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Movie Review

‘Why Don’t You Play in Hell?’ still has a lot to learn

Samurai sword-wielding yakuza gangs take center stage in a movie within the movie “Why Don’t You Play in Hell?”Drafthouse Films

No doubt echoing the goal of the film’s director Sion Sono, Hirata (Hiroki Hasegawa) — the young wannabe auteur hero of “Why Don’t You Play in Hell?” — declares that he wants to make the greatest film ever. He offers his life to “the Movie God” for the chance to achieve this, and gets encouragement from the old projectionist at the local cinema, a nod perhaps to the sentimentality of “Cinema Paradiso.” But 10 years pass before he and his cartoonish cohorts and Sono’s scatterbrained screenplay can get it together. And it feels like 10 years before the inane preliminaries are over with and the Quentin Tarantino-esque Armageddon of the film’s final half-hour makes the waiting worthwhile.

Comparisons to Tarantino come up frequently in reviews of “Hell,” but with the exception of the finale, Sono’s style and material seem more reminiscent of the 1960s TV series “Batman.” If anything, Sono is less subtle. The cartoonish characters, the leaden irony, the hysterical or affectless acting, the clanging cuts, head-banging cinematography, gratuitous technical flourishes, and semaphoric soundtrack (with inexplicable passages from Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth symphonies) call out for a visit from Adam West. But Sono also adds some strikingly distasteful original touches, such as a scene in which a pert little girl in a white frilly dress slides across a floor pooled with blood to beguile a wounded yakuza. And you thought Tarantino’s foot fetishism was creepy.

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The little girl is Mitsuko (played as an adult by Fumi Nikaidô), who stars in a wildly popular toothpaste commercial in which she sings a ditty with the catchy lyrics “Gnash your teeth hard, let’s go! Now gnash and gnaw, let’s fly!” (Much of the film’s humor might be lost in translation.) But her ad is pulled after a scandal involving a foiled assassination attempt on her vaguely incestuous father, the gang chieftain Muto (Jun Kunimura). Ten years later Mitsuko has grown up into a “Kill Bill”-like tough cookie, and her father wants to resurrect her career by featuring her in a movie. By means of the unusual plot device of projectile vomiting, the dreams of both Muto and Hirata coincide, and the real show can begin.

Meanwhile, there’s a war going on between Muto’s gang and the faux-traditionalist, kimono-clad knuckleheads headed by Ikegami (Shin’ichi Tsutsumi), the apparently pedophilic, bleeding yakuza from the beginning of the film. They all serve as cannon fodder in a balletic, gore-spurting whoop-de-doo of samurai swords and severed limbs, with guerrilla filmmakers shooting assault rifles as well as cameras. It’s a self-reflexive tour de force, laugh-out-loud in its outrageousness, a true gift from the Movie God, who, if not Tarantino, is in this case probably Sam Peckinpah. You just have to endure 90 minutes of inanity to get to enjoy it.

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Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.