EM: EMBALMING

By: BRIAN THOMAS
Review Date: Friday, June 24, 2005

Tokyo police embalmer Miyako Murakami (Reiko Takashima) is drawn into an intriguing case by her admirer Det. Hiraoki (Yutaka Matsushige) when Yoshiki Shindo, the teenage son of a prominent government official, takes a dive off a tall building, and she's ordered to restore the body for the funeral at the parents' request. After the job is finished, there is a break-in at the lab and the corpse's head is stolen. Under pressure from the politician father, Hiraoki grimly sets out on a quest to recover the head and bust the ring of organ thieves thought responsible. As for Miyako, she vows to finish her job of embalming as a point of professional pride, but soon finds even more personal reasons to stay on the chase. For one thing, she gets a curious warning from the Shindo's religious leader Daitokuin Chief Bonze Jion (Kojiro Hongo of YOKAI MONSTERS 3 and several Gamera films) to refuse the job, which is an apparent contradiction she's impelled to find an explanation for. But the revelation from her assistant Kurume (Seijun Suzuki, director Aoyama's hero) that an evil outlaw embalmer named Dr. Fuji may be involved in the crime draws her in even more, since details of the doctor's history seem to jibe with those of her long-lost mysterious father.

Managing to track down Fuji (Toshio Shiba of GODZILLA VS. HEDORAH in a standout role) via email, she's taken by an Ygor-like assistant to a meeting with the outlaw in his gory mobile lab. However, she finds the meeting more frustrating than revelatory, and Hiraoki's raid on the organ thieves is just as much a failure. Clues to the real fate of Yoshiki's missing head come from other directions, leading to the discovery of rare mental disorders and the unspooling of a conspiracy to enact freakish experiments.

As only 1% of corpses in Japan are embalmed, the subject matter of this horror film is much more uncommon there than it would be in the USA, in which more than one television series has been made about embalmers. Already in strange territory, Aoyama pushes us into the outré even more by hinting at supernatural influences, ninja assassins, identical twins, multiple personality disorder and Frankensteinian weird science. Some, but not all of these elements turn out to be distractions and red herrings, while others have more to do with the characters' personal journeys than they do with the central quest for a severed head. Skating the edge of horror and fantasy in this way, he keeps the audience on edge throughout, wondering what could possibly come up next. Unlike many of the hit J-horror films now being remade in Hollywood, Aoyama is influenced far more by the work of Seijun Suzuki and his contemporary (and somewhat of a mentor), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (CURE), presenting his grotesques within the context of the cool police procedural and film noir atmosphere, often spicing things up with showy cinematic tricks.


Artsmagic provides a presentation of the film that is adequate, but I spotted incidences of shifting image areas enough that I can't say that it's 100% satisfactory. Jasper Sharp, editor of Midnight Eye, provides an authoritative commentrak that is waylaid a bit when he reads from an essay on Suzuki, but he does a good job of not only offering a brief history of Japanese horror flicks, EMBALMING's place in the new wave of horror, and discussing the film at hand. For confirmation of some of Sharp's information on the director, as well as a firsthand examination of his intentions toward the film, access the 19-minute video interview on the disc.

Copyright © 2005 Brian Thomas, author of the massive book VideoHound's DRAGON: ASIAN ACTION & CULT FLICKS.
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