Available from Panik House | Review by Crites
Panik House continues its series of hit-or-miss titles with TOKYO PSYCHO: "Ripped from the headlines, TOKYO PSYCHO retraces the steps of a real Japanese serial killer...Graphic, shocking and unrelenting! A new wave horror classic!" But is it now?
Yumiko (Sachiko Kokubu) is being harassed by a crazy one-eyed woman; the bizarre creature just shows up at her design studio one day and starts freaking out on her. On top of that, on the very same day she receives a mangled letter stating simply, "You were born to marry me." She even gets a tortured photograph of herself delivered to her at her secondary school reunion. In this context it all brings to mind the unwanted attentions of an unstable classmate from back in grade school, a disturbed outsider named Mikuriya. He too wanted to marry her, but was removed from school and was rumored to have been sent to a notorious juvenile detention center.
With the help of the Internet and the "Juvenile Delinquency Enthusiast Club" Yumi comes across the case of "Youth 'M'" who seems to fit her stalker perfectly – lonely, no friends, always changing schools... and found not guilty of the murder of his parents by reason of insanity. Murder, by the way, committed by strangulation with piano wire; wire very much like that sewed through the eerie letters she's been receiving. Reading further, Yumi discovers something even more frightening: "The faces were peeled off of both bodies. 'Youth M' is Motomu Mikuriya."
Unwanted mail continues to arrive, this time in the form of a surprise package containing her secondary school ID card, packed in a box of dirt and bloodworms. With this Yumiko has had enough, and she contacts private investigation firm the Baker Street Irregulars at which her former classmate Mika works. They locate an old apartment of Mikuriya's that's discomfortingly close to Yumiko's home; even more unsettling is the fact that it's filled with obsessively damaged photographs of her.
Outside of the apartment the girls run into Osamu (Masashi Taniguchi), the boyfriend of her art school chum and business partner Moe (Mizuho Nakamura). A shocking impression of recognition causes Yumiko to faint dead away, and when she awakens she finds herself in Osamu's flat being tended to by he and Mika. As she attempts to sort out her feelings, Osamu strangles Mika to death with a garrote of piano wire as she leaves to make her way home.
Yumi however is spared, and some time later she unwisely meets Osamu for coffee. Not only does he admit to being Mikuriya, but he pretty much convinces her he's completely batshit all across the board. Yumiko escapes his attentions for the time being, and desperately she tries to reach Mika by phone. But even as she does so we're shown what's become of the junior detective, who's now little more than an ornately lighted corpse wired into a birdcage-like altar to Mikuriya's obsession.
The psycho even does away with his newly-pregnant girlfriend Moe, showing up at Yumiko's apartment wearing the dead girl's face. Overpowering Yumi Mikuriya wraps her in plastic and carries his "fiancee" away for a "picnic," an outing every bit as deranged as he is (think worms and polka-dotted hats). The inevitable emotional and physical climax isn't far away, and with a little bit more than a little bit of psychosis the film comes to the expected overwrought conclusion.
This one had so much potential; a Japanese true crime serial killer film by an established director... But it rapidly becomes clear that this is Oikawa's pet art project, not a serious attempt at conveying the shock and horror of psychopathically aberrant behavior striking too close to home.
With a stark elemental cinematic approach that borders on the claustrophobic, TOKYO PSYCHO initially looks like an entry in the GUINEA PIG series but quickly devolves into an irritating stylistic experiment. One that, instead of inspiring terror, gives the viewer an almost reality show/soap opera view of the melodramatic goings-on; very up close and personal, yet none too graphic at all. And while the film does adequately convey the discomfort of damaged human relationships it still doesn't provide the cinematic payoff you'd expect from such a sensationalistic topic; rather than shocking the viewer TOKYO PSYCHO manages to impart the complete opposite of its intentions, boring the watcher with its cuckoo theatricals.
Special features include looks behind the scenes and chats with the cast and crew, biographies, appearances at the premiere, trailers, poster & still galleries and, perhaps most interesting of all, "True Crime: The Inspiration for TOKYO PSYCHO" as told by Selwyn Harris. This covers "The Otaku Murderer," a child-killing cannibal necrophiliac named Tsutomo Miyazaki. An "obsessive collector" of sexually explicit and violent videotapes (around 6,000 or so), Tsutomo suffered from a deformity of the hands that didn't prevent him from killing a number of victims, keeping parts of their bodies and mailing others back to the families. He was eventually caught and found to have multiple mental disorders but was given a death sentence anyway (at the time of this release he remains on death row). The second article is on Hiroyuki Tsuchida, another deranged fan of anime who killed his mother and planned to kill many more.
With such rich material to work from, and the artistic license to take it to extremes, this background material only makes the film's lack of impact all the more disappointing. The packaging, however, is top-notch: the DVD case cover is a detachable jigsaw puzzle, and the disc comes with a full-size sticker of the cover imagery. Region-free, in native Japanese with optional English subtitles.
