DVD REVIEW: MASTERS OF HORROR – IMPRINT

The episode is set up to fail from the start because of casting: lead actor Billy Drago is atrocious. He’s laughably bad, undermining the drama of any scene he’s in. It’s a fatal performance. The other half of the casting problem, as noted in the excellent commentary track on the DVD, was that Miike forced Japanese actors to try to act in English. They’re unable to properly emote, and the interaction between the hammy Drago and the stumbling Japanese actresses bogs the film down, leaving Imprint without a center – which is especially deadly because the movie makes no sense. This isn’t really unusual for a Miike film, but the flatness (or cartoonishness, in Drago’s case) of the performances just draws attention to how nonsensical the story is and closes off any avenues of subtle meaning.

The good news is that even when his actors work against him, Miike remains a master of the visuals. Imprint has a strange and unnerving look, and the director’s camera always manages to find incredibly interesting angles to view the action. And of course there’s the trademark Miike perversity. This time it comes in the form of a torture scene that one-ups Eli Roth’s Miike homage Hostel, and a subplot dealing with abortion that apparently led skittish Showtime to scrap the show.

I am kind of baffled by this – the abortion content didn’t get to me. I don’t know if this is an indication of how jaded I am or that it was the subject matter and not the visuals that scared Showtime. There are scenes with fetuses being dumped in a river, but after you’ve seen a Miike movie where the main title is spelled out in semen, some fakey fetuses are underwhelming. We don’t even see the abortions happening, which is completely something I would expect from a Miike film.

The torture scene is harrowing, though. Miike seems to have two modes of violence – the very wacky and the very disturbing, and this falls into the second category. It’s more Audition than Visitor Q, and the scene goes on for what feels like a very long time. It’s also astonishingly effective because, unlike the current crop of torture porn films (of which I am generally an unabashed fan), the victim of this torture is a character we like. At least as much as we can like any of the woodenly-realized characters in Imprint.

Sadly, Imprint will be the first time many Americans experience Miike. While there are some excellent moments and while the last ten or fifteen minutes gets into trademark Miike strangeness, Imprint is mostly a major disappointment.

The DVD itself, though, is great. The strange thing about the Masters of Horror series so far is that I can recommend almost any of the DVDs just based on the fantastic special features, even though many of the episodes don’t warrant more than one viewing. Imprint might have the best commentary of the bunch because, while Miike isn’t on the track, the two commentators (American Cinmatheque film programmer Chris D. and writer Wyatt Doyle) are brutally honest about the episode. It was nice to hear their take on Imprint’s flaws, because I felt a little lonely with my dislike of the episode.