"Go, Go, Executive Koala" (Executive Koala (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Executive Koala (DVD)
Date:	26/01/09 (200 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Vaguely funny premise, some great moments

Disadvantages: The joke wears awfully thin

A review of just the film. This is available on region 1 DVD through amazon for about £11.

This... well, this is just ludicrous. It's a Japanese film made in 2006. It's sort of a thriller about a businessman who finds himself in the frame for his girlfriend's murder. But the businessman in question, Tamura, is a koala bear. (Or at least, a guy in a business suit with a koala's head and hands, but who's going to quibble?) The director, one Minoru Kawasaki, had previously made a film called Calamari Wrestler, which is apparently exactly what you'd imagine...

This is a bizarre one-joke film. Although Tamura's colleagues know he's a koala, they don't make a big deal about it. Tamura's boss is a guy in a rabbit costume. And there's a man-frog working in the local convenience store - a man-frog who may hold all the answers! And, er, that's it. The main character's koala-ness has little bearing on the plot. He has the police after him, he has a psychiatrist, he has a murdered girlfriend, but none of these have anything to do with him being a koala.

The story itself is a mix of thriller clichés and horror-influenced sequences (imagine Halloween if the killer had a koala's head instead of a William Shatner mask... Well, that's what the film-makers here obviously did). The only film it even remotely reminded me of is The Terror of Tiny Town, a 1938 all-midget Western, which also has a perfectly conventional plot in which the fact that all the characters are little people is ignored. This also looks like it could have been a sketch on Big Train, but with fewer laughs.

Because although this is obviously not meant to be taken seriously, there aren't really a lot of jokes (there's a prison called 'Alcatrazu', but that's about it. It's possible that the humour is lost if you don't live in Japan, though). The central gag is milked for all it's worth, and while slow-motion romance montages and martial arts sequences featuring a giant koala are amusing up to a point, they aren't as funny as I suspect the director thinks they are. This could almost be a stoned conversation gone much, much too far. 'Like, wouldn't it be totally hilarious to have, like, a normal film, but the main character's just a dude in a bear suit!'

It does have some truly weird touches - a demonstration of Korean martial arts is accompanied by still images of plates of food for reasons I can't even begin to guess at. And there's a cracking good dream sequence with singing peasants. But is that enough to carry a whole film?

The film is unbelievably cheap. The koala costume is absolutely rubbish - one of its eyes doesn't close properly. It occasionally has scary red lights in its eyes, but they don't really work either, blinking on an off seemingly at random. But it's a film that revels in its own cheapness - most of the fight scenes use obvious dummies and hardly any of the 'martial arts' on display look remotely real. And there's a flying squirrel (someone's pet) that is an incredibly obvious hand-puppet.

I suspect this would be a safe PG if released here. The fights are so unconvincing I can't see any problem, and the more horror inflected scenes are neither scary nor gory (a few splashes of blood on the walls and that's it). There's one scene where a lady takes a shower, but there's no visible nudity. Although the koala dates human women, nothing is made if this - it's not a furry fetish flick.

The performances don't seem that great - I didn't recognise anyone, but then it is Japanese. The main character, of course, is dressed as a koala throughout, so is fairly unreadable. I quite liked three women who worked with the koala and provided a sort of Greek chorus in the film's first third - this is the kind of movie that could have got away with that - but they're not in the film's confusing later stages.

This isn't very good, but it's impossible not to like it at least to an extent. And it's certainly never boring, going off at completely unexpected tangents every time you think you've figured out the plot (I doubt anyone will guess what happens in the end, if only because it makes no sense whatsoever). If you base an entire film around a cheap and silly gimmick like dressing a man as a koala you deserve at least some success. But it's probably nicer to know that films like Executive Koala exist than it is to actually see them.

Summary: One of the silliest films I've ever seen