Review of Kichiku: Banquet Of The Beasts

Introduction

I`m not particularly fond of Horror movies, but every year around October 31st, I get an urge to watch a film that will fulfil my annual quota for spookiness, slashers or all out gore. It`s not much of a surprise that around this time of year, the number of horror titles sent for review sees an upturn. Quite recently I received Kichiku Dai Enkai for review, and reading the blurb I decided to put it to one side for a Halloween night viewing, although it must be made clear that this is not a horror movie with ghosts and ghouls.

Made in 1997 for the princely sum of $30000, Kichiku Dai Enkai is director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri`s student opus. The cast and crew are fellow film students and the film took two years to complete. Kichiku Dai Enkai: Banquet of The Beasts is set in the late sixties/early seventies, when students the world over could afford to worry about more than just their student grants. This was the age of the student radical movements, when in the United States, Europe and Japan, the youth tried to affect political change through any means possible. This was the era of the student riots.

The politics of the party shown in Kichiku isn`t really defined, but that is beside the point, as their leader has been arrested and the remaining group begins to disintegrate. The new leader Masami uses her sexuality to maintain control, but suspicion and paranoia sets in as she becomes more irrational. When leader Aizawa commits suicide in prison, the distrust in the group that has been bubbling under the surface explodes in an orgy of violence, torture and death.

Video

Kichiku was shot on 16mm film, so it`s unsurprising to see that the image is soft on this NTSC 4:3 transfer. There`s a bit of print damage and a whopping great big hair in the shutter in a few scenes. It`s what you would expect for a low budget film. The transfer on this single layer disc is less than ideal, with aliasing and moiré in certain scenes. The student nature of the film is also apparent with some scenes poorly framed, and a couple of directing clichés as in the wild camera movements accompanying the moments of insanity and excess. Kichiku is presented on a Region 0 disc.

Audio

The sound comes in a DD 5.1 Japanese track, but again it`s little to be excited about, with the sound equally placed among the speakers, there aren`t really any discernable surround effects. There are moments of hiss and distorted speech, but by and large the dialogue is clear. There are English subtitles naturally.

Features

The extras for Kichiku are quite comprehensive and warrant a dual layer disc all for themselves. The menus are presented in gory red widescreen, but the features themselves are all presented in 4:3 and with DD 2.0 sound.

There is the ubiquitous trailer and a couple of biographies/filmographies for director Kazyoshi Kumakiri and actor Shunsuke Sawada.

The Making Of Kichiku lasts half an hour and is a sequence of behind the scenes footage from the film, covering rehearsals, special effects shots, and shooting the scenes. The low budget nature of the film is immediately apparent in what the actors are willing to do for the film. The torture look more brutal in the behind the scenes footage than it does in the final film, despite the actors being padded beforehand. Also the vomit scene is pretty gross revealing a whole new side to method acting.

Reaction to Kichiku is 8 minutes of footage of Film Festivals, quotes from critics and interviews from press junkets.

There are four discrete interviews on this disc. The introduction by Tom Mes is pretty informative as he takes 21 minutes to look into the background of the film, and neatly analyses the movie. As he speaks in English there are no subtitles.

The interview with the director takes 30 minutes and he goes into detail regarding the making of the film, what inspired him, and the critical response to the film. I did notice a flaw in the subtitles where they just stuck for three or four sentences. It`s as if they just gave up on translating for a minute or so.

Finally there are interviews with the Cameraman Kiyoaki Hashimoto (17 minutes) and actors, Tomohiro Zaizen, Shunsuke Sawada, Shigeru Bokuda, and Kentaro Ogiso (37 minutes)

The extras serve to shed more light on the film and give an opportunity to re-evaluate it after having seen it once. Whether they serve to alter one`s opinion on the film is another matter but they are a much-appreciated compliment to the film.

Conclusion

Kichiku Dai Enkai is the kind of film that will attract two audiences. The obvious assumption is the gore and splatter in this film will appeal to those whose appreciation for the more visceral things in life requires more than your average blockbuster. Unfortunately they will probably have to fast forward through the first half of this film until things get juicy. They will have missed the infighting, the power struggle, and the disintegration of personalities that leads to the final paroxysm of self-destruction. With its roots in the student movements of the sixties and seventies, this is a subject that would be appreciated by a different audience.

There is plenty of gore in this film, beginning with a particularly messy death by shotgun. Castration and decapitation all lead up to a warped climax in which a blowjob with bite is followed by a rape by shotgun, during which the trigger is pulled. While the violence is graphic, and is occasionally strongly sexual, the sexual content itself isn`t graphic, and is implied instead.

Unfortunately, none of this worked for me. The violence is numbing and so extreme as to be even comical. But a failure to develop the characters meant that when things started to go wrong for the group, I just didn`t care what happened to them. It`s a shame too, as nearly an hour is spent leading up to the violence, and all we really see is Masami sleeping around with various members of the group trying to hold on to her power, now that her boyfriend is in jail. Perhaps the only relationship of note in the film is Kunagaya and his protégé Shigeru, whom he introduces to the group. Theirs is almost a mentor pupil relationship and it`s obvious that Shigeru idolizes the more experienced Kunagaya. However the turn that their relationship takes, while it is the only really unsettling thing about the film, is a little too implausible to make sense. It does however hint at how much more powerful the film could have been, had we have been able to get to know the characters properly before their little group imploded.

It is apparent that this is a student film, though one with great scope and ambition, simply through the lack of skill on the part of the actors. The descent into madness of the group and especially de facto leader Masami is accomplished through endless fake laughter, which quickly turned into annoying cackling that distracted me from the film.

As a student film, Kichiku Dai Enkai is an amazing accomplishment in scope and professionalism. But on a personal level, the story is just tedious and the violent content is ineffective. The film naturally betrays its low budget roots, but the extras with this disc would be impressive on a bigger budget title, and actually gave me pause for thought, making me want to re-evaluate my opinion. But my initial opinion stands, and I cannot recommend this film.