"I'll suck your brains out and fuck your empty head."Shozin Fukui, you mad genius.
After the explosive demise of their last subject, scientists must look for a replacement on whom to continue their bizarre experiments with brain-altering drugs.
Rubber's Lover is showing in 1 cinema in Los Angeles - next screening Saturday 14 November at 21:15 at BRAIN DEAD STUDIOS.
Next screenings: Saturday 14 November.
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"I'll suck your brains out and fuck your empty head."Shozin Fukui, you mad genius.
My head feels weird. Imagine if you will, another world in which Eraserhead was a box office smash. Men, women, and children were lining up around the block to see it. The profit motive naturally compelled all the major studios to repeat Eraserhead (of course, frequently missing the point, so you'd have a boom of 1000 movies about mutant babies or office supply body parts or something). But within any new subgenre there are going to be interesting deviations, and that's what this is. If anything, Rubber's Lover is the exploitation film take on Eraserhead. I could have just said that single sentence, but I wanted to have fun with wordy bullshit, plus I'm writing this immediately after the movie ended and it genuinely put my head in a strange place.It's hard to capture just how intense the visual style of this film is. The vast majority takes place in small enclosed spaces, locked up from the outside world. A sense of location is never established -- the rare times we leave the lab there is never an opportunity to see how entering or exiting works. It gives off the impression of being truly cut off from the world, in some deep dark hole almost no one knows about. The black and white imagery is harsh, some of the most visually aggressive work I've seen (be warned if you have an issue with intense flashing strobe lights, as well). There's a tiny scene in a store and even there the white of the image is blown out so hard that this mundane location is almost unbearable to look at. On top of this there is some Tetsuo: The Iron Man style imagery; every inch of this film is dirty, sharp, and loud.And within these threatening spaces, terrible experiments are being conducted. The plot is not in any way easy to follow, quite possibly not even coherent, but the general concept is that individuals are being injected with ether and subjected to audio torture in what seem to be vague attempts to unlock psychic abilities. The Powers That Be start threatening to shut down their operation, and a few scientists insist on continuing by any means necessary. Then everyone writhes around and screams for an hour.This movie is probably too much for any cohesive reading to exist, but it provides a whole lot of opportunity for freestyle tangents. The closest thing to an overarching theme I can find is something about power struggles and control. It's everywhere: the scientists lash out and take full ownership of their experiments, the subjects are deprived of any ability to move, and eventual bloody conflicts involve psychic battles of the wills. There are also several expressions of patriarchal force, up to and including sexual violence committed by a man dubbed "The Muscle Monster." I wouldn't exactly call it purposeless, but Japanese cinema is often a little too willing to go too far on this subject. It's unfortunate and I wouldn't blame anyone for being too put off by its inclusion.Still, I love the exploration of unethical experimentation. It's a great place to mine horror, as we have plenty of disgusting examples of this sort of thing in the real world. Plus, the torture by audio essentially predicts one of the atrocities the US would later commit.Rubber's Lover is exactly my type of nightmare cinema. It's an uncompromising attack of a movie that aims to challenge anyone who comes across it. There were plenty of moments where it felt truly alien -- just too unlike anything I could imagine a human brain constructing. I'm so happy to still be discovering movies like this.
10% rape, 10% rubber, 15% tubes and pipes and screens, 65% screamingTetsuo’s psychic fetish cousin, a black-blood-&-white-ether descent into cruel corporate madness. Marginally more accessible than 964 Pinocchio but magnitudes more uncomfortable and grimy. Eleven minutes into Rubber’s Lover, a man explodes. Japanese cyberpunk horror is fucking insane.
Scientists conduct bizarre experiments with brain-altering drugs on human subjects following the explosive demise of their previous test subject.
Shozin Fukui directed Rubber's Lover in 1996, building on the frantic Japanese cyberpunk aesthetic of his earlier work.
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