Same idea as Serpent’s Path – this time Sho Aikawa’s daughter is the victim, and he dispatches some guy he assumes to be the killer within ten minutes of movie time. Now what?

A guy who looks suspiciously like Creepy but is another actor – somebody Sho presumably killed horribly in Dead or Alive, and the star of Kitano’s Getting Any? – offers the directionless Sho a job at his “import/export” company. The business of this company involves Sho stamping an endless pile of documents in a shabby office while the other guys have some kinda shakedown/blackmail/hitman thing going on. These guys appear small-time, so the boss gets involved, and the boss’s boss, and they want to recruit Sho and put down the others, but they don’t go down so easy. Similar look and tone to the other movie, but goes in a more traditionally yakuza direction.

In here somewhere is Chief Ren Osugi of Nightmare Detective… Ren’s Sonatine and Fireworks costar Susumu Terajima… Kill Bill boss Shun Sugata… but I didn’t catch character names, so I’ll sort it out during the next Kitano or Miike binge.

Kurosawa is a White Dog fan:

Great writeup by John Lehtonen. A small piece:

Eyes of the Spider is a film of emptiness, its protagonist hollowed at the outset. Empty time and empty people, and what is projected onto and, eventually, out of this emptiness. Tonally and generically dynamic, it moves its cipher hero (and Aikawa’s iconographic image) through a variety of generic scenarios and roles: the husband, the salaryman, the yakuza.

I had watched either Serpent’s Path or Eyes of the Spider (I forget which one) in the pre-blog era on VCD so after enjoying Chime (and before this year’s Serpent’s Path remake) it’s time to re/watch these in HD. They both hinge on a kid’s abduction/murder, and each main character’s plot spirals out of control, in very different ways.

Creepy Teruyuki Kagawa kidnaps gangster Yûrei Yanagi (Boiling Point) with the help of Creepy’s math professor friend Sho(w) Aikawa. But the gangster says another guy did the crime, and they have to keep kidnapping gangsters. The second guy (the husband in Door) fingers a third guy (a minor player in early Miike films), who takes them to the room where they’ve made torture videos for profit (these rooms were common in late 90s/early 00s horror).

Sho and Creepy:

Why is Professor Sho capably handling all the details and abductions here, what’s his deal? And why is he privately coaching the abductees on what to say? I guess he’s just trying to help kill as many members of this organization as possible – including Creepy, who it’s revealed used to work in their organization and therefore thought his own family would be exempt from the business. Darkest subject matter given a matter-of-fact tone with an absurd edge.

Michael Sicinski:

Formally, we can already see Kurosawa’s primary style taking shape; the clinical viewpoint and tendency toward long shots emphasize both an objective, godlike perspective as well as a sense that the film frame is a container, trapping its characters in culture and history. If the overt narrative of Serpent’s Path is somewhat vague, Kurosawa fills in all the crevices with a pervasive dread. Considering Kurosawa’s earliest work was purely genre based, here we see him breaking away from those strictures in a fairly dramatic fashion.