Dead or Alive Directed by Takashi Miike. Opens June 8 in New York City, touring selected US cities thereafter. For trailer and info, visit www.viz.com/deadoralive.

Consider, if you will, that finest of Japanese delicacies, the hamu sandoichi. Yes, the humble ham sandwich. Nourishing and nondescript, the very thing you wouldn't want to bring to a smorgasbord.

Now consider the films of Takashi Miike, the ultra-prolific, 40-year-old director that Tony Rayns, introducing audiences at the 1998 Vancouver Film Festival to the director, once described as "a law unto himself." Miike makes movies where the hamu sando and the smorgasbord lie down together, simple crime films, mainly, except that everything about them seems to have been spray-gunned with hermaphrodite schoolgirls, Fujiyama-sized chimpira, and radicalist attitudes toward contemporary social science. No wonder so many otaku have taken Miike's law into their own hands. For the superflat generation, nothing exceeds like excess.

A relative unknown but two years ago, Miike is today being slathered by his fans with the same sort of hyperbolic relish his movies are smothered in. And the US theatrical release of his delirious showstopper, Dead or Alive–roughly the 30th film Miike's signed since 1991–seems but the icing on an already-iced cake.

A restless improviser with an addiction to action and overstatement, Miike's clearly got a gift for deranging the most haggard of yakuza eiga cliches with an up-to-instant aptitude for adrenaline pacing and chainsaw montage. Lesser craftsmen could tread water for the length of an entire feature with the material Miike typically introduces even before the opening credits roll. But Miike himself would be the first to tell you that he's hardly the second coming of Suzuki Seijun, let alone an aspirant to the constellation of "the greatest Japanese filmmakers every known." He's a populist, an entertainer, a gross-out specialist and a goofball, and no one laughs harder at a Miike movie than Miike himself.

And yet, sexually and politically speaking, Miike's also a rather broad-minded guy. Hookers, bare-assed buggerers, lethal clowns and deep-fried body parts are but a few of his favorite things, and his appetite for hashing them together is as bottomless as his aptitude for depicting the melting culture-cauldron of modern-day Japan is ethno-boundless. Uncle Remus (Walt Disney's shuffling shame of the South) and Michelle Reis (the fishnet twisting toss-artist in Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels) both make appearances in Miike's films, as do Brazilian disc jockeys and Russian travel agents, Taiwanese drug tyrants, four-legged porn stars, and the occasional turd-sniffing midget. Mandarin, Portuguese, and Afro-American "Jive" are all spoken here. Miike believes in making the cosmos his soundstage, and like some sort of Shinjuku Shakespeare, he's already become the bard of the world's bastard sons, a punk poet for whom even a title as pedestrian as Dead or Alive manages to pack both significance and meaningless into the same exploding bento box, right between Hamlet's existential agonizing and that hamu sandoichi.

To bleed on yourself, or to bleed all over yourself and everything in sight, that is Miike's question.

Battle Royale with Cheese

Miike had made nearly a dozen low-budget videos before anyone seemed to sense that he might be a talent to watch, then seemed suddenly to come-of-age when his Shinjuku Kuroshakai–aka Shinjuku Triad Society, aka Chinese Mafia Wars–won him a Best Director nomination from the Japan Motion Picture Producers Association in 1996. Not bad for a scabrous little film about race relations between the "black societies" of Japanese and Chinese underworlds, and the nexus of police interrogation and pleasurable sodomy. Sudden celebrity, however, did not quickly follow, and Miike continued to toil as an auteur-for-hire. Even as recently as twenty months ago, just as his anomalous Audition, a slow-building but ultimately excruciating horror film about a particularly lethal ex-ballerina, began to ride the film festival circuit to international critical acclaim and outrage, Miike was still on one-offs like Andromedia, a gooey sci-fi showcase for members of the J-pop teen groups Speed and Da Pump.

Dead or Alive began as another of Miike's contract jobs: a fast, cheap, and straight-to-video supersession for two of small-screen Japan's reigning mighty guys, the Pez-headed gokudo (hoodlum), Riki Takeuchi, and the hair-triggered brine shrimp Show Aikawa. Just another high noon at the Yokohama corral was what Dead or Alive was meant to be, a simple showdown between the crooked and the crazy, with (as in so many Miike movies) a bit of culture shock tossed in.

In it, the snarling Riki–a displaced Chinese malcontent with aspirations to international drug trading–faces off against diehard nihonjin police detective Show, a jaunty little Brundlefly whose visage fuses memories of the buzzcut young Bunta Sugawara with a well-chewed stick of BlackBlack gum.

What Dead or Alive has become, much to its producers' and financier's amazement, is an international otaku uproar, a snarky essay in how to defy sequelization which has already spawned one sequel and now threatens to become a trilogy, and a state-of-the-art dossier on cinematic chaos. The first twenty minutes of it–a senses-deranging orgy of freefalling sex dolls, noodle-gorged tough guys, and frenzied lovers thrusting away in an oasis of filthy urinals–will deep-fry your mind; the last thirty seconds will toilet-snake your soul. Pity the fool that would prematurely reveal the ending of Dead or Alive, just as you'd pity the fool who'd lend him their ear, since they'll suffer a similar fate: puking themselves pink just trying to imagine where DOA 2 could possibly begin. (The answer, as it turns out, has less to do with "Where are they?" than "Where are you?")

