Silver (1999)

Silver is a 1999 obscurity from prolific director Takashi Miike. In his 30+ year career he has directed over 100 films, ranging from extreme exploitation and horror to mainstream family films and adaptations of popular manga and video games. I have watched many of the most well-known Miike movies and wanted to dive deeper.

I was excited to see the Naro Expanded Video archive still had the old DVD copy of Silver I considered renting years ago. As of this writing, there is no way to legally stream or purchase this movie digitally in North America. Yay for discs! This is also a reminder of the limitations of physical media, though. This 2006 DVD from Tokyo Shock/Media Blasters is NOT anamorphic widescreen. So we get a boxed image with black bars on the sides, then within that box is the widescreen image with more black bars above and below. That’s usually a dealbreaker for me, but since this is a super cheap shot-on-video movie made for direct-to-video release, the ugly smaller image is probably better than seeing it blown up on my 4K TV. Also, the subtitles are burned-in, so even if you speak Japanese you are stuck with English subs. And in the long tradition of misleading marketing, the lead actress never wears the sexy outfit on the DVD cover (her actual wrestling gear in the movie is still quite fetching, just less cleavage-y).

This was made around the same time as Miike’s international breakthrough Audition and the first movie in his epic Dead or Alive trilogy. He already had a great deal of experience and skill, but Silver sees him trying to portray an epic action/spy/wrestling/softocre flick with a budget seemingly in the tens of dollars. I can’t say he really succeeded in making a coherent or good movie, but I still enjoyed various elements.

The movie opens with a chainsaw maniac under some kind of mind control/hypnosis by a criminal gang. He comes out of a house covered in blood, they deactivate him, then they burn the house down. The chainsaw maniac will not be seen or mentioned again. Even on video, Miike tries to give his images some flare, which at this budget level mostly just means lots of colored lights. It does add some style, though, with an Evil Dead-style backlit doorway shot when the maniac appears. His victims were the family of Jun Shirogane (Atsuko Sakuraba), who was off competing in an international karate competition. A few years later, her former partner/lover recruits her to join a new government task force. It sounds like she was a legendary cop and international karate champion BEFORE her family was murdered, then she went and spent a few years in the USA training with the FBI. The actress was obviously only in her early twenties when this was filmed, so this extensive backstory is pretty amusing.

Jun is given an undercover identity in the Ladies Legend Pro-Wrestling League under the name Silver. It’s never clear WHY she has to do this. Ostensibly it is so she can move around secretly between missions, but that doesn’t really matter since 1) she wears her public wrestling costume on the missions, B) she IMMEDIATELY gets caught or draws attention any time she tries to do something, and Thirdly everyone seems to already know who she is anyway. She barely trains with someone I assume is a real-life Japanese wrestler. At one point a wrestling match starts and I jokingly wondered how much of the run-time would be taken up by easy/cheap to film wrestling, but it was surprisingly brief. The wrestling gig does lead to one of my favorite little touches, though: for scene transitions where they are “traveling” in their bus, Miike just shoots a tight close up of a tiny part of a van exterior, then jiggles the camera around and adds car sound effects to simulate driving. Adorable.

Silver’s main target is a Mistress Nancy, a dominatrix with lots of incriminating pictures and footage of powerful businessmen and politicians at her mercy. We are introduced to the Mistress rolling by on a little cart, standing on her hands and feet in a bridge pose. From that position, she projectile urinates into a jar and makes a powerful bank president drink it. If you make a Miike movie, you’re gonna get some bodily fluids in there. Later on, the exec will present his pixelated anus for the Mistress’s strap on. The movie veers into kink/sleaze/pinku territory, but it is also surprisingly (relatively) restrained at times. When Silver is immediately caught, she is bound and tortured by the Mistress. Yet even after her costume top is pulled down, Miike rotates his camera around and lights it in ways that obscure the details of her nudity. Then later on when Silver has a nude sex scene with her partner, it’s shot with all the “tasteful” soft lighting, shadows, and slow movements of a Skinemax softcore scene (except on video).

There is also another organization called the Viper’s Nest, of bad guys(?) who I think may be the gang with the chainsaw maniac at the beginning? Agent 004 from the Nest follows Silver around, even saving her once. Then he is mad at the Mistress(?) and offers all her blackmail stuff to Silver if she can defeat him in battle. So, Jun/Silver is an international karate champion and now a wrestler. You can probably imagine her fighting style based on that. You would be wrong. With the help of fast-forwarded footage, she can front flip with great efficiency, and with the help of the worst CGI 1999 had to offer, she can flick coins. Yes, other than flip-fu her main mode of attack is chucking loose change at people. They should have mentioned she won the underground Tiddlywinks Kumite or something, since that seems more important than the whole karate champ thing. This turns out to make her an even match for 004, though, as her CGI coins are able to counter the CGI darts he uses as his primary attack. She gains his respect, they fight a bunch of guys, and then a mystery sniper shoots 004, cut to credits, the end. Huh?

This movie is only 75 minutes long and somehow manages to have both too much and not enough plot. There are multiple exposition scenes that still only got me half on the page with what was happening at any time. The non-sequitur chainsaw maniac in the opening and mid-scene cut to credits at the end point to this being part of a larger story or world. It was based on a manga and written by the creator Hisao Maki. He has a number of collaborations with Miike that don’t seem to rate very highly in Miike’s filmography, but I still had some fun with this one.

I can’t recommend this movie to anyone other than weirdos and Miike completists (although that Venn diagram may just be a circle). It was frequently confusing and occasionally boring, but I enjoyed the little quirks, from recurring Miike elements to seeing his attempts to make this chintzy video affair seem more like a real movie. It also helps that I found lead actress Atsuko Sakuraba very attractive. She has a sweet face and a banging body. To quote Teri Hatcher on Seinfeld, “They’re real, and they’re spectacular.” I was not surprised to see she was a gravure model before this. I WAS surprised to see that she actually practices martial arts and briefly participated in MMA, because she doesn’t really get to demonstrate any fighting skills here (her fight career seems to consist of only one match where she refused to tap out and her arm was dislocated). If I had to go through the effort of hunting down the disc myself and paying out-of-print prices this would have been disappointing, but when the only investment was my time, it wasn’t the worst way to spend 75 minutes.

My wife’s verdict: Pretty boring for a Miike movie, could have used more boobs.