Theoretically, it's a trip into depravity and horror. Imagine a family of inbred mountain hicks who'll murder, kidnap and/or rape anyone they see. That's pretty similar to this film, except without the mountains. It has a mundane Japan urban setting. This makes it unusually intimate for a Daisuke Yamanouchi movie, incidentally, since it's focused on the family and the slightly claustrophobic world they've created.

They run a bar, admittedly, with customers. (Albeit odd ones who don't react to people getting stabbed.) Television is occasionally watched. However, Mikayo (Ayane Suzukawa or Ayane Ryokawa... she's used various names) wears a gas mask when she goes outside and the narrative certainly never looks as far as, say, the police or the yakuza.

What makes the film bizarre is Mikayo herself. She was kidnapped eighteen years ago as a small child and since then she's hardly advanced mentally. She thinks she's a fairy tale princess. She draws crayon pictures about herself. She thinks her captor is an alien monster and we occasionally see him in that form. Reality is flexible in this film. Miyako's scene might get filtered through her abnormal worldview, so for instance she might decide that someone's a handsome prince... and suddenly everyone's wearing Disney prince and princess costumes. What's more, there's at least one suggestion that other people can perceive the Mikayo-reality that we're experiencing.

The rednecks are straightforwardly disgusting. They have a serial killer room where they use acid and a washing machine to dispose of corpses. (It also has a tarpaulin on the floor, a croaking victim in a wheelchair and various tools like a hammer, a machete, a metal pipe and a bathtub.) Shizue (Hotaru) employs and sometimes has sex with two ageing, unpredictable assassins called Yoshii (Youta Kawase) and Misawa (Manzo Shinra). They'll stop someone on the street, put a plastic bag over her head and beat her to death with a hammer. They might attack anyone, including each other. They might bind you with duct tape and rape you while holding a machete to your throat. Youta Kawase isn't inherently scary, at least compared with the more stereotypically menacing Manzo Shinra, but there's no limit on the crimes his character will perpetrate. You'd assume he was a nice, friendly middle-aged bloke... until you met him and learned the hard way what he'll do to you.

The following year saw at least two might-be-sequels, called Perverted Family and The Beach of Reunion: The Woman Who Slept with Regret. The latter sounds unrelated, given its story summary, but the internet thinks all three films star the same actors in roles with the same names. Admittedly, though, the internet isn't always right, while Daisuke Yamanouchi often uses the same or similar names for different characters played by the same actor. I know of nine films where he cast Ayane Suzukawa as someone called Mikayo or Mari, for instance.

Mikayo makes this film unique. She creates a magical picture-book realm, despite the film's brutal content. By the end, you can't trust what you're watching. Reality's been distorted too far and we don't know what's objectively true any more. How much are we seeing through her eyes? All bets are off. At one point, there's a crazy genre leap that made me laugh. Furthermore, don't think for a millisecond that a fairy tale princess will think or believe as you'd expect. This is Daisuke Yamanouchi. Disney would die of shock. Her perceptions make sense and fit her worldview, but she's had a seriously twisted upbringing in a serial killer house. Her perception of sex is a Venn intersection of "happy ever after" and Tobe Hooper.

This one's pretty amazing. It's freaky enough that you'd probably get the gist even without English subtitles (which my copy didn't have). I'm not expecting a film called The Beach of Reunion: The Woman Who Slept with Regret to be related to this movie, but I'll watch Perverted Family like a shot if it ever crosses my path. (Apart from anything else, the existence of a sequel might explain this film's final shot...)