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Released by: Adness/Ventura
Released on: 830/2005
Director: Takashi Miike
Cast: Noaki Hosaka, Tomoko Nakajima, Ren Osugi, Sadaharu Shiota, Yoshinari Anan, Rieko Miura
Year: 2000
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The Series:
What's an MPD Psycho? In 2000, Takashi Miike directed a mini series for Japanese television based on a book by Eiji Ootsuka (who also penned the screenplay) that revolved around a detective who suffers from multiple personality disorder who gets involved in a series of investigations that revolve around the wrong doings of a bizarre cult that may be somehow connected to his past. The MPD in the title stands for Multiple Personality Detective, and the series is a strange blend of humor, horror, and mystery with plenty of those bizarre little touches that Miike is known for. The series is comprised of six episodes, roughly an hour long each, and this DVD presents the third and the fourth - so basically it's the middle part.
EPISODE THREE: LIFE IS A CONSTANT DOUBLE HELIX
Picking up where Volume One left off, a gang of Japanese high school girls (God bless those Japanese high school girls…. Sigh…) kill off a bunch of their classmates and then turn around and put bullets through their own heads in some sort of strange ritual killing spree.
Detective Amayima is called in to check out the scene and see if he can figure out the motive and the cause of the mass killing, and as he roams around examining the numerous corpses he finds upon arrival, he discovers that each and every one of the dead teenagers has got one of those strange barcodes tattooed on their left eye.
Without wanting to spoil the episodes conclusion, someone from Amayima's past had a hand in the killing spree and the detective thinks he knows just where to find him. He gives chase and tries to bring him to justice but it's too little too late and his nemesis makes his escape but before he splits the scene and disappears, he warns Amayima of a man named Isono Machi. Amayima is unsure what this could mean, but he takes note of the warning just the same.
EPISODE FOUR: THE CRUSHED ANTS
In this fourth episode, Amayima is assigned another strange case. Two gangs got into a fight at a local video arcade which resulted in a massive slaughter. When he arrives to check out the scene, he discovers next door to the arcade a bunch of body parts piled up that have been severed from the victims and which all have numbers carved into them.
Amiyama knows that the person responsible for the carvings is somehow connected to the disappearance of his beloved wife, but telling you anymore about his reasoning in this matter would be a huge spoiler and ruin a large chunk of the storyline. Let if suffice to say that, as in the last episode, some interesting details from our hero's past come into play and as more of his origin plays out for us, things tend to take an even stranger turn that what we've seen thus far in the series.
'Middle sections' usually don't far so well. Take the second Matrix film, for example - it was obviously just the dull part sandwiched in between the action packed first part and the exciting conclusion of the third part and as such, it's pretty much looked at as the weakest entry in the trilogy. With MPD Psycho, however, that is thankfully not the case. The third and fourth episodes of Miike's bizarre TV series builds nicely on what has come before without ruining too much of the mystery that will hopefully be revealed in the finale. Don't go into this one without watching the confusing first two chapters in the story as you'll need to see those to have any clue whatsoever is going on and thankfully, these later episodes explain some of what came before.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The image is matted to roughly 1.85.1 and is not enhanced for anamorphic television monitors. The good? The image looks great. The colors, especially for something that was shot on reasonably low budget digital video, look great and the black levels stay surprisingly strong for a production of this nature. There's a pretty solid level of detail present throughout the two episodes on this disc, and for the most part, everything looks very good.
Now the bad. The image is fogged pretty severely. Those accustomed to Japanese exploitation cinema know that it's policy of there to fog out genitalia but the company that made MPD Psycho went one step further and fuzzed out all of the gore as well. The result is that you can see just enough underneath the optical cover up to know that something cool is going on, but you can't really make out what that coolness is. This proves to be not only quite distracting, but also really damned irritating - it takes it to a ridiculous extreme. Apparantly this was a conscious decision on Miike's part, to kind of fly the middle finger in the air to the censors with whom he has had problems before but I found it annoying, even if it isn't Adness' fault that it's there in the first place.
The Japanese language Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track is fine. Dialogue is clean and clear, sound effects come through nicely, and the background music is properly balanced against the rest of the mix so as to not overshadow things but accentuate them. The English language subtitles are removable and free of any typographical errors though they're white and tend to be just a little hard to read during some of the lighter scenes.
Adness has included a handful of trailers for a few of their other Japanese cult cinema releases but nothing specific to the MPD Pyscho series itself aside from the previews.
The Final Word:
The series starts to come into its own with this second volume of episodes, and it definitely promises some interesting things to come. If you were into the first volume of the series, you'll probably enjoy MPD Psycho Volume Two even more.