“Take my blood and walk the path of the yakuza vampire!”

Justin’s rating: This review is part of a “movie swap” that we did in June 2024. ZombieDog assigned this one to me to do, while I gave him George Orwell’s 1984.

Justin’s review: I think it’s safe to say that if I wasn’t assigned Yakuza Apocalypse, I wouldn’t have ever seen it. I’ve been successfully avoiding Takashi Miike’s movies for decades now, even though he’s racked up some notorious cult entries like Ichi the Killer and The Happiness of the Katakuris. I’m just not into the over-the-top violence and gore that he generates.

And I’m guessing that any movie with the yakuza, vampires, a knitting class, goblins, and a giant killer frog isn’t going to be a PG-rated hug-a-thon where a feeling stick is passed around the campfire.

So there’s this Japanese town, see, where a vampire yakuza boss named Kamiura (Lily Franky) protects the people and secretly feeds on them. You know, as vampire yakuzas do. When he is definitely not graphically murdered for refusing to return to his old outfit, Kamiura expends his final moments to nibble on one of his lesser enforcers, Kageyama (Hayato Ichihara), turning this dude into a vampire as well.

Kageyama gets a crash course in modern vampire living as he helps the yakuza fight off this great threat of the syndicate and its leader — “the world’s toughest terrorist” — who just so happens to like to express himself as a giant murder frog. He also sparks a vampire epidemic, sort of like a zombie outbreak with more blood drinking and less brain eating.

Before long, most of the town has been converted to “yakuza vampires” — no, I’m not sure why becoming a vamp makes you a yakuza or why their blood is less tasty — and an endless parade of absurdity has set up shop. I didn’t even blink an eye when a crazy lady started growing children in the dirt by pouring milk all over it. Made about as much sense as anything else here.

Yakuza Apocalypse begins as a somewhat typical Japanese gangster movie before leaping off the freeway and free-wheeling it across the fields of lunacy. This is a firehose of weirdness blasting the viewer with absurdity, fantasy, horror, and glowing red hands of fire.

Y’all know me. I love a lot of out-of-the-box goofiness in movies. But it can’t be all nonsense; there has to be a framework of movie logic to hold it together. Yakuza Apocalypse simply tilts too far into chaos and never recovers its balance (nor does it seem to want to). I found it amusing in parts but ultimately unsatisfying as a story or experience.