Psychological and physical horror are fused seamlessly in the grueling Antichrist, which is either a treatise against new-age therapy or a tragedy of Greek proportions. However you choose to interpret the story of an archetypal couple coping with the grief caused by the accidental death of their child (the incident is depicted in black and white with high speed photography evoking the credit sequence in Tarsem’s The Fall, but with much more graphic sexual imagery), Antichrist will make your skin crawl.

After disposing of his wife’s medication, psychologist Willem Dafoe decides to use her as a guinea pig for a series of “grief therapy sessions”, which soon reveal themselves as nothing more than primal struggles for dominance set against a swath of untamed wilderness. Banal activities, such as piggyback rides or bridge crossings, are given great metaphorical importance in the eyes of the therapist. Each and every task must be some sort of test, with Dafoe providing additional obstacles in the form of arbitrary rules. When things are not done exactly as instructed, the “game” resets. Understandably this does more to exacerbate pre-existing problems than anything else.

Charlotte Gainsbourg does phenomenal work as the wife, who is an intriguing mix of victim and antagonist. Likewise, the psychologist could be seen as a good guy “thinking outside the box”, motivated by nothing more than love for his wife. While Dafoe remains a cool blank slate through most of the film, Gainsbourg must go through an entire heightened process of grief, dealing with the ugly flip side of her maternal instincts.

Passive aggressive mental torture rules the first half of the film; Lars von Trier seems to identify more with the grieving mother of the dead young ‘un, as her husband does nothing but spout cliches and Psych 101 jargon. As they’re a good day’s hike away from civilization, escape isn’t a viable option. So she begins to trip out, vacillating wildly between anxiety, suicidal mania and hypersexuality. Dafoe responds by becoming even more detached from the relationship: “You can’t screw your therapist!”

What was once a normal marriage deteriorates into a power struggle, with the grieving mother hoping to achieve her salvation through sex, and the smug, sexless PhD who thinks he can boil every brain fart down to an exact scientific cause and effect. The conflict is rich in emotional extremity, and fosters an extremely tense atmosphere; the insane guilt-triggered animal hallucinations hardly seem necessary, but they help Antichrist achieve an inhuman level of intensity.

Hallucinations and flashbacks, usually preluded by a slow zoom into the back of their respective character’s head, are done with a wide variety of film stocks and speeds and often quite disgusting. Images of stillborn deer, baby birds consumed by ants and decapitated by roving eagles, a fox tearing at its own gaping stomach wound. Coupled with some really bass-intensive ambient sound, these scenes are otherworldly and immersive despite the repulsive imagery. Plus you’ve gotta love it when the fox opens its maw and says “Chaos reigns!” to signal the end of that particular chapter.

Nature itself is a palpable aggressor, preferring not to talk most of the time. Acorns fall on the tin roof of their forest shack, making it impossible to sleep. There are those damn talking foxes and miscarrying does wandering around the cabin. A dramatic climax occurs during a hail storm, creating a wall of atonal noise to create yet another schism between the warring sexes. Then there’s the nature of man as a sexual being, which ties into a layer of guilt that sends poor Charlotte over the brink, and puts Willem through more hell than when he played the “Real Christ” for Scorsese 20 years ago. The Herculean trials that await Mr. Dafoe make Monica Bellucci’s tunnel scene in Irreversible look like a lazy Sunday stroll. His fearless performance washes clean any trace of the septic reek of The Boondock Saints.

Many self-respecting critics couldn’t seem to handle the graphic violence and stomach turning twists that await the curious viewer, and so took it upon themselves to ruin every last detail. Since I was aware of all the unpleasant occurrences of Act 3, it had a lot less impact than a cold viewing would have. It’s still horrifying nonetheless, and the only logical termination of the self-fulfilling prophecy of their DIY couples therapy. Never has transfer of anxiety been so literal, or so brutally visualized. Antichrist is deeply painful, disturbing on several levels, and also technically flawless. See it on a big screen with the loudest sound system possible.

**REVIEW CONTAINS SOME BIZARRE, GRAPHIC IMAGERY**

It is impossible to conduct any kind of discourse on György Pálfi’s Taxidermia without spoiling some of its more extreme plot turns, which will alternately disgust, horrify, and delight whomever’s brave enough to grapple with its gauntlet of terror. Its first images deal with a man masochistically burning himself with a candle flame, then ejaculating a fountain of fire which lights up his lonely wooden shack, and it gets way more bizarre from there.

“Extreme” is a term that ceases to have meaning when you’re dealing with a film that goes so far over the top with sex, gore and general depravity that it ceases to disturb, becoming a very strange comedy as a result. It’s not nearly as good as Pálfi’s Hukkle but its dazzling Kubrick-esque imagery makes it impossible to look away even while some truly repulsive things are going on.

Each act deals with a different successive generation in a depraved gene pool. Our man from the opening is some kind of orderly in a postwar care home, who is grappling with some serious sexual frustration. Recurring actions revolving around a bathtub are initiated when the dude crouches next to the tub; here the camera literally revolves 180 degrees around each iteration of the tub that he imagines while in a weird meditative state. The way the shots blend together, there is the illusion of 360 degree movement around an invisible axis.

