Tweet
Released by: Adness/Ventura
Released on: 5/24/2005
Director: Takashi Miike
Cast: Noaki Hosaka, Tomoko Nakajima, Ren Osugi, Sadaharu Shiota, Yoshinari Anan, Rieko Miura
Year: 2000
Purchase From Amazon
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 first two.
EPISODE ONE: Memories Of Sin/Drifting Pedals
In the first episode we meet Detective Amamiya Kazuhiko, a man who suffers from multiple personality disorder and who is assigned to a case where a serial killer is running around Japan chopping the tops off of women's heads and making them into bizarre and grotesque flower pots after burying them up to the top of their neck in the dirt. Kazuhiko, who has was just about to retire, starts digging around to see what he can come up with and soon his wife ends up missing, the victim of a kidnapping possibly orchestrated by a cult whose members have computer barcodes tattooed under their eyelids.
EPISODE TWO: How To Create A World
The second chapter continues Kazuhiko's story and this time out he's trying to track down a serial killer who is into removing unborn babies from the wombs of their mothers using his knife and without the aid of anesthesia or even a hospital bed. Kazuhiko thinks that this might be a copycat killer as he remembers similar crimes from a few years back, and the all of the women who are killed have those mysterious bar codes under their eyes. Meanwhile, Kazuhiko's wife is under some sort of spell or hypnosis and wanders the city in search of something, while Kazuhiko gets closer to figuring things out when he ties in the murders to someone from his not too distant past.
The series seems to be set sometime in the not too distant future, but as to why this is, we don't know yet. The first two episodes basically just set up Kazuhiko's character and give us some background information on him, but seeing as this is only the first third of the series, it's really difficult to say where it's all going as we're not even half way there yet. I can say this though, MPD Psycho is really weird.
While pretty much all of the exploitative elements are covered up (see the video section for more on that odd phenomena), the very premise behind the killings in these two episodes are strange enough to be interesting. There's some wacky humor, much of it self referencing and almost all of it tongue in cheek, that adds a second layer of strangeness to it all and even if you can't really tell what the Hell is going on this early in the series, the show is entertaining enough based soley on the 'huh?' factor that Miike fans should give it a look.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The image is matted to roughly 1.66.1 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 surprsingly 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 severly. Those accustomed to Japanese exploitation cinema know that it's policy of there to fog out gentialia 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. Whether or not this was a concious 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, I or a studio impossed boo-boo I can't rightly say 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 langauge subtitles are removeable 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.
The Final Word:
Seeing as this one is basically the first two episodes of a mini series it's a little hard to grade and a little hard to follow but I'll give Miike the benefit of the doubt as it looks like things are headed in a pretty cool direction. The Adness/Ventura release of MPD Psycho Volume One looks great (aside from the optical censorship) and sounds pretty good and this one is worth a look despite the lack of extras.