Yakuza Apocalypse
Directed by Takashi Miike (2015) **1/2
Film director Takashi Miike could be described as the Japanese Roger Corman. He’s made over one hundred feature films in twenty years, in a wide variety of genres and styles and his movies embody the genre-mixing, logic-deficient, risk-taking of Corman’s oeuvre (Corman’s The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, 1958, comes to mind).
It’s noteworthy that, like so many films into Miike’s career, he still makes films with the energy and enthusiasm of a sixteen-year-old kid who decides to make an iPhone movie in his neighborhood. Yakuza Apocalypse, though using a professional (but not large) budget, exemplifies the same kind of seat-of-your-pants filmmaking. It’s a crazy, violent, nonsensical romp, practically designed to annoy those not open to its anarchic spirit.
Yakuza boss Genyo Kamura (Lily Franky) is loved by the citizens he protects and his underlings but is secretly a vampire. While mentoring the young mob boss wannabe Akira Kageyama (Hayato Ichihara), he’s confronted by two out-of-town visitors, who want to pull Kamura back to a previous life: a gun-
slinging priest with a mysterious coffin on his back and a martial artist disguised as a tourist: Mad-Dog (Yayan Ruhian, of the amazing Indonesian action drama, The Raid). After much martial arts fury, the duo extract Kamura’s vampire blood with a steampunkish, gun-like device, and decapitate him. Decapitating a vampire means little in this movie, though; Kamura bites into Kageyama’s neck, transforming him into a Yakuza vampire, a dilemma made worse when the neck of the girl he pines for, Kyoko (Riko Narumi), begins to look very enticing.
The succeeding plot is a shambles, but it’s a shambles you won’t soon forget. There are the slave knitters shackled to tables in a Yakuza basement (never explained), the annoyingly smelly Japanese folklore imp, 
Kappa, part duck, part turtle (known for removing a mythical organ called the shirikodama from their human victim’s anus), the ear-squirting Captain, whose motives and allegiances are unclear and who resorts to growing new citizens from the earth after too much of the city’s populace become vampire Yakuzas (who can Yakuzas shake down if everyone’s a Yakuza?).
Nothing thus far, though, will prepare your brain for the movie’s top villain: a martial arts-fighting monster in a tacky cloth frog suit, equipped with hypnotizing eyes and portending the end of the world.
Yakuza Apocalypse contains two gratuitous rape scenes, both offensive and completely unnecessary. Otherwise, for those who can withstand the bloodshed, the film’s deliberately dumb and silly concepts and its devil-may-care disregard for nearly all the attributes which make for good storytelling congeal to create a world which never would be, or could be, filmed in the United States.
—Michael R. Neno, 2021 January 25