Executive Koala (2006)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Sorry, this movie sucks

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Minoru Kawasaki is a director who has made a career out of making insanely awful films. Now I am not talking about awful like an Ed Wood film, but awful because the plot ideas are completely insane to begin with and cannot be anything other than awful. But there are many of us who LOVE insanely awful films because they can be absolutely hilarious and that's why the film Executive Koala is another addition to my"you ain't seen nothing' yet" series.The film is about a hardworking and dedicated executive in Japan named Keiichi. He's an important man in his company, the envy of his co-workers and women think he's incredibly sexy. There's only one problem....he's a giant koala!!! Throughout this entire movie Keiichi is played by some guy in a big koala suit...but he's not all. There also are, for no reason whatsoever, a boss who's a giant white bunny and a guy who works in the local convenience store who is a frog...and all the rest of the characters are humans. And, I should point out, this is NOT a cartoon!! Does it sound 100% insane? Yep...because it is!!Unfortunately for nice-guy Keiichi, soon his girlfriend is found dead--stabbed to death by some maniac! And, with Keiichi's old wife missing for three years!! The police naturally think this marsupial is responsible and after a while Keiichi himself starts to wonder if perhaps he is as well. Is he a serial killing maniac or is this some elaborate plot being organized by forces of evil?! See the film and find out for yourself....if you dare!!If you think that this could be a good film or makes any sense. you are wrong. The film simply never tries to be coherent. The story is punctuated with bizarre and bloody dream sequences, there is also a hand puppet (Momo, the flying squirrel) and an ending that only would make sense if you are under the influence of LSD or have had a recent severe head injury. But, oddly, I liked it. The film has a wonderfully silly and wicked sense of humor and is also a lot of fun. However, people who like conventional films need not bother-- you really have to have a willingness to just turn off your brain and enjoy!For lovers of weirdness, I'd give this one a 9. For 'normals', I'd say a 1...at best.

The front of the DVD advertises Executive Koala as being apart of the "Minoru Kawasaki Collection", which made me chuckle twice as, first, I had never heard of him and the DVD assumed he was a director of stature enough to already have a 'collection', and secondly that his collection of films is of the kind of work that makes Japanese entertainment seem as wild and crazy and cute as it is. A sampling of his titles include The Calamari Wrestler, The Rug Cop, and Best Hit! Parade!, and he doesn't seem to be stopping yet, mostly through direct-to-video stuff that Takashi Miike would probably turn down. And with this film he has what is a kind of psycho-Kafka parable with a giant Koala-man fighting for his sanity and justice in a murder case. ... Yeah.Why a giant Koala? Hey, why the hell not? I love that the director doesn't really explain that there is a giant Koala-Man, nor that his boss is a giant rabbit, nor that there is a small role for a giant Frog who works at a convenience store. Everyone else in the film is human, and with the exception that the Koala is suspected of murdering a girl, and then possibly his ex-wife, or maybe more than that stemming from a childhood of evil, no one takes him being a Koala as not normal. It's just one of those 'things' in Japan, as if the mentality of the Muppets is so straightforward for them, albeit in this case in a dark-comedy-thriller context where the Koala goes insane with red-eyes and KILLS KILLS like a robot.The film grows to be a big entertainment mostly near the end with a big climactic fight that had me and my friends howling with laughter and cheering. Up until then, it has a curious disposition: it is funny, yes, but it also 'tries' to be funny in some ways that don't work, except maybe in some inside-joke way that Japansese would get and Western audiences would feel out of the loop. But the film has a great charm to it, and knows what it is enough to poke fun at itself (i.e. those flashback scenes the Koala has with his 'romance' stuff), and actually gets oddly dark when the Koala is sent to prison(!) in a fake Alcatraz scenario where he's bullied by everybody else.Executive Koala is recommendable to certain movie buffs. It's not a movie you tell your mother to watch unless she happens to have an affinity for weird anthropomorphic stories of corporate and psychological horror. But if you're hanging out with friends and want that next rush of crazy-Japanese filmmaking (or for Japan is, um, just another Thursday), it's fun and different. And the Koala-man is actually a good actor! I would credit him but IMDb doesn't provide any names for anyone (perhaps due to it being an anonymity thing, or just because of laziness).

I have no idea why people say ''Executive Koala'' is hard to understand. Almost everything is explained, bluntly, and the story is pretty linear. Aside from being unfinished, this movie is pretty simple. Described as a ''psychological thriller wrapped up in the packaging of a nonsense comedy--with giant animal characters'', I expected this to be humorous, at least slightly. No. ''Executive Koala'' wasn't even humorous accidentally! (Well, I guess if you find ax murder hilarious it could be.)So it's not funny. But this is supposed to be a convoluted storyline that (in the words of one reviewer) ''...changes direction frequently, especially in the thirrd act, when the plot changes several times...''. Sorry, it fails there too.I found the plot very linear, the story unfinished, and the movie fairly...simple. There are no ''plot twists and turns'', nothing ''funny'', and definitely nothing nonsensical.In the end,''Executive Koala'' isn't a total waste of time, it's just EXTREMELY misrepresented by its advertising.

Writer/Director Kawasaki Minoru shot to cult fame with the infamous "Calamari Wrestler" about a wrestling squid, and he's back in anthropomorphic territory with "Executive Koala".Keiichi Tamura is a hardworking executive in a pickle company, who is making a big merger at work and struggling with memory loss and the mysterious disappearance of his wife three years prior. He's also a koala, which doesn't seem to bother people too much, but then the president of the company is a large white rabbit. Tamura enters the sights of the police when his current girlfriend is found stabbed to death and his murky past seem to imply that he is not the well-mannered Koala he appear to be.On the surface "Executive Koala" takes the shape of a thriller, but delve into weird psychological territory and spices it all up with quite a few surprising twists and turns. Indeed, you never quite know what to expect next as one bizarre scene follows the next, ranging from romance to creepy horror and a musical trial. It doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense and becomes weirder and weirder, but then you were never really gonna get a normal movie when the main character is a suit wearing Koala.A cross between magical realism and surrealist expressionism, "Executive Koala" might be weird for the sake of weird, but unlike David Lynch and his sort, who take that thing very serious under the guise of art, "Executive Koala" is inherently silly and never tries to hide or excuse that."Calamari Wrestler" had a more straight forward and accessible plot and made sense within it's narrative universe. "Executive Koala" doesn't, but then it isn't supposed to. It just comes at you with a wealth of ideas and odd quirky silliness, but you can't help but feel that it's a joke on people who would take this sort of surrealism too serious and engage in deep analysis. "Executive Koala" strength is it's truly quirky reality and one-of-a-kind expression, all the while sending you in one direction wondering where it's going until you realize, "Hey, it's a giant talking koala" and you cannot help but laugh at even the darkest subject matter.You will probably come away wondering what it was all about, but still having been thoroughly entertained and laughed heartily at the goofy silliness of the whole thing. But that's a good and very charming thing.Highly recommended.