DEATH FILE BLACK

By jimmy Squarejaw

Back in action and ready to bore the living shit out of you is the incredibly bland narrator from the Japanese death film series DEATH FILE.  This time around the would-be thanatologist (look it up) brings us along on a journey into the abyss known as DEATH FILE BLACK. Beginning with a long dreary introduction on the dark streets of an urban scrawl somewhere, our trusty narrator fills us in on the horrible visions and locations we are about to visually embark upon.  I’m left with only assuming what he is saying because my copy of DEATH FILE BLACK does not have subtitles so let the bull-headed American misinterpretation ensue!

According to the map on the screen we are going to Brazil.  And in Brazil we are thrust into some sort of situation room where people talk on cell phones bigger than Wilt Chamberlain’s heritage dispensing unit.  WHAT? WHO? WHEN?  Quickly everyone in the situation room mobilizes and we’re off to a neighborhood that is beyond the definition of ramshackle.  The narrator and a few of the local smokies wedge themselves into an apartment to find a deceased individual surrounded by boxes, shelves, garbage and other geometric shapes that just make a shit load of clutter.  Someone on the Narrator’s staff is a translator, so Brazilian gets translated to English to Japanese and we find out that this guy is dead.  The decomposing color, bugs, and blood could have told us that too but hey, they’re the journalists ok!  A few guys step in, give the deceased the ol’ sheet wrap around and out they go to load him into literally a body wagon; a U-Haul type truck with a 2 X 2 body shelving unit in the back compartment.  The narrator says things into the camera and we all head out to follow the body wagon on it’s way back to I’m guessing a headquarter type building of official status. 

Evidently the Marx Brothers wrote this scene because the body wagon breaks down on the side of the road, everyone is looking at the defunct engine like Brock Hudson used to look at vaginas and then the drivers start pulling out their guns to show the camera crew while laughing.  This whole scenario is all over American bar band blues music mind you so I figure I need to move to Brazil!  Following this is a nice at home moment with one of the body wagon drivers where the narrator and the driver have a chat.  We meet the wife and kids and extended family members to round out the night. 

The narrator lines up a tour of the Medico Legal, I’m guessing morgue, and has a chat with the head pathologist.  Not a bad looking facility being that it’s located in one of the most impoverished locations in the world and then back to action as the crew heads out on another thrilling dispatch!

People must be really accustomed to seeing body wagons roll through their streets because everyone runs up to the truck like the driver is throwing out ice cream cones mixed with cocaine.  This dispatch the crew goes up to a gentleman holding a plastic dish that looks like the bottom shelf from a refrigerator made in 1987.  In it?  An aborted fetus almost old enough to grab the finger of the guy holding the container and suck it’s own thumb.  The policia bring the DEATH FILE crew to the stream they fished the thing from and chat for a bit. 

The next morning the narrator is having some lunch in a quant restaurant and then a map comes up that focuses in on Tokyo.  This segues to a nocturnal skyline peppered with bright lights, a bustling population, and something that looks like the Eiffel Tower?  Those damn innovative people!  The narrator lands an interview with a seemingly normal Japanese couple.  Normal as in the lady gets up from the table, lays some newspaper down on the floor, places a bowl, squats, shits in the bowl, then places it in front of her gent.  He looks quite thrilled and starts forking the fibrous brown turd into his mouth.  I’m guessing this wasn’t a meal of delectable ikura, uni, or saba because it looks like she shit out a thick reduction sauce of Campbell’s Chunky Jambalaya mixed with corn nuts and burnt grass.  And her expression is hilarious while watching him continuing to sniff and consume every morsel of congealed crap.  Hell these people are worth talking to, so the narrator chats with them for a while after the head of the household’s fecal dining session is over.  Well enough of this shit, n’yuck n’yuck n’yuck, lets head over to Thailand!

In Thailand DEATH FILE BLACK goes into a faster paced montage segment.  The first scene is scored with really cheesy lounge music playing while a guy is pacing back and forth on top of a roof.  Nothing happens except concerned citizens waving their arms and yelling.  Bookmark this scene because it jumps to an onslaught of scenes with mutated babies, one of which is the bug eyed suction cupped mouth baby from DEATH FILE RED.  A longer scene in the X-Men baby montage takes place on the shore of a serene river.  The camera crew is front and center to watch a crew of local officials stand on the bridge above and fish out a water bloated, cleft faced baby.  There had to be an easier way to do this, my thought is to go down to where the camera crew was and walk out of the 5 feet of water it was found in.  Grab it, discreetly place it into a towel or sheet and walk out.  As opposed to hoisting it up thirty feet by wire in front on 300 gasping people, but that’s why they make the big bucks right?!?!?!

 A few more scenes of car wrecks, appendages ripped off by elevators, and various other gore leads back to the poor bastard pacing back and forth on the rooftop we saw before.  The god-awful lounge music rears back up as the tension and the crowd around him builds.  Does he live or does he jump to his death?  You’ll have to track DEATH FILE BLACK down to find out folks!

  

Blake and Jimmy’s Extreme-O-Gauge!

Realistic Gore: 3 out of 5, this was a pretty tame “death film” by my standards

Rape: 0 out of 0, no blurred out Japanese rape in this one.

Animal Death: 0 out 0, unlike American or Italian death films there was no animal death.

Necrophilia: 0 out of 0.

Torture: 0 out of 0, no subtitles is a little torturous though!

Overall Movie:  2 out of 5, this flick missed the mark for me.