Crazy Lips (2000)

Hirohisa Sasaki's "Crazy Lips" left me stunned.The film mixes pinku eiga rape scenes with martial arts,comedy,gore and musical numbers.Michio Kurahashi has been accused for killing and decapitating schoolgirls.His sister Satomi believes that he is innocent.She enlists the services of a psychic named Etsuko Mamiya and her sleazy assistant Touma and all hell breaks loose in the family of Kurahashi."Crazy Lips" is gleefully weird and tasteless.It has rapes committed by Touma,silly FBI agents,bloody murders and cheesy musical number.The cinematography is lovely and there are some well-choreographed martial arts during the climax.7 scalps out of 10.Still haven't seen sequel to "Crazy Lips" titled "Gore from Outer Space".

When Michio Kurahashi is suspected of being a serial killer and goes on the run, his pretty sister Satomi hires a psychic in a desperate bid to prove his innocence. And precisely what happens after that is anyone's guess...I usually jot down notes whilst watching a film to help make life easier for me when it comes to writing a comment, but about half an hour into Crazy Lips I put down my pen and paper, for accurately summarising the plot to this insane movie was clearly going to be impossible and all the scribbling in the world wouldn't help me to express my feelings about it.So I'm going to wing it, sans notation; bear with me...In a world where most mainstream cinema has become dull and predictable, I can always find time for the completely demented and bizarre, and Crazy Lips is just that—a depraved, off-the-wall piece of Japanese cinema that defies simple categorisation. Supernatural horror, mystery, music, soft porn, and martial arts are combined by director Hirohisa Sasakito to produce a messed up piece of work reminiscent of movie maverick Takashi Miike's offbeat output, only one lacking that director's unique narrative skills, sense of style and intelligence.But although Sasaki might not be a real threat to Miike when it comes to confrontational cinema (Takashi still holds the title 'King of Japanese Weirdness' for producing monumentally effed up movies like Visitor Q and Fudoh), Crazy Lips is still the only film I have ever seen to feature the wandering spirits of decapitated girls, a pair of FBI agents who keep an eye on proceedings through the screen of a television set, a scalping during intercourse, and a woman being forcefully double teamed by an evil psychic's assistant and a hanging corpse with a hard-on.All of which must surely count for something.

This movie can only and has only been described in my circle of friends as the Stain. Because all who witness it's perverse power find themselves Stained. It's not that the movies bad, it's just that so many horrible things in-explicitly interwoven with so much randomness, that you laugh when things are horrifying and you clutch yourself in terror when something random and almost funny happens. And as you sit through more and more of it, you find that a funny black smudge is starting to infect your soul. Not a lot of it, but enough to be noticeable. After much scrubbing and scalding oil, we found the Stain to be fastly stuck with no possible solution. Unless you see Gore From Outer Space. Gore can in some ways, reverse some small effects of Crazy Lips....not all of the Stainness will be removed, but enough of it to breathe freely (and not find yourself feeling sick).Hope this was helpful

The excuse for the rest of the movie is a story about a widow and two daughters being harrassed by neighbors and media alike as the missing son is the prime suspect of the recent beheadings of middle school girls. When the equally harrassing police fails to help them look for the son, the younger daughter consults a psi-detective and her assistant. Director Sasaki's efforts to throw in every type of entertainment in 85 minutes of film has won him some praise for making a movie rising above all genre-boundaries in a mind-blowing treat. Criticism has accused him of not knowing where to stop--the director himself acknowledged this.I personally had the chance to ask him whose lips were going crazy, and he was embarrassed to answer that the title came before the plot, and just stayed there through the re-draftings of the movie.*POSSIBLE SPOILERS* FYI, Miwa Hitomi is a better singer than the movie lets you think, and Abe Hiroshi personally asked the director to give him all of Shimomoto Shiro's lines--to which his managers strongly objected and as always in Japan, had their way. Most of the film budget was saved for the grand finale. None of the actors were really interested in working with this movie when they got the script. All this information was given by the director himself in an interview after the movie's screening in his hometown, which I attended.