Masamichi Kawata's graduation movie “The Horny Taxi” is a bizarre sex comedy. The flick premiered at the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in 2017.
“The Horny Taxi” is screening at Japan-Filmfest Hamburg
Taneno (Shinya Orikasa) is an upright policeman who seems to have made it his main goal in life to eradicate illicit sex and possibly pleasure as a whole. He is quiet and stoic. In a word, he is a prude. Coming home on his wedding anniversary, he catches his wife Mitsuko (Sasa Handa) masturbating with a huge Okinawan bitter melon. In a moment of madness, he uses the natural dildo to “slay” his shocked wife. Unbeknownst to him, his action is seen by his obsessed-with-sex, slacker colleague Onari (Hideyuki Arai) who has been peeking on Mitsuko pleasuring herself.
Fast forward two years and Taneno is released from jail but due to his infamy as the goya samurai, seems to be unable to fit into society. As a result, he ends up in a taxi-brothel where he finds his wife working as a prostitute and decides to free her by taking her job. Due to his sexual talents and the surging popularity of the moving brothel, Odari and his new sidekick Asadachi (Yoshinori Miyata) get a whiff of the pleasure taxi and decide to take it down.
Considering its pretty ridiculous premise, it is not a surprise that Masami Kawata chooses to direct the movie in a tongue in cheek way. Not only is each scene full of references to other films and thinly veiled jabs at Japanese society, but many sequences are also directed as if coming from movies from wildly different genres. There's a bit of yakuza drama, some jidaigeki-like shots with bitter melons and stylized blood, raunchy sex comedy in the style of “Naked Ambition 2,” kungfu action, and 60s family drama. Each sequence is also shot, edited, and acted in a manner befitting the genre.
Though initially interesting, this genre-hopping gets a bit annoying pretty fast, especially considering that neither of the genres and their conventions is referenced in an original or interesting way but rather mimicked blindly. And oftentimes pretty amateurish at that. The same amateurish quality is seen in the acting, too, which is formulaic and full of exaggeration, as is expected from a movie from this genre. All of this might have been a conscious choice on the side of Kawata and maybe a way to comment on the Japanese obsession with superficial things and only basic carnal pleasures, but it is not done in any convincing way.
Technically, the movie is not all that accomplished and that is understandable. For the most part, the camerawork by Ryo Morita is pretty basic and with its overdependence on medium shots and very basic lighting, reminiscent of a mediocre TV show. The same goes for the rudimentary editing the same uses for the majority of the film. The keyword here is “majority” because as bland and drab as the day scenes are, the night/sex ones are flashy and drenched in (often digital) neon.
The overdependence on loud oversaturated colors in the night scenes gets boring and taxing on the eyes very quickly. And gaudy. At least as gaudy as the overstuffed and kitschy interior of the eponymous sex taxi. Talking about the taxi and its interior, the movie's set design, or at least the one during the taxi scenes is pretty interesting precisely because it is very cheap or rather, shows a confidently in-your-face cheap taste. There are velvet drapes, Buddha statues, white lace on the seats, fake maple leaves, a fake wood over the steering wheel, and who knows what else. A sight to behold in a very weird way.
Nothing is as intentionally cheap-looking as the final battle between Taneno and Onari. Taking place on the top of the moving taxi, shot entirely on a green screen, and made to look at least as cheap as something by The Asylum, it is truly funny and a great way to create a memorable fight scene on a tiny budget. As the taxi swerves, the two duke it out doing some pretty funny and ridiculous stunts. By far it is one of the most entertaining sequences in the entire movie.
Though oftentimes funny or at least amusing, especially in the ways it shows society as only obsessed with sex and pleasure, the underdeveloped ideas of the film and somewhat mediocre story and camerawork, make “The Horny Taxi” a passable title. It is undoubtedly watchable and has its moments but they are way too far and in between to make it a movie worth one's time.
