10 Outrageous Japanese Films Hollywood Wouldn't Dare Remake

3. Ichi The Killer

You’ve got to have a Takashi Miike movie on a list like this because he’s one of the filmmakers most closely associated with the inventive mayhem of extreme Japanese cinema. Ichi The Killer shows you why.

Based on a manga series, the film follows a series of oddball characters, none stranger than Ichi (Nao Omori), a hapless loser who’s introduced to the viewer masturbating while a pimp slaps around one of his girls. Ichi later kills them both, in part because of a false memory implanted by Jijii (Shinya Tsukamoto), who’s using him to play two rival gangs off against each other.

The amount of blood shed in the movie places it squarely in the splatter film category: faces are sliced off, a man is cut in half and, perhaps most memorably, a gang boss is tortured by being suspended from hooks. The enforcer responsible later slices off his own tongue as “punishment”, so if you want a traditional gangster picture, look elsewhere.