Okay I’m having mixed results with the Bloody Disgusting Selects line but I have a few more to go. Cold Fish is currently available on instant Netflix.
Cold Fish (2010) – Not rated but plenty of gore and sexual situations.
“In this bloody shocker inspired by a true story, Nobuyuki Syamoto — the downtrodden proprietor of a tropical fish business — finds himself drawn into the world of a twisted serial killer and his equally psychotic young wife.”
I wanted different and I got different. This movie is very polished, filmed well, has decent acting and a literate script. It is clearly overlong – this is not an epic and certainly didn’t need almost two and a half hours of run-time. It could easily have been trimmed by an hour and that would have made for a much tighter picture.
I wanted to get all the particulars out of the way in the first paragraph as nothing in the film is either great nor awful so I’ve no need to rant or rave over technical aspects. If you are male, it’s possible that you could watch this and see a mild-mannered man pushed to his limits. In fact the poster tagline is “How far will you be pushed?”
If you are female (or possess even the slightest bit of empathy for the opposite sex), you are likely to be sickened by the casual misogyny on display here. Japanese cinema, and by extension society, has often been accused of misogyny but most of my knowledge of Japanese cinema is limited to samurai films and the Japanese horror craze that started with The Ring.
If I watched this film without knowledge of the real world, I would think that all women wanted to be dominated, beaten, and raped. Please note that this isn’t even the theme or plot of the movie – it is just a casual byproduct of the plot.
Shion Sono directed and co-wrote this film. Honestly if I could put aside the misogyny, I could view this as a sick and twisted version of Straw Dogs (yes I know that one was misogynistic too). I think what Shion Sono was going for was some type of male empowerment saga. Unfortunately I just found it more depressing than disturbing.