Throne of Blood

Though a quintessentially visual director, Miike–a former assistant to Shohei Imamura–has, like his mentor, a knack for choosing talented screenwriters and re-digesting suggestive source material. For instance, the audacious Audition–one of the director's most thoughtful films, never mind that sound of piano wire sawing through someone's leg–was adapted from Ryu Murakami's serialized novel by Daisuke Tengan, Imamura's son and frequent collaborator.

Even in a not-exactly-literate piece of impure cinema like Dead or Alive, some delicious aphorism or apt exchange will somehow manage to rise, gorgelike, to illuminate the spaces between Miike's corpses and his conscience. Take, for example, the following exchange between Aikawa's crooked cop and his confidential informant, a purveyor of beastiality videos played by dog-faced comedian Dankan (star of Takeshi Kitano's Getting Any? and director of Ikinai):

Baffled by the exponential mayhem on his beat, Aikawa poses the following question, "Yakuza killings, Mafia killings, bank heists–how do they link up?"

Gobbling through his lunch (even as he confesses that the spiciness of it makes his asshole burn), Dankan sheepishly admits that, "I don't know if [they're] all connected...but there is a new dope route into Yokohama."

Taking the dope route is what Miike's all about: finding the coolest concatenation of angles within angles, scribbling directly on celluloid like shabu-sick Stan Brakhage, or letting the projector burn hole right through the otherwise inescapable frame. Technique, for Miike, is something to be stolen and fucked-with, if only because he knows that everything's been done twice already, and that ultimately all the dopest routes lead down the same black hole. The English-language title of the culmination of his "black society" trilogy, Ley Lines (Nihon Kuroshakai), underscores the point. What are "ley lines"? A set of ethereal latitudes and longitudes known mainly to Freemasons and ancient astronauts as the shortest route between mystical places: the crow's flight-path from Tokyo to Taipei, or the grit-trail that leads from a dustbowl in Sao Paolo, Brazil to a lonely road near Saitama that looks suspiciously like the desert outside of Fullerton, CA.

Miike knows other dope routes as well–the secret byways between inner and outer space, consumption and expulsion, us and them–and admits as much when his camera traces a death-dart from its vaginal origin in the genital battles royale of Fudoh: The Next Generation, or dwells serenely on the following scene from Dead or Alive:

A venomous yakuza kingpin (played by the immensely repellent Renji Ishibashi) sitting back in his easy chair, a hypodermic freshly flushed into his forearm, a smear of feces browning his brow. At the kingpin's feet: a vacant stripper, stoned to the gills, floating in a children's wading pool filled with gallons of enema-evacuated fluids, sausage-sized hunks of stool bobbing near her swollen, speechless lips. Moved to theosophical contemplation by degradation before him, not to mention the stripper's overwhelmingly sensual stench, the kingpin marvels at the woman's saintly defilements as if in anticipation of the divine.

"Pumped full of smack, screwed by all, bathed in your own shit...do you sense God?" he inquires, then drowns the woman in her own watery soil.

How fragrant is that Hamlet sandoichi now?

Heads or Tails?

One way or another, it seems as if everything in Miike's movies comes up smelling like neuroses. Decapitations occur in almost all of his films, yet the separation of mind and body is hardly one of the director's themes. The cosmic and the cloacal are clearly linked in Dead or Alive, just as Tomoro Taguchi, in Rainy Dog, sports the biggest little johnson that ever pissed all over Taipei. And while castration-substitutes seem everywhere abound (severed limbs, inoculated eye sockets, the appearance–in Andromedia–of cinematographer Christopher Doyle in an outsized pompadour and a pair of short pants), the specter of Oedipus seems as more of an inducement than an impediment to anyone's progress. Riki Fudoh's entire existence is based on the eventuality of slaying his father, even if he does take a pass on passion with his tattooed mother-substitute (who then hooks up with the hottest chick-with-a-dick in Riki's high school gang.)

These days, Miike–like so many of his movies–seems to be everywhere at once, directing a computer effects-heavy musical at Shochiku with his left hand while drawing up plans for Zatoichi 2001 with his right. On occasion, he'll turn his thoughts to an adaptation of novelist Ryu Murakami's Coin Locker Babies, even though it sometimes seems as if every film he's already made is a meditation on Murakami's early puke-and-teenaged-pussy classic, Almost Transparent Blue:

"Kei waved a piece of bacon and drank wine, Moko buried her red fingernails in the huge butt of wiry-haired Oscar. Reiko's toes were stretched back and quivering. Her cunt, rubbed hard, gaped red and shone with mucus. Saburo took deep breaths and slowed down the spinning, moving her in time with Luis Bon Fa's singing of 'Black Orpheus.'"

With Dead or Alive about to take the stage, Takashi Miike's clearly about to arrive, and–to mutilate Nagisa Oshima's ancient prognostication–if you sniff carefully enough, in the smell of a hermaphrodite's menses and the ham-chunked stools of gluttonous midget, you can smell the outpourings of a new generation. Nobody prays over a smorgasbord, so y'all go on and dig right in. Just don't forget to ask yourself later, as you lie gorged on all that Miike allows, if, in the course of all this feasting, you got a sense of God.

Chuck Stephens is West Coast Editor of Filmmaker magazine. He reviews films for Film Comment, The Village Voice, and The San Francisco Bay Guardian.