★★★☆☆
A serious murder mystery mutates into gonzo lunacy – psychics, decapitations and the weirdest FBI agents in Japanese cinema.
The first and more occult of the two Hirohisa Sasaki oddities getting world-premiere restorations (from Third Window’s new director-approved masters) at this year’s Tubi Frightfest, Crazy Lips arrives with a pedigree that belies its chaos. It was written by Hiroshi Takahashi of the Ring films and produced by Takashige Ichise of Ju-on and Dark Water, out of the same Omega stable as Audition.
It begins, deceptively, as a straight-faced horror-mystery – Satomi (Hitomi Miwa, herself a Ring alumna) sets out to clear her brother, accused of decapitating four schoolgirls, and consults a psychic whose price and answers are not what she bargained for – before the film mutates, by degrees, into something flatly indescribable.
Supernatural horror, soft porn, kung-fu, off-key musical numbers and buckets of gore are flung together with a Miike-adjacent glee. The whole thing tips over the edge the moment two of the most delightfully bizarre FBI agents ever filmed arrive to investigate the murder, chief among them Tomomi Kuribayashi’s blonde-wigged Lucy, who is easily the highlight of the film. One can feel the influence of the X-Files, arriving through a deranged cultural filter.
It’s playful, foolish in the best possible way, and charming in its outright refusal to make sense. One large caveat: like a number of Japanese adult farces of its era, it plays sexual assault for laughs, a sourness modern audiences will rightly flinch at.
Taken as a midnight-movie pop culture blast rather than anything coherent, this restored slice of J-cult delirium delivers more supernatural mania than any one film has the right to contain.
Crazy Lips is playing at Tubi FrightFest in London.