Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 5:4	Budget Medium

I've known for a long time that some weird and wonderful shit comes out of Japan. But this one threw me. Fortunately a little bit of time with the extras shed some light on what the movie was meant to be. About every fifteen minutes the movie changes styles completely. We start out with the sane guy in the asylum movie, then segue quickly into "The Fugitive", followed by "trading places with a twin" theme with a short intermission for some funny monks, then into a very bizarre Island of Dr. Moreau theme, which then turns into an Agatha Christie whodunit finale only to be ultimately capped with a suicide by fireworks. During one of the interviews in the extras someone talks about how funny this movie was and how the audience laughed and cheered at the ending. He must have used the work "absurd" fifty times when describing the film. Which was a great relief because the film is really well done, but almost seems like it is baiting the audience. Remember the scene in Amadeus where Tom Hulce as Mozart is riffing on other composers? He plays improvised melodies in an exaggerated style of the different composers. Here I think Teruo Ishii (director and screenwriter) and Rampo Edogawa (novelist) are playing the same game with western movies and stories. They touch on themes that are quite familiar and then tweak them in bizarre ways.

I am not even going to try to get the names straight here, there is no doubt that I would fail miserably. So anyway, our hero starts out in an insane asylum. After being caught in the womens' cell, he is admonished by the guard and returned to his cell. Soon he is attacked by a bald man and kills him while defending himself. Our hero then causally saunters out of the place and soon encounters a girl. During their discussion he asks here about a lullaby which she halfway remembers. As his pursuers are closing in on him, they agree to meet the next day to view a drawing. They meet the next day at the circus where the girl works and our hero has a mustache and beard and a drawing of a seashore. Just as she is about to reveal a significant piece of information about the drawing, the girl is killed by a knife which our hero dutifully removes from her chest as she falls to the ground. Predictably, the crowd assumes that he is the one who killed the girl and he flees for his life. We next view our hero clean shaven again and taking the train along the coast looking for the area he keeps drawing from memory. When he finds it, it turns out that a local landowner has just died that looks exactly like him, even down to the scar on his foot. Our hero goes to the graveyard, digs up his look alike and puts on his burial shroud. After fooling everyone but the dog that he is in fact the landowner come back from the dead, he heads off to an island. There he meets the very deranged father of the person he is imitating only to find out that he is one of the guy's four children. Turns out that the girl he has fallen in love with is his sister. After a policeman shows up to clear up the confusing story, the two lovers wander over to the fireworks display and go out in a blaze of glory.

It turns out that the writer of this movie, Rampo Edogawa, was a huge mystery fan and not only wrote many mystery stories and novels but translated several into Japanese as well. Rampo Edogawa was not his real name, it is a variation on Edgar Allan Poe an author he admired. This movie was filmed four years after his death and is based on one of his novels. It may be that the film's wildly varying themes is meant as a tribute to Rampo's varied styles as a writer. Clearly it is not meant to be taken literally and seriously.

The Malformed Men of the title are the results of Dad's experiments. Our hero was sent to the big city when he was three years old to become a skilled surgeon to help Dad create more strange combinations of people and animals. Obviously he needs a surgeon because left to his own resources, Dad mostly just seems to be smearing them in rice and rice flour and keeping them in cages. It turns out that Dad has webbed hands. He was pretty self conscious of these and even though he married the prettiest girl in town, he felt alienated by normal people. When he caught his wife in bed with another man, he did what anyone would do. He hauled them both off to his island and chained them to a cave wall. After the lover died, the wife survived by eating the crabs that fed on her lover's body. Still, she and Dad managed to produce four children, all of whom die by the end of the film.

Horrors of Malformed Men is just plain bizarre start to finish. From the interviews on the DVD I suspect that there are lots of jokes that American audiences just won't get. Still, it was huge fun watching a Japanese director play with American film genres.

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