Shortly afterward, there is a voyeurism/masturbation scene which is most likely a wicked inversion of the famous shower peephole scene in the abhorrent yet wildly successful Porky’s, but Palfi takes it one step further by showing certain X-rated details. Once our boy starts getting off in piles of pig intestines after butchering the creature, we’re in some dangerous new territory. After that bit of business, a bit of graphic intercourse with an obese prostitute doesn’t seem so bad.

Act 2 deals with the sired son of the whore, born with a tail that is immediately amputated, who becomes a world-class competitive eater. Even though this segment begins with a stomach-turning sequence which contains a great deal of actual vomiting, the travails of the eating champ soon take a turn for the better when he falls in love with the Big yet Beautiful wife of a teammate. When the woman reaches over him while he’s lying supine in bed, a bead of armpit sweat falls on his face. As it rolls down a cheek, he extends a tongue to lick it off. Thus begins one of cinema’s most bizarre love stories, which plants the seed for the third generation.

To go further would spoil most of the surprise of the truly insane storyline. Act 3 is kind of brilliant, like an obscene Twilight Zone episode with a contraption straight out of Cronenberg’s nightmares.  By the time Taxidermia hits its demented climax, you will be laughing in spite of your overwhelming urge to vomit. You will be horrified in spite of your detached bemusement. You will respect the lethal prowess of even the fattest pussy cats. You will never again think about eating butter.

The title makes sense by the time a final scene, in an art exhibit attended by unseen patrons, wraps everything up in an elegant fashion. The unsettling strains of Amon Tobin’s trippy musical score contribute much more to the mood than the icy cool sharp photography ever does, yet this is still a fantastic finish.

Taxidermia is about how we all try to achieve immortality, and how most of us fail. The fact that this moral is imparted through nonstop psychedelic madness testifies as to how the director is likely to achieve immortality through midnight screenings and DVD circulation. This film is destined to have a long life as a cult classic.

Big Man Japan is a mockumentary about a long haired, flowered shirt wearing burnout named Sato who resembles a faded rock star. This small, thin man lives alone in his house, feeding stray cats, eating his favorite food “super noodles,” having bricks thrown through his windows, and waiting for his cell phone to ring.

For the first 10 to 15 minutes, Sato is being casually interviewed; the first question is what he thinks of the weather, and he responds by saying how much he likes his umbrella. Sato carries it with him all the time because it is very compact and “only gets big when it needs to, and then it’s very useful.”

Eventually Sato gets phone call, and then he’s off to a local power plant plastered in angry painted signs about littering, destruction of public property, and misusing energy. The small man is then is taken where the cameras cannot follow, and a power surge follows.

Next thing you know, Sato is now a 50-foot tall CGI-generated giant fighting the first in a series of bizarre monsters whose sole interest is destroying buildings. Sato and these monsters do battle in what is not so much a Godzilla free-for-all as a demonstration of the world’s worst dog catcher.

The monsters that Sato faces serve as distortions of himself. These creatures appear as psychosexual demons taunting him with their distinctly human faces. His adversaries include the Strangling Beast (who only wants to throw castles and buildings around, lay his eggs, mark his turf, or otherwise inseminate the ruins), the Leaping Monster (who has the intellect of an 8-year-old who only wants to jump around, no matter what it breaks), the stink monster (who appears for a public sexual encounter and is unaware that it stinks of 10,000 pounds of feces), the Cyclops creature (whose eye is attached to a long tendril which descends from its groin), and finally the “Child Monster,” who is weak and sickly, and only trying to get home.

Big Man Japan is a profile of Sato, the last of Japan’s Big-Men who are seemingly normal humans bred to do battle with the giant monsters that periodically appear in Japan. These Big Men transform into giants themselves via high voltage electroshocks to the nipples. Sato’s father had destroyed himself trying to become “bigger than the rest,” so Sato’s grandfather raised him and returned as the family’s Big Man champion; unfortunately, the grandfather has exposed himself too much high voltage recharges, and has rendered himself senile. Big Man Japan is thus a story of a somber man who becomes his country’s biggest spectacle as he wrestles all manner of horrors in his underwear.

Films like Jean Claude Van Damage, They Call Me Bruce, and Zebra Man (another Japanese film about a faded superhero in the modern world) deal with fallen heroes, myths descended into the grim and grit of modern life and humor. Big Man Japan follows suit, but manages to balance its self-deprecating realism with the wide eyed absurdity that made such heroes so interesting in the first place. It’s largely a parody of Ultraman a Japanese super-hero franchise later imitated in North America by the Power Rangers in 90s.

There’s also some gentle fun poked at the loss of traditional culture (the sacred growth ceremony once attended by geishas and crowds is now performed like an old habit by Sato and a priest in a storage room), the non conflict oriented post-war Japanese (Sato tries to talk to the stink monster into just leaving the town instead of fighting it), and the flip side of such passive aggression, and the obsession with violence (best illustrated in the final scene’s surreal duex ex machina, which make the superhero team come off as a gang of bullies, degrading and humiliating their chosen “bad guy” target).

In some patches, Big Man Japan does become more dead than just dead pan, and the jokes fall flat, but the more quiet moments make the clever scenes all the brighter. The third film from the Six Shooter series, which gave us Let the Right One In and Time Crimes, has mostly succeeded here with their third genre fusion of superhero, mockumentary, and comedy.

Big Man Japan is an entertaining and grandiose weird tale and modern fable about being emotionally stunted, by family, country, duty, and cowardice. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, indeed. Literally.