It’s been… four months? since I rented this from Netflix and it’s still on my mind. I want to see some sequences again and while there are YouTube snippets, they’re not complete. There are, of course, also sequences I never wanted to see again (Mole Brothers. Oy). The former outweigh the latter and so… I have it out from Netflix again, something I rarely do.

This time around I’m more taken with “Guitar Brother” than before (and this coming from a big fan of Tadanobu Asano) and less annoyed with the “Babbling Hot Springs Vixens” but my favorite sequences are still Notti & Takefumi, especially Takefumi’s dream. Weirdest. Music Video. Maybe. Ever.

Imagine UHF if it had been directed by David Cronenberg, but with lots of musical/dance numbers. It has that VHF quality in that it comprises lots of odd little stand-alone numbers that are assumed to be common pop-cultural references like “The Mole Brothers” and every little segment has its own stylized logo like “N&T” (short for Notti & Tamafume, maybe the main characters? Possibly? Oh, there’s no point in deciding who the protagonists might be, though this all could be understood as a series of their dreams…). It has Cronenberg qualities in the creature design and the unique ways people interact with these creatures. And the musical/dance numbers are, quite simply, bizarrely enjoyable and kickass.

You’re either going to love it, even as you wonder what the hell is going on, or you’re going to shut it off pretty quick because “The Mole Brothers” are wildly annoying, and some of the creatures are fairly stomach-churning.

But there’s always Tadanobu Asano…

If you have seen this film and liked it, you and I will probably understand each other better than most people do. That is not to say I understood this film entirely - or rather these films, because it’s really a collection of shorts that intertwine in ingenious ways - but even when I was confused I was delighted, entertained, intrigued… all the things we want films for. If there were more films like this, we wouldn’t have/need a drug problem in this world.