A Darkly Comedic Japanese Descent of Modestly Orphic Proportions 

DIRECTED BY SHINJI IMAOKA/JAPANESE/2006

DVD STREET DATE: JULY 9, 2024/REDEMPTION FILMS (via Kino Lorber)

When you can list a giant squid, killer spiders, penis-biting snakes, and the king of Hell as immediate threats, you’ve definitely got some problems.  Also, you’re quite likely in a Japanese pink film from the mid-2000s.  Welcome to Uncle’s Paradise… where pleasure leads to unlikely pains. (As advertised).

In contemporary (2006) Japan, professional squid catcher Haruo Maekawa’s life is cast into turmoil when his down-on-his-luck uncle, Takashi (Shirô Shimomoto; S&M Hunter Begins), shows up to live with him and his girlfriend, Rika (Minami Aoyama).  Though not outwardly crass or even forward, the humble-looking Takashi manages to seduce woman after woman, always signing his name on their bare backs with a red marker mid-encounter.

When Haruto (Mutsuo Yoshioka) finds Takashi’s name scrawled on Rika’s back, he becomes forelorn.  Eventually, it’s up to Rika to take on the Devil himself in an Orphic high-stakes game of rock-paper-scissors in order to save the souls of both men from an afterlife of perpetual rancid, depleting sex in some sort of disgusting hotel.  That the Devil (AKA “the king of Hell”)- red skin, horns, and all- is personified as a fed-up desk clerk of a cheap hotel might be the funniest thing about this rather weird movie.

Per the film’s description as provided by its stateside DVD distributor, Redemption Films, Uncle’s Paradise is “a wild, campy and comedic adventure.”  It is?  I suppose that to me, some of that is true…  It has its “wild” moments, sure.  The snakebite in a tender location in public should qualify for that.  As should a scene of a guy in an inky-water bathtub full of small dead squids getting attacked by some sort of undersea tentacle.  But is that stuff comedic?  While some viewers report belly laughing throughout this strange-by-design tale of erotically-charged weirdness, my jaded (and perhaps, I admit, a little prudish?) self found such moments scoff-worthy at best.

Being largely unfamiliar with the work of busy director Shinji Imaoka, I’ve learned that a consensus holds that Uncle’s Paradise is an outlier within his filmography.  Though Paradise didn’t fully come together for me, I would still maintain that it is by no means a poor film.  

If I’m remembering correctly, this is the fourth such DVD release from the Redemption Films sublabel farm that I’ve reviewed lately, and like the others, its visuals appear murky and particularly low on resolution.  “Combing” is common, especially when it comes to text graphics and the like.  I understand that Japanese