Oh! My Zombie Mermaid (a.k.a.
Ah! House Collapses)
Director: Naoki Kudo
Year: 2004
Running Time: 99 minutes
Production Company: Soft on Demand
It seems like an inordinate number of bizarre
cult type films are coming out of Japan these days – to the point where
mainstream films seem to be getting less and less attention outside of
the country. I suppose they have always been around, but many of the small
independent production companies/new directors are championing these low
budget oddball films while the older more settled movie firms still stick
to the basics – melodramas and samurai films. Certainly, it is these smaller
films of late that have captured the imagination of many western film fans
with movies like Battlefield Baseball, Cromartie High, Wild Zero, Executive
Koala, Calamari Wrestler and Yaji and Kita finding audiences, foreign distribution
and acceptance. These films don’t really fall into any specific genre –
they simply survive on their amusing weirdness and no holds bar imagination.
They often take place in the real world but they create rule sets that
are absurd and totally unrealistic and then play it perfectly straight
– zombies killing on the baseball field, singing samurai homosexuals on
motorcycles, a giant squid in the ring, gorillas attending class, a koala
bear in a business suit going to the office – are all part of the natural
order of things in these worlds.
“Oh! My Zombie Mermaid” can certainly take its
place among these films for its absolute sense of absurdity and wonderful
tongue in cheek humor. Like many of these cult films, it is played in total
seriousness by the characters but has spoof written on it in loud chuckling
letters. At a high level you could say this is a combination of Battlefield
Baseball, Game of Death and Splash (and let's throw in Zatoichi towards
the end), but it’s not an easy film to describe its essence because on
the surface it could sound like an almost normal film, but it’s the treatment
that is so silly. The action is over the top crazy and the melodrama is
just a wonderful parody of the over abundance of corny schmaltz that Japanese
films can be full of. At least I assume it’s a parody – with this
film it’s rather hard to be sure if it’s trying to be serious or not.
Japanese wrestler Shishio (Shinya
Hashimoto – a real life wrestler) has built his wife Asami’s (Urata
Awata) dream house for her and his family and makes the mistake of throwing
a house warming party for his wrestler friends. His arch enemy Ichijoh
(Nicholas Pettas) shows up uninvited and taunts Shishio for killing his
brother in the ring and this leads to an all-inclusive brawl that pretty
much demolishes the house – and what is left intact is blown up minutes
later by an explosive device set inside. The wife who was upstairs happily
playing the piano and singing “If I were to build a house I would build
a small house” through all of this is badly hurt and sent to the hospital
– but her recovery seems underway when mysteriously her skin begins to
peel off – revealing . . . scales underneath – the dreaded Mermaid bacteria
– soon she can only sqeak in a high pitched voice and begins to develop
a fin. Shishio doesn’t care if his wife is turning into a fish though –
he loves her no matter how scaly she gets.
With expenses piling up and a hope that building
a new house will cure his wife, Shishio accepts the offer of a sleazy TV
producer (Shiro Sano) who wants to put on an extravaganza on live television
– fights to the death. On each level of a pagoda like structure Shishio
will have to fight a different opponent to the death - among them a huge
man mountain gajin, an Amazon of indeterminate gender and gigantic breasts,
electrified baths, a zombie who rips out his intestines to strangle Shishio,
booby trapped chandeliers and others. Almost the entire final forty minutes
of the film is one big crazy non-stop action scene – at one point his lovely
sister-in-law Nami (Sonim) heroically joins in the fight like a lady ninja–
and its great fun and very brutal – but what would you expect from a fight
to the death – a dinner at Elaine's? These kinds of films are so quirky
that one can usually judge that they won’t like it if this sort of film
just isn’t to their taste – my guess would be that Dick Cheney would not
find this amusing, George Bush just might. But either it clicks with you
or it leaves you feeling superior for thinking it idiotic rubbish – I disliked
Battlefield Baseball, didn’t think that much of Calamari Wrestler but really
enjoyed Cromartie High – and really have no clue why. Same with this
– I really liked it but for no rational reason that I can think of – it
just clicked with me - perhaps because underneath all the zaniness and
absurdity lies a very sweet story of romance and the love of a man for
his wife.
Sadly, Shinya Hashimoto died in 2005 at the
age of 40 from a brain hemorrhage.
My rating for this film: 7.5
Source: Screener
