Yosuke gets called out of retirement to help with an investigation. Meanwhile the appearance of a strange cult with barcodes tattooed on their eyeballs coincides with a number of gruesome murders.
You'll need to fit into specific criteria to get the most from the series. Firstly, you'll need to like mysteries that don't pander to a casual audience; pay attention or you'll get lost (I paid close attention and still felt lost part of the time). You'll need to like stuff that makes your brain melt like candle wax in a furnace. And, lastly but perhaps most importantly, you'll need to be willing to experience Takashi Miike's work. Miike is a Japanese film director with a love of all things bloody and violent. He's no concept of pacing, or perhaps he does and simply doesn't care.
Each episode has its own unique murder technique but also adds to the overall story arc. With there being rarely a satisfactory conclusion to the individual stories, I was left hoping it would all begin to make some kind of sense when the arc was tied up at the end. But this is Miike, to wish for such things is folly.
The series has a cast of sickos and idiots. There's a one-eyed snuff film lover, an idiot police chief, a killer that cuts babies from their mother's wombs, some school girl suicides, etc. It flits from coma-inducing boring to heightened (suggested) gore to slapstick comedy. (The pixelated nudity and gore are a stylistic choice by Miike; it enabled him to suggest things that were forbidden on TV and have the viewer's sick twisted mind fill in the rest.) In the end I was left scratching my head about something. I'll need to give it a second viewing.
6 episodes, approx 56 mins each.
3 severed body parts out of 5
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