Miike’d Up: Eyecatch Junction

In Miike’d Up, I will be attempting to watch the entirety of Takashi Miike’s filmography in chronological order, or at least as much of it as is feasibly possible.

Reviewed on Letterboxd 9/20/22

Miike’d Up: An [Incomplete] Prologue

Eyecatch Junction (1991)

I haven’t watched anything in a while, so I figured what better way to get back into the swing of things than with a little-known, low-rated film from Takashi Miike’s early days working in V-cinema.

V-cinema was Japan’s direct-to-video industry in the late 80s and early 90s, and this film from 1991 was the first released with Miike’s name at the helm (Lady Hunter: Prelude to Murder was released after it despite, as I mentioned in my review for the film, being shot before Eyecatch Junction). With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Eyecatch Junction is little more than standard direct-to-video fare. While it poses as a film about a group of crime fighting policewomen bent on taking out yakuza pimps and avenging the deaths of young women, in reality it’s little more than a vehicle for skin and the perverse. If you’ve ever seen a late-night movie, then you pretty much know what to expect: some action here and there, a fair few goofy jokes, but most of all skin, skin, and more skin, and plenty of men ogling at such displays. 

Needless to say, it’s pretty uninspired on the whole. The story isn’t anything special, although I will admit that it did hook me at one point. That is, it hooked me until I realized that it was simply walking a well-trodden road that a million other such films have been down, earning it, in my eyes, the most ignominious of distinctions, that being “formulaic.” There were some inspired cinematography and editing choices, but those were few and far between, and on the whole this film was arrhythmic, leading it to feel much longer than its 93 minute runtime. 

It’s unfortunate because, like Lady Hunter: Prelude to Murder, this film represented a chance to do something different in regards to its story. Both films place women in the role of protagonist(s), but in each case this amounts to little; in the former, Saeko is a stock character that could be either male or female (something Tom Mes mentions in his book Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike), giving no real weight to the fact that she is this badass female super soldier, and in the latter, the women of the secret crime fighting group “Eyecatch Junction” play into their standing as objects of sexual desire, thereby upholding gender roles (don’t believe me? The hint’s in the name— and even spoken by one of the characters herself).

So while this film presented a unique opportunity to buck what was presumably the trend in V-cinema at the time (I can’t say I’m too familiar with this industry, but I feel like I can certainly make a well-educated guess), it squandered this chance and instead found itself floundering as a mediocre late-night watch. Yes, I chuckled, yes there were parts I enjoyed, but in the end, there’s not much to it. Speaking of the end, the credits were fun, but they certainly weren’t enough to lift Eyecatch Junction out of the bottom of the V-cinema bargain bin.

2.5 ⭐️ out of 5