Cold fish

Black comedy, softcore porno, serial killers and gory horror are favoured elements in mainstream Japanese movies. Writer-director Shion Sono gave his audience their money's worth of all such macabre big-screen entertainment with 144 minutes of Cold Fish. Of its kind, its many genres, it's excellent.

An avant-garde poet and actor, Sino's first feature as a writer-director (in 1990) was Bicycle Sighs. His 2002 gory cult hit Suicide Club (aka Circle), and its 2006 sequel, Noroko's Dinner Table, brought him commercial and critical success, as well as global film festival attention.

Cold Fish is loosely based on a pair of serial killers who owned a pet shop. The film's alpha-male middle-aged extrovert madman owns a grand tropical fish store, and he matter-of-factly tells his chosen new business assistant that he's made 58 people "invisible". The younger man, a weak-willed nerdish pet fish shop-keeper, is easily trapped when the happy maniac rescues his bolshie teenage daughter from shoplifting charges.

Both men have sexy young wives with enhanced breasts and lesbian tendencies. The madman was sexually abused as a boy by his father. The daughter is a bad-mannered bitch who detests her young step-mother. Carnivorous fish are also featured, and a madly menacing hoodlum working for the aquarium boss. Various corpses are butchered methodically, by candlelight, their flesh and bones anointed with soy sauce before burning.

For two hours, the nerd is drawn further into the murderer's mayhem and mindset, and then, inevitably, the worm turns with horrific results. And any viewer who doesn't giggle and gasp, sitting spellbound by the blackly comic audacity, cannot be human.

The actors all present remarkably credible characters (even the voluptuous breast-bared wives) as psychotic misfits living in a loveless world of pain. The editing is well-paced, the camera-work exciting without being too flashy, and sound (especially rain) and music (pop and classic) effects underscore the moods tellingly. This is black comedy at its best, streaked with lots of red blood and wild-eyed scenery-chewing. Yet the only award it's collected was for best screenplay at a fantasy festival. It deserved better recognition.