The Defiant Deviant

Ichi the Killer

The Takashi Miike Drinking Game goes something like this: one drink for every mention of the word "prolific" (which, with 60-plus directorial credits to the 44-year-old director's name, is definitely warranted); another shot for any reference to his gleeful taboo detonations, best summarized by the warning preceding his Dead or Alive: "explicit portrayals of violence; sex; violent sex; sexual violence; clowns and violent scenes of violent excess"; add another slug for every time the term "surreal" is brokered (with an extra round for any reference to Davids Lynch or Cronenberg). Despite comparisons, Miike's work is defiantly his, exploding with the velocity of an Everclear sake bomb as his guerrilla cinema smolders across the States' collective subconscious. To showcase the man's inarguable talent, the Austin Film Society has crafted Bloodbath and Beyond: The Extreme Cinema of Takashi Miike to spread the gore-guzzling gospel to those unaware of his surprising charms. With seven diverse films showing the director's fascination with the absurd, the grotesque, and recurring themes of obligation and brotherhood, the Alamo Drafthouse is also on board, highlighting eight of Miike's smaller features.

Bloodbath begins March 1 with Audition, an excellent gateway into the Miike oeuvre. Dissimilar from his other works that explode out of the gate, Audition is a slow-motion nightmare in sunlight, a morality tale that curveballs into noir's shadows, then into outright horror. Ryo Ishibashi plays a devoted, widowed father working for a television agency. Convinced by a co-worker into auditioning women for a fictitious acting gig as a way of vetting potential mates, he falls hard for model Eihi Shiina's character. Miike's direction is initially feather-light, yet once she disappears, Ishibashi's search for Shiina reunites the two in the film's final reel, a golden-bathed set-piece of body horror guaranteed to satiate the most jaded.

The Happiness of the Katakuris, playing March 8, is similarly atypical of Miike's work. Like the power-addicted characters he creates, Miike is a celluloid junkie willing to fix on anything. While resulting in a few misfires, his experimentation reaches joyous serenity in this musical about the violent slapstick troubles befalling a family operating a countryside B&B. Miike's use of song, choreography, claymation, and J-pop satire makes for a sensory experience as unique as it is hilarious.

From here, Bloodbath swerves into material more "typical" of Miike's work, if at all possible. The City of Lost Souls (March 15) introduces viewers to the idiosyncratic mixture of gory action, fidelity, and charred black humor of his Yakuza films. Gozu (March 22) does this also, albeit with a nightmarish, Godot-like futility. After offing his Yakuza brother, a street soldier spends the bulk of the film looking for his corpse in this tale imbued with evil and magical realism. Fudoh: The New Generation (March 29) mines similar territory, with the Yakuza revenge saga from 1996 being one of Miike's first hits in Japan.

The exaggerated, Merrie Melodies-style violence Miike began perfecting with Fudoh reaches transcendental depravity in Ichi the Killer (April 5). Based on a Japanese manga, Ichi is a jumble of stimulus-responses with razor blades for heels. He's a fragile, troubled soul who's been suckered into slaughtering underworld bosses. Kakihara (charismatic Tadanobu Asano) is a masochistic young don who thinks nothing of a little torture for himself or others. He's pining for Ichi's violence as much as Miike enjoys employing severed legs, devoured hands, and shot semen as sight gags. A treat for the iron-stomached, Ichi is Miike's ode to hurting and wanting to be hurt, a thanatos clusterfuck of sick, slick filmmaking at its most intense.

Visitor Q (April 12) ends the AFS series. The title's interloper, Q, wreaks an extreme makeover of sorts on a family torn apart by career, bullying, and abuse. Despite redemption's path being riddled with incest, necrophilia, head trauma, and copious lactation, Q manages to end on a strangely affirming tone, one signaling Miike isn't out solely to provoke. Only in exploding all the button-down conventions of family, can Q, and Miike, reassemble and save it.

The Drafthouse's free matinees begin with the relatively subtle drama of The Bird People of China (March 5) before delving into Shinjuku Triad Society (March 6), Miike's first theatrical release and template for many of his Yakuza thrillers. Hard-boiled and unforgiving, Society bears the trademark of an auteur developing his bearings. Sequels Rainy Dog and Ley Lines follow March 13 and March 20. The Guys From Paradise falls on March 12, with direct-to-video thriller Full Metal Yakuza on the 19th. The Alamo's run ends with Blues Harp on March 26, and V-Cinema Yakuza potboiler Kikoku showing March 27.

The Austin Film Society and Alamo Drafthouse's Bloodbath and Beyond: The Extreme Cinema of Takashi Miike runs on Tuesdays from March 1 to April 12. For ticket information, call 322-0145 or log onto www.austinfilm.org. Meanwhile, More Miike, the Drafthouse's matinee series, screens throughout March. For more information, see www.drafthouse.com. All of the AFS screenings take place at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown (409 Colorado, 476-1320), as do the More Miike screenings through March 6. After March 6, the More Miike screenings take place at the new Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar (for more on that location, see next week's Chronicle).