Fantasia Festival ’18: Tokyo Vampire Hotel

**½/****
written and directed by Sion Sono

by Bill Chambers This feature-length truncation of a 6½-hour Amazon Japan TV series finds kitsch provocateur Sion Sono presiding over another apocalypse, as gun-crazy vampire clan the Corvins trap young Japanese singles inside their Technicolor hotel “for one-hundred years” while the world outside allegedly becomes ash. Tokyo Vampire Hotel is unconventional, to say the least, though what struck me as its most audacious flourish–Sion’s credit and the movie’s title appearing 42 minutes into this 142-minute film–might just be an overlooked remnant of an individual episode. Believe it or not, shearing over four hours from the running time doesn’t seem to have helped clarify an epic and obviously convoluted narrative, in which the centuries-long feud between the Corvins and the, yes, Draculas comes to a head in 2021 (a significant year in that it will either make or break America) on the 22^nd birthday of Manami (Ami Tomite), who was fed eternal blood or some such at birth, making her a delicacy among vampirekind hotly pursued by members of both clans–including K (fashion model Kaho), a kind of Terminator vampire whose “come with me if you want to live” proposition does not put the hysterical Manami at ease. Sion distils all this grade-A nonsense to its exploitable elements (sex and violence, not necessarily in that order), resulting in an almost totally sensory experience; an opening title card beseeches the viewer to play it loud, “even if you’re using headphones,” which is great advice if you want the sustained feeling of an ice-cream headache. Yeah, I don’t know what to say about Tokyo Vampire Hotel, and I’m disappointed that Manami’s backstory, exemplified by the culturally-loaded image of her shaving off her long black hair in an act of rebellion, never really merges with her present-day damsel-in-distressdom to create a whole person. Perhaps the picture’s masterstroke is that it turns into a painstaking homage to Brian De Palma’s Scarface–albeit one set subversively in a vagina–so gradually you don’t even notice until it’s almost in the rearview. Fantasia Fest 2018 – Programme: Selection 2018