"Tajuu jinkaku tantei saiko - Amamiya Kazuhiko no kikan" (2000) TV mini-series

User Rating:

6.6/10   

Director:

Takashi Miike

Writers:

Eiji Ootsuka (novel)
Eiji Ootsuka (screenplay)

Release Date:

2 May 2000 (Japan)

Genre:

Horror | Mystery | Thriller

Plot:

Yosuke Kobayashi, a detective assigned on a homicide unit, saw his wife killed by a serial killer, Shinji Nishizono...

Plot Keywords:

Serial Killer | Detective | Murder | Homicide | Panic

Cast

Naoki Hosaka	...	Kazuhiko Amamiya / Yôsuke Kobayashi / Shinji Nishizono
Tomoko Nakajima	...	Machi Isono
Ren Osugi	...	Tooru Sasayama (as Ren Oosugi)
Sadaharu Shiota	...	Masaki Manabe (as Sadaharu Shioda)
Yoshinari Anan	...	Kikuo Toguchi
Rieko Miura	...	Chizuko Honda / Chizuko Kobayashi
Lily	...	Yôko Yamamoto
Nae	...	Tomoyo Tanabe (as Nae Yuuki)
Satoshi Matsuda	...	Tatsuya Ueno (as Tomonori Masuda)
Fujiko	...	Mami Sasayama / Tooru's wife
Saki Ohara		(as Saki Oohara)
Hiroto Horibe
Chiaki Kuriyama
Shun Satô	...	Saku Ooe
Shun Ichijô	...	Hisashi Shimazu

Also Known As:

"MPD - Psycho (Multiple Personality Detective): The Complete Miniseries" (USA) (DVD box title)
"MPD Psycho II" (USA) (DVD box title)
"MPD Psycho III" (USA) (DVD box title)
"MPD Psycho" (USA) (DVD box title)
"Multiple Personality Detective Psycho - Kazuhiko Amamiya Returns" (International: English title)

Runtime:

54 min (6 episodes)

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.78 : 1

Certification:

UK:18 (edited version) | Australia:R

Filming Locations:

Japan

Company:

Excellent Film

Movie Connections:

References The Shining (1980)

a disappointing, confusing, censored mess from Miike

I'd liked the Takashi Miike films I'd seen so far, but I found this pretty disappointing. I'd bought it, but I won't be keeping it.

I saw it on the Adness DVD, which has just two episodes. In the first, a killer abducts women, cuts the top of their skull off to expose the brain, plants them in the ground up to their chin, and plants a flower in the brain. You can tell that from the DVD box. In the movie, the top of the head is digitally blurred out by TV static. Had you not seen the DVD box, the viewer wouldn't know what people were looking at until later a young cop produced a small model of the body. Oddly, there is also a flash frame later on of the woman's head and it is not censored. Apart from this, I'm not really sure what was going on. Some women get phone calls, and a sketchy animated character cavorts around when that happens. An animated character also appears on TV screens sometimes. It's unclear if anybody sees it.

In the second episode, pregnant women are being found cut open and their babies are missing. Again, a cop produces a model of what the corpses are like, which is helpful since again the actual body is censored. There is also a natural birth in the movie, but oddly even that baby and the umbilical cord are censored! According the the DVD box, uncensored versions were not kept when this was originally made. Perhaps even if they had, if they knew they were going to be censored, maybe they didn't bother actually showing anything...? Not sure.

If I hear the later episodes are better, maybe I'll look for them. As it is, I won't bother.