Warning: this film was the most disgusting sadomasochistic film ever made, which is why I never watched it. If your stomach gets queasy, avoid reading any further.

It's a Japanese Yakuza film made in 2001, called "Ichi the Killer", and it has two main characters. It opens with a young Japanese man watching a woman get brutally beaten and raped while he masturbates in a hidden location. He orgasms on a plant and the opening credits roll as the camera focuses on his dripping cum.

Cut to our other protagonist, Kakihara. Open to the back of a dyed blond head. As the camera turns, he inhales on a cigarette, and the smoke comes out the sides of his face. As the camera rotates, we see that his faces has slits extending from his mouth where the smoke is coming out. He has two gold circular piercings that hold the edges of his mouth together. His face is covered with other scars. Kakihara is discussing the disappearance of his yakuza boss, Anjo, and 100 million yen. Kakihara and Anjo were not just second in command and boss, there was also a sadomasochistic relationship between them, and although never explicitly said, Anjo is probably the source of most of the scars on Kakihara's face.

Searching for the killer with the rest of the gang, Kakihara learns from an informant that the highly placed member of another gang was responsible. Kakihara captures him and brutally tortures him, hanging from hooks in his back, buttocks, and legs, piercing his face with needles, and pouring boiling fat on his back. When none of that gets him the answers he wants, Kakihara pours more boiling fat over his victim's face, half melting it.

At this point, the head of the rival gang bursts in, and explains that it was Ichi, a mysterious assassin for yet another Yakuza gang. As penance for his mistake, Kakihara is expulsed from his gang and, to avoid being killed, Kakihara holds his own tongue by the piercing in the end, and saws it in half with a sword, tossing the severed end into a glass jar where we see it slowly floating.

Then in a strangely amusing scene, just after he has cut off his own tongue, Kakihara gets a phone call on his cell phone, which he answers and tries to talk as though nothing happened.

Cut to our mysterious shy waiter. He is in fact, Anjo's killer. When in grade school, he witnessed his teacher getting raped and beaten, and instead of helping, he found himself aroused. His guilt over this event has turned him into a unstoppable psychopathic killer, and Jijii, the head of the third gang(and the mysterious informant who lead Kakihara astray) manipulates him into taking out his rivals. Most of the time, Ichi is a shy, demure waiter. When Jijii convinces him that Jijii's rivals are bad people, Ichi dons an identity-concealing rubber costume and slaughters them with razor like blades that extend from his boots. We are shown a room with covered with the dripping remains of Anjo, who has been sliced into pieces. Two of Jijii's flunkies have clean up duty, and they complain that since Ichi came around they don't get to do the fun stuff anymore.

Meanwhile, Karikara decides that after all that work of torturing people and cutting his own tongue off, he needs some rest and relaxation. He hooks up with a Japanese girl named Karen, who arranges to have put him in chains and repeatedly beats him up. She isn't quite as into though as Anjo used to be though, and after an evening hitting Karikara repeatedly in the face, he tells her "You aren't the one."

Instead Karikara decides that if Ichi managed to kill Anjo, he must be Anjo's superior. Karikara decides to find him, and try to become Robin to his Batman, only with lots of sadomasochistic fun in the bat cave. Karikara recruits a few of his former gang members and sets off to find Ichi.

Of course they do eventually meet up, but not until we've seen Ichi slice a man in half and kill a woman after forcing her to perform oral sex on him, Karikara get in a fight scene where he takes the piercings off the corners of his mouth, open his jaws unnaturally wide, and swallow the fist of his opponent. Members of the various gangs torture a few more people, giving us one scene where a woman has her nipples sliced off among a few others.

So finally, Karikara and Ichi confront each other on the roof of a building in the inevitable fight scene. Karikara is dressed in pink overcoat and Ichi in his black, latex costume. Karikara gains the advantage and unmasks Ichi, but instead of finding the face of his new master, discovers a crying, confused boy. Disappointed that instead of finding a new master he has discovered another pawn, Karikara inserts long needles into his ears, breaking his ear drums and piercing his brain. Kicked by Ichi, he totters at the edge of a long open air shaft and thens falls. Flailing on the way down, he says something about much cooler it is than he could have thought, and dies upon hitting the ground. Ichi briefly lingers over the corpse and the movie ends.

No, I didn't actually watch this movie. I just saw clips of it on You Tube and read a few reviews. None of the sexual violence against women is available, but pretty much all the other graphic material is, from the cum dripping credits, to Karikara pouring boiling fat on the man's back and then having to slice his own tongue, to the final scene of Karikara falling off the building. I don't really need to watch the actual movie now, I don't think. I'm kind of glad I managed to avoid seeing this all twenty feet high and fifty feet wide.

This is, I guess, the next step after Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" and "Kill Bill", and Rodriguez and Miller's "Sin City" and bears a certain relationship to Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange". Unlike those films, "Ichi the Killer" has tossed out any pretense of having a hero or a message. It's just the Romans looking for the next bloody spectacle at the Colliseum.. I'm not certain it is possible to top this one.

The images have been disturbing me all week.