Announcement
Collapse
No announcement yet.
MPD Psycho Volume One
Collapse
X
Collapse
-
MPD Psycho Volume One
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.Posting comments is disabled.
Categories
Collapse
article_tags
Collapse
- album review (218)
- album reviews (274)
- arrow video (272)
- blu-ray (3225)
- blu-ray review (4162)
- comic books (1392)
- comic reviews (872)
- comics (988)
- dark horse comics (484)
- dvd and blu-ray reviews a-f (1969)
- DVD And Blu-ray Reviews G-M (1711)
- DVD And Blu-ray Reviews N-S (1757)
- DVD And Blu-ray Reviews T-Z (878)
- dvd review (2513)
- idw publishing (216)
- image comics (207)
- kino lorber (391)
- movie news (260)
- review (318)
- scream factory (279)
- severin films (300)
- shout! factory (537)
- twilight time (269)
- twilight time releasing (231)
- vinegar syndrome (497)
Latest Articles
Collapse
-
Released by: Kino Lorber
Released on: February 22nd, 2022.
Director: Gianfranco Parolini
Cast: Lee Van Cleef, Jack Palance
Year: 1976
Purchase From Amazon
God’s Gun – Movie Review:
Directed by Gianfranco Parolini in 1976, quite late in the spaghetti western boom years, God's Gun (Diamante Lobo in Italy) introduces us to a bad, bad man named Sam Clayton (Jack Palance) who, along with his gang of equally bad, bad men, start wreaking...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 12:10 PM -
-
Released by: Kino Lorber
Released on: October 8th, 2019.
Director: Mario Bava
Cast: Christopher Lee, Reg Park, Leonora Ruffo, Gaia Germani
Year: 1968
Purchase From Amazon
Hercules In The Haunted World – Movie Review:
Directed by Mario Bava in 1961 and featuring a screenplay by Bava (and Sandro Continenza, Francesco Prosperi and Duccio Tessari), Hercules In The Haunted World (also known as Hercules At The Center Of The Earth and...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 12:08 PM -
-
Released by: Cinématographe
Released on: March 26th, 2024.
Director: Jack Nicholson
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Mary Steenburgen, Christopher Lloyd, John Belushi
Year: 1978
Purchase From Amazon
Goin’ South – Movie Review:
Made at the height of his career as an actor, 1978’s ‘Goin’ South’ sees Jack Nicholson once again in the director’s chair, seven years after his directorial debut, ‘Drive, He Said,’ failed to set the...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 10:29 AM -
-
Released by: Radiance Films
Released on: April 20th, 2024.
Director: Noburo Nakamura
Cast: Miyuki Kuwano, Mikijiro Hira
Year: 1964
Purchase From Amazon
The Shape Of Night – Movie Review:
Directed by Noburo Nakamura for Shochiko in 1964, ‘The Shape Of Night’ follows a young woman named Yoshie Nomoto (Miyuki Kuwano). In the opening scene, she’s working as a streetwalker on the outskirts of town and soon enough, she’s picked...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 10:26 AM -
-
Released by: Film Masters
Released on: April 23rd, 2024.
Director: Bert I. Gordon
Cast: Richard Carlson, Juli Reding, Lugene Sanders, Susan Gordon
Year: 1963
Purchase From Amazon
Tormented – Movie Review:
The late Bert I. Gordon’s 1963 horror film, ‘Tormented,’ is an effectively spooky ghost story made with an obviously low budget but no less effective for it.
The story revolves around a professional piano player...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 10:19 AM -
-
Released by: Grindhouse Releasing
Released on: March 12th, 2024.
Director: William Grefé
Cast: William Shatner, Jennifer Bishop, Ruth Roman, Harold Sakata
Year: 1974
Purchase From Amazon
Impulse – Movie Review:
Directed by the one and only William Grefé, 1974’s Impulse is one of those rare films that allows you to witness what it would be like if a really sweaty William Shatner got mad at a lady carrying balloons. Before that...-
Channel: Movies
04-15-2024, 01:20 PM -