other things I'd rather not mention here. Yet it fails to be disturbing simply because it is so outrageous. Occasionally it is amusing, but more often it's rather boring.

I loved Miike's AUDITION, probably his most serious and artistic film, but I can't recommend this one as anything other than a curiosity item. It's worth picking up just to see some things that you're unlikely to see anywhere else, but don't expect anything coherent.

The DVD contains a biography of the director and "liner notes" (useful for those renting.) There are also a few trailers which you must sit through to watch the film. If you try to escape to the main menu the disc will stop playing entirely. I hope that this is an error on the part of the disc authors and not an annoying new trend.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Transgressive cinema at its best
Review: Remarkably talented filmmaker Takashi Miike scores again with this demented fable. Before seeing Visitor Q I was anticipating something much faster and flashier, more along the lines of his brilliant yakuza films Dead or Alive and City of Lost Souls. Instead, Visitor Q is slow and almost sedate, closer in tone to the incredible Audition. The film is an ambiguous, absurd black comedy. VERY black, that is. Scenes dealing explicitly with incest, copious lactation and necrophilia insure that this is not something you'd want to watch with your mom. But this isn't just a shock-fest. The film raises all sorts of questions, some dealing with the narrative itself (Just who or what IS the titular visitor?), some dealing with the nature of family and conventional morality. For the open-minded viewer, this unique film is a must.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Good Family Fun.
Review: The cinamatagraphy is astounding. This movie is great to watch with parents, teens, and aspiring movie makers. It will leave you saying: "WTF?"

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: HILARIOUS!
Review: The first hour of this movie is the worse but the last 20 or so minutes make up for it with off the wall humor and spectacular violence and lactation!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not Takashi's best...Stick to AUDITION
Review: This film was a bit too twisted and sick for me but I still managed to watch it in one piece. This film was just a pure crap and had some really unnecisary scenes and is just as bad as the unholy overrated Ichi the Killer. If you want to see a good Tkashi Miike film watch Audition...Forget this crap..

2.1 out of 5 stars..

Lates

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A thoughtful documentary on Japanese culture.
Review: This is a thoughtful documentary on Japanese culture.

While the movie only shows the most basic everyday interactions of a Japanese family, it still manages to compell as Japanese family structure, interaction and culture happen to be quite different from our Western culture and traditions.

This documentary has been unfairly maligned by many American reviewers as shocking and perverse. I am very saddened to know that many of us in the United States would malign other peoples without reason. We should be more open minded and be sensitive to the fact that what we are viewing can not be called immoral simply for the fact that it is different from our own culture.

If you can expand your horizons and get past the small Western world view of family structure and traditions, you will find the typical Japanese family, as depicted in this documentary, is rich in valuable culture and traditions and is as deserving to be celebrated as our own.

Thank you Takashi Miike for your reaching the hand of friendship across the seas and introducing us to this rich rewarding view of the typical Japanese family.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Off the wall satire on reality TV (4 1/2 stars)
Review: This is the type of film I would love to see made here in America. Not that I want theatres filled with excessive violence, incest, and necrophilia; it's that this film goes as far out as it wants to and never looks back. That kind of ballsy satire is what we need; anything to keep from being safe and PG-secure. Back to the point: this is an extremely edgy take on reality programming which features a truly disturbed family. Taboos are violated almost at random in the film's attempt to push and maintain it's distance from the expected well behaved Japanese family. As far as I'm concerned it works, and works well.

This is not to say Visitor Q is an enjoyable watch, or a film you'd recommend to your friends, but you might if you like your entertainment off the wall and far, far from conventional. The basic plot follows a distorted nuclear family as they go through their day. Nothing is normal or expected in what they do, or more shockingly, how they react to each other's behaviors. It's the lack of response that's the kicker here, and you should really see it for yourself.

I really did like this film. Even though it's not a pleasant watch I think anyone who likes raw unrestrained films that want to push your buttons and not only do so but have very good reasons to in the first place should get their hands on this one.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Takashi Miike AT HIS WORST
Review: This movie was Garbage...I though Vistor Q was going to be great but instead I got garbage...Its stupid and yet disturbing...Trash....

Very bad...THis movies plot was just as stupid as the film...DO NOT GET THIS FILM!!!

-0000000/5 stars


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