Imprint

Coming off from a spectacular nightmare filled with violence and torture, I woke with a specific desire to see Takashi Miike's much-feted Masters of Horror episode Imprint, the episode that started a minor furore when it was banned from the cable broadcast that originally commissioned it.

But expectations kill the best hopes, especially when hope takes the form of gloriously vulgar and imaginative filmic violence - the particular kind I saw in my dreams. I don't know what Imprint did for the hoards of festival-goers who report – as veterans brag about their war scars – their trauma and awe at its audacity, or Tobe Hooper, who supposedly had nightmares himself after seeing it. The violence was actually rather mild – at least for Miike standards – and not really that imaginative.

The film though, takes place in a surreal and extremely exoticized Nipponland, where women speak Engrish and have red armpit hair, and pinwheels grow from the ground in place of flowers. Its imaginative candy-colored design and stylized visuals are a treat for the eyes though, and help rest them while waiting for Miike and the scriptwriter (Shohei Imamura's son and co-scriptwriter) to bring on the horror, which doesn't quite have the intended effect of making us stare mouth agape while the rolling credits smirk at us.