The City of Lost Souls (2002)

A film from the insanely prolific Takashi Miike, the demented Japanese auteur who gave us (among other things) Audition. This one, with its manic pace and weird digressions, is more representative of his usual work -- though it is for the most part missing the extraordinary capacity for gore and scat that have made films like Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q popular cult items. It also doesn't quite hang together as a film, instead feeling like a series of disjointed vignettes that got knitted together somehow. Still, I almost gave it a B-minus for general coolness and the fact that it does get better (read: more cohesive) in its second half -- but there's a dumb twist ending that seems to exist just so Miike could say his film had a twist at the end.

Grade: C+