Why Don't You Play in Hell? (2013)

The Worst Film Ever

hyped garbage

Don't Believe the Hype

Absolutely Fantastic

Action Comedy with stylistic blood sprayage everywhereMovie follows two groups of people. The F-Bombers , guerilla film crew, and two Yakuza gangs battling for top position .. The F-Bombers want to film a gang war , and the yakuza clans want to make the perfect movie .. Holy matrimonyFast forward ten years later and everybody gets their wishFeatures a Bruce Lee look-alike , and a clueless Director who never wanted the position in the first place , a cute girl dancing in a pool of blood and yakuza memories still reliving the moment 10 years laterThe actual "filming" takes place in final 30 minutes

Fate causes the paths of a guerrilla film crew and two feuding Yakuza clans to clash for the second time in ten years in this outlandish comedy from 'Suicide Club' director Sion Sono. The movie initially feels like a twisted version of 'Bowfinger' or 'Cecil B. DeMented' as the young guerrilla filmmakers heartlessly intrude on the Yakuza madness to get money shots. In between the violence, there are also some moments of macabre beauty too, such as a young girl in a white dress sliding through a sea of blood, and things get more complex as the story progresses and jumps to the present. Deliciously weird and wacky as the film is, it takes a long time for the paths of the protagonists to cross once again, and the film feels way too long. It is, however, the midsection that needs trimming (especially a romance) as the carnage-heavy finale is glorious with the guerrillas' insensitivity to all the bloodshed at peak. The unemotional way in which they film all the action is uncanny; one gets a sense that they have completely lost all sense of distinction between reality and movie-making. The film has some solid performances too, particularly from Jun Kunimura as a much-feared Yakuza boss whose daughter used to be in toothpaste commercials, and Shinichi Tsutsumi as the other Yakuza boss who became fixated on Kunimura's little girl at an age that many would consider creepy. Fumi Nikaidou (as the adult daughter) also keeps singing her toothpaste jingle. It is that kind of delirious, unconventional comedy if one is in the mood for something decidedly different.

Nutty yakuza comedy from Sion Sono. It's overlong, particularly with an interminable set-up, but once we get to the big action set piece you'll find it well worth the wait. A group of amateur filmmakers calling themselves the F Bombers (led by Hiroki Hasegawa) has spent a decade looking for the opportunity to make a real movie. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for them, a yakuza gang is looking for someone to make a feature starring the boss's daughter (Jun Kunimura is the boss, Fumi Nikaido the daughter). Hasegawa proposes that they film the real-life gang war that is bound to happen with the rival gang (led by Shin'ichi Tsutsumi). Sono really could have shortened the film considerably had he realized the character played by Gen Hoshino, the love interest of Nikaido, was worthless and jettisoned him. Or, more obviously, he should have been combined with Hasegawa's character. As it is, Hoshino plays a shy, ineffectual character and he pretty much gets shoved to the background anytime the more lively Hasegawa is on screen. I can't imagine anyone caring about his burgeoning relationship with the drop-dead gorgeous Nikaido. None of this really matters once we get to the blood-soaked finale, which is about as fun as any movie I've seen in recent memory.

Beneath all my suffocating inhibitions, my inability to share my true feelings, my fear of doing what it is that I really want to do - there is a character somewhat akin to 'Hirata', in Sion Sono's 'Why Don't You Play in Hell?'. Here is a ridiculous and frankly insane character - a wannabe film director (and leader of the 'F**k Bombers' cinema club) who'll go to literally any length to realize his dreams and is not remotely discouraged by his complete lack of accomplishments over the past ten years. He's nuts, and yet my soul is frankly screaming for me to live my life with the same liberated, unashamed, energetic, joie d'vivre, that Hirata maintains in the face of it all... The spirit of the F**k Bombers!Before Sion Sono was a filmmaker, he was part of a poetry collective called 'Tokyo GAGAGA', that took their poetry screaming into the streets. 'GAGAGA', Sono's explained, is the 'sound of the soul'. By that same token, I've often felt that Sion Sono's characters are the soul, personified: their actions are crazy, over-the-top, and usually comically violent - they're not realistic, normal characters - and yet I see my own soul realistically reflected in his characters, more strongly than anyone else's.Like Kurosawa's 'Dreams', 'Why Don't You Play in Hell?' is autobiographical in the most uniquely and completely outlandish way. Hirata is Sono, from his early amateur filmmaking days, when he really did go round with his gang, calling themselves the F**k Bombers, playing Bruce Lee in the park, and being called an idiot by young children. That just about everything else in this movie is heavily fictionalized is pretty obvious, but just as Sono's characters don't reflect normal people, but capture their spirits, his story, if you consider it autobiographical, captures the spirit of his experience becoming a professional filmmaker. It's a movie about the spirit of movies, the spirit of filmmaking, and as Sono says, the 'love of 35mm'.It's also about a yakuza turf war. And there's some romance as well: a meek boy falls in love with a girl after seeing her shove a piece of broken glass through another guy's cheek with her tongue, and shortly gets over his own shyness. The movie is a crazily-ridiculous breathlessly-paced action-comedy, capturing the same punk rock energy as Sono's Love Exposure, and it's his most polished-looking film yet. It's a lighter affair than most of the movies he made before - the psycho-horrors and the Fukushima-dramas - but it's no less good; it's thoroughly entertaining from start to finish, and especially, everything after the F**k Bombers finally cross paths with the yakuza is pure genius.It's a movie that had me laughing, had me tapping my feet to the music (all written and composed by Sono himself), and had me grinning cheek-to-cheek the whole way through. And, like Sono's very best movies (Hazard, Love Exposure), it might have even inspired me, to loosen my inhibitions a little bit.