Often when a movie is termed “dream-like” the description can mask an aimless narrative or artsy self-indulgence.  I’m going to suggest that a lot of these movies are not precisely dream-like—that is, they approximate what we remember about our dreams, but not how we experience them.  No matter how bizarre the dream, the dreamer usually senses some underlying logic to its events; it’s only after we awaken that we say to ourselves, “Wow, to think that that actually made sense to me…”

Cult director Teruo Ishii’s feverishly innovative and occasionally excessive Horrors of Malformed Men (1969), however, is a movie that truly comes close to replicating the vast tracts of gaudy depravity and nebulous angst that mark the unconscious.  Events that seem disconnected, shocks that feel random, and (apparently) central characters who show up and then die with equal abruptness—it’s hard to dismiss these as instances of mere sloppiness or opportunism when they occur during the film.  That’s because there’s a nagging sense that everything will come together and all will be explained.  It’s hard to trust this feeling, though, so outrageous and weirdly thrilling are the images and sounds that assault us.  And then finally, at the eleventh hour, everything is explained… kind of.  That is, not “explained away” to the extent that we lose our wonder over them, but rather the opposite:  our wonder increases as we realize that Ishii has created in this film an entire universe of madness, complete with its own oddball yet compelling coherency.



Part of this exhilarating collision of nightmarish vision and disorienting narrative is evidently the outcome of a happy accident.  Ishii set out to adapt one particular novel by Edogawa Rampo (Japan’s canon author of the macabre), and then decided that—why not?—he might as well shoehorn in elements from his other works as well.  To imagine the product of such an undertaking, start with an analogous English language author known for short and long-form fiction—Stephen King, H.G. Wells, or Shirley Jackson might work.  Then picture what would result if one of that writer’s major novels was merged with a “greatest hits” selection from his/her short stores and the final movie entitled the "Collected Works of…"  That’s exactly what happened in this case.

While early scenes in Horrors of Malformed Men suggest, at best, an overrated exploitation film, the film consistently grows and builds in complexity.  No, the feeling of “anything goes” never really departs, but rather gets ratcheted up to operate on a greater and greater scale.  The ending is one that left me floored in a way that few movies other than Miike’s Dead or Alive (1999) have.  You sit there wondering if you really saw what you just saw and marveling at how the tone that’s been struck is actually appropriate in some outlandish way—it’s what a movie has to do when it keeps escalating and has no where else to go except straight through the roof.

How Ishii accomplishes so much with relatively simple costumes, makeup effects, and (yes) musical numbers, is hard to explain.  A movie about unfathomable mysteries becomes, in the end, an exercise in a most mysterious kind of moviemaking.