The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

The Happiness of the Katakuris doesn't dispense entirely with the kind of grotesquerie and perversion that have given Takashi Miike's more notorious films, such as Audition and Visitor Q, their reputations. It does, however, begin with a woman discovering a demonic creature in her soup that immediately yanks out her uvula and flies off into a claymation netherworld where a succession of more and more fantastic beasts devour one another with gleeful aplomb, none of which has anything to do with the plot to follow. This is a film full of ridiculous digressions, all of them patently hilarious and many of them more than a little bit gross. People spontaneously burst into song just like in the classic musicals Miike parodies relentlessly, but somehow lovingly (overall, the Katakuris are a kind of cockeyed Von Trapp family from The Sound of Music). But only someone as twisted as Miike could come up with the baroquely absurd love duet between Richard, the navy officer (Japanese rock star Kiyoshiro Imawano in a devastatingly funny performance), and the family's daughter, a starry-eyed unwed mother. It's perhaps the silliest moment in a movie so unabashedly and consistently silly through and through that almost beggars description, and one can't help but be won over by its lowbrow charms. ~ Tom Vick, All Movie Guide