Masters of Horror: Imprint (2006)

Imprint was made for the series "Masters of Horror," and aired as episode thirteen of the first season. It was directed by Takashi Miike of Audition(1999), and features Youki Kudoh, Michie Itô, and Billy Drago.

The Masters of Horror opening reminded me of a Gothed-out Nip/Tuck trailer with all the Photoshopped moving gargoyles and bleeding doll eyes and such. I felt like it was trying too hard to impress.

Really, if the director wants a movie to be truly lifelike, he or she should really dispense with most CGI work. I feel that most CGI effects end up falling into the Uncanny Valley. The effects are just real enough that the viewer's mind that the unrealistic bits seem more jarring by comparison, and ruin the effect overall. This idea is more closely associated with robotics, but I think it applies here just as well.

After the Masters of Horror opening, and up until about half-way in, I wasn't enthused. The first thirty minutes play like a high budget SciFi channel movie. This is especially bad because it it essentially the low budget that makes SciFi movies entertaining.

I almost turned it off, despite the cinematography, which was absolutely stunning. Everything is saturated in rich rainbow color, even during scenes of torture. The costumes were amazing.

However, beauty doesn't make up for bad scripts. Seriously. This movie is set in Nineteenth Century Japan, and everyone talks like characters in a teenage Lifetime movie. Even aside from a certain lack of originality in dialog, people in Japan a hundred years ago would not be using English proverbs like "Keep your chin up." I am sure there's a Japanese equivalent that would have meant the same thing but not sounded so out of place.

In addition, the script really didn't do the idea behind the movie justice. Miike really plays with the idea of narration, of what makes a story "true" or believable. He leads the viewer deeper and deeper into the story of Komomo's death, showing each scene in the scarred woman's story change as the facts behind it shift.

The story begins basically as a set of cliches, with a man returning to rescue the beautiful hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold and take her home with him to America. Though Kokomo is not at that geisha house, he is forced to stay the night and hires a geisha who keeps to the back of what looks like a jail cell the girls are kept in. Her face is scarred on the right side, the skin stretched oddly, giving her a permanent lopsided smile. She informs Christopher that Kokomo killed herself a few months before, as she believed Christopher to have abandoned her.

Christopher refuses to believe her, prying for more details. As he questions, her story expands and changes. The scarred woman herself transforms along with the shifts, going from noble hero to betrayer to monster. I don't want to give too much away, but in the end, the viewer is left in suspense as to what truly occurred, and left questioning who, exactly, is the monster.

Theory: A
Execution: C+