Junk Films

By Jimmy Squarejaw
www.facebook.com/yallaredead

When FACES OF DEATH was released in 1978, it was originally produced for the death hungry population of Japan by an Italian documentarian who wanted to up the ante a little in the mondo/bizarro/documentary genre.  In the land of the rising sun it was originally titled JUNK, and according to the commentary on the FACES OF DEATH 30^th ANNIVERSARY release it eventually grossed more than STAR WARS at the box office in 1977.  (Why the FUCK do I live in America?)  In the tradition of the JUNK movie series Tsurisaki Kiyotaka, director of OROZCO THE EMBALMER, compiled a collection of his psychotic short films and titled it JUNK FILMS which was released in the states a little while ago by Massacre Video.  Shall we?

JUNK FILMS opens in India (I think) with a few nice shots of an incredibly overcrowded tent town full of cripples, the impoverished, and amputees; it really sets a nice theme of “hey, life can be total shit.”  Scenes from Tsurisaki’s ambulance chasing days follow including first hand aftermath footage of, amongst others: a guy who got into a motor scooter accident and looks like a skin chalupa crammed full of guts, a lady stabbed to death with an eerie ceiling fan lingering above her, and a guy with his head split open displaying a plethora of webbed meninges everywhere.  One scene in this grouping of shorts I particularly like is a scene in an apartment above an alley where a guy has passed away by what seems to be natural causes while surrounded by his family and a lot of confused emergency service crew looking at each other trying figure out how to get this dude out of the apartment two stories up.  Take note kids, a lot of people don’t realize when you die you have to be transported to either a funeral home or morgue before you turn into a heap of jellied human jambalaya hosting a maggot orgy.  So the next time you think about shooting up and jerking off with a bag around your head, don’t fucking do it in your attic unless you weigh 80 pounds!  Moving along.  

One of Tsurisaki’s more elaborate shorts included in JUNK FILMS is of the Vegetarian Festival on Phuket Island, Thailand.  If you haven’t partied at the vegetarian festival you ain’t livin.’  These guys wail the fuck out of themselves on the back with blades until they split open like a hyman being ripped apart by a Los Angeles Laker.  After that stunt they stick guns, bars, and swords through their faces and follow in procession through the city.  I predict in 30 years this shall replace the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and we can all kill ourselves at any point before that happens.  Really, all we are missing is keg stands, twerking, and high fives and we got one hell of a vegetarian party!  But seriously this stuff is fucked up to watch and these people must have balls the size of skulls! Too bad that’s probably the reason smite was delivered to Phuket shortly after these films were shot in the form of a tsunami created by the righteous Pat Robertson and Jesus. 

The last scene in JUNK FILMS drove me fucking crazy and I really wish I didn’t ever have to watch it again.  Taking place in a nicer than nice looking crematorium, a group of Japanese people in their 30’s surrounds an urn containing the cremated remains of their buddy.  Instead of their brain using a two second buffer to restrain some of their idiotic comments, this group of hip folks just spout out the fucking stupidest shit for twenty minutes about death, and dying, and bones, and blah fuckin’ blah fuckin’ blah!  I cannot believe no one has ever pointed out to them how ANNOYING they sound as they try to weigh out life’s ultimate mysteries!  I bet Mr. Cremated Remains committed suicide because listening to these introspective morons for a short amount of time made me want to swallow a bee hive and ask a bear to fuck it out of me!

Other than that scene, I enjoyed JUNK FILMS quite a bit.  Tsurisaki did a good job making every segment interesting; whether it was with editing, camera effects, spooky music, or the subject matter itself, JUNK FILMS stands apart from the otherwise distended corpse known as the death film genre. There are a lot of scenes in this film I didn’t chat about so don’t let my brief synopsis throw you, it’s well worth picking up!

For Purchasing go to 

http://massacrevideo.com/site/shop/junk-films-standard-dvd/

Blake and Jimmy’s Extreme-O-Gauge!

Violence/Gore: 5 out of 5, it’s a death film for real.

Rape: 0 out of 0

Animal Death: 0 out of 0, a nice reprieve from the usual animal massacre in death vids.

Necrophilia: 0 out of 0.

Torture: 0 out of 0, no one is seen tortured but I bet the family of the dead guy in an urn surrounded by his fucking moron friends at the funeral home were slightly tortured listening to those fucking idiots.

Overall Movie: 4 out of 5, very nice, very good, very well!