27th October 2021 BBC- In November 2001, one of the most violent and notorious films to emerge from Japan premiered in the UK, at the London Film Festival. Later described by Empire magazine as “a masterpiece of extreme cinema, crammed full of images that push back the boundaries of what’s possible – and allowable – on screen”, it would be duly chopped into shreds by censors in the UK and further afield, and banned outright in several countries around the world.
Ichi the Killer was directed by the now-infamous Takashi Miike – whose 1999 film Audition had already built him a reputation in the UK (after arriving on VHS via distribution label Tartan Video). It told the story of two deranged killers caught in a twisted cat-and-mouse chase across Tokyo’s red-light district of Kabukicho; the “Ichi” of the title was a mentally disturbed man, manipulated to kill by a master hypnotist. Kakihara was the deranged yakuza enforcer hot on his trail, determined to use whatever torture methods necessary to track down the man responsible for killing his gang’s boss.
Ichi the Killer typified the output of an intense faction of the East Asian cinema boom of the late-1990s and early-’00s. The film’s distinct Japanese identity stoked its cult popularity in the West, and along with the whole “Asia Extreme” genre of the time, created a new era of shocking cinema that foreshadowed the emergence of ultra-violent films in the mainstream today. Twenty years after debuting in the UK, it returns to the big screen this month as the final feature in the BFI’s six-film “J-horror Weekender” – part of its wider Japan 2021 film season.
