★★★★☆
Two of cinema’s strangest FBI agents return, in a movie that comes on like The X-Files on bath salts, now newly restored – and unrepentant.
Restored from 2001 and paired with its companion piece Crazy Lips (both playing at Tubi Frightfest this weekend, and coming soon to physical media from Third Window), Hirohisa Sasaki’s oddity is exactly the kind of thing a festival restoration strand exists to rescue. A woman condemned for murdering her daughter (who may or may not exist) recounts her story to a visiting nun, and the telling spirals off into sci-fi lunacy that no synopsis can honestly contain. What holds it together (loosely, gloriously) is the return of the two weirdest FBI agents ever committed to film, chief among them Tomomi Kuribayashi’s blonde-wigged oddball agent Lucy, a turn pitched somewhere between deadpan and berserk. Sasaki’s approach is playful and idiosyncratic, foolish in the best possible way, the sort of film that treats coherence as an optional extra and dares you to keep pace. It is incoherent by design; if that reads as a knock, it isn’t. The pleasure is in surrendering to the nonsense, in a J-cult V-cinema sensibility that never condescends to the audience or to itself – and is packed with cameos from J-horror directors.
Taken together with Crazy Lips, Gore From Outer Space plays like a fever transmission from a parallel Japan where The X-Files was rewritten on bath salts. There’s a rough charm to the restoration and a real strangeness that a lot of contemporary “weird” cinema only gestures at. For the midnight-movie faithful, and anyone who likes their genre curios utterly deranged, this is a treat. Some will say newcomers should probably start with Crazy Lips, but you can watch them in either order, and this superior sequel is the pick of the pair.
Gore from Outer Space plays this weekend at Tubi FrightFest in London.