DVD Review: Silver (1999)

  A family is brutally murdered by a secretive yet powerful criminal society.  Years later the surviving daughter is recruited by Japan's Secret Service.
  Jun Shirogane is sent undercover as a Woman wrestler; her mission - to deal with criminals who cannot be touched by regular means and in the process avenge her slaughtered family.

  I saw this one on an IMDB list and "Silver" seemed to tick a lot of my boxes.  I like wrestling. I like women's wrestling. I like weird Japanese films  and the Takashi Miike films I've seen thus far were pretty cool.

  The thing is, I watched "Hara-Kiri" and "13 Assassins"  which are Takashi Miike paying tribute to the classic samurai movies.  Miike is also famous for certain other films which , I gather, are notorious for pushing the boundaries of taste.

  What I was expecting was something daft but fun, where a spandex-clad cutie beats up improbable bad guys. (Basically a live-action Cutey Honey minus the shape-changing.)  There really isn't much of that in this film.

  What I got was a film where a dominatrix pisses into a glass - while doing a backward crab pose no less - then forces a cowering banker to drink it.  

  Just so we're clear on this, I'm not remotely entertained by that kind of thing.

 I could also have done without the overlong sex-scene, or the whipping scene or the bit where a crucified man gets his horse-sized dick smacked with a studded paddle.

 By contrast, if you're expecting much wrestling in a movie about a female wrestler, you're wasting your time.
  The showdown between our heroine and the evil dominatrix comes in two acts, neither of them much to write home about.
  And when a promising new villain is introduced there's some talking, a tiny bit of scrapping, more talking and then the film suddenly cuts off. Since there was never a sequel I guess we'll never know what the bloody hell that was all about.

 I have a theory that Miike was paying tribute to some of the tough-gal anime/movies of yesteryear . Cutey Honey is one reference point. The yo-yo-wielding heroine of Sukeban Deka is another, what with Jun's favourite weapon being rapid-fire coin-flicking.  I don't remember anybody drinking piss in either of those but maybe that was cut out of the UK releases, I dunno.

My alternative theory is that the director was just trolling everybody.

"Silver" is not a fun film to watch. Even without the unpleasant elements, there's very little here to get excited about because too much of the film is dull, half-hearted and barely coherent.

To sum up: I did not enjoy "Silver"  and having to watch somebody drinking piss is only one of the reasons why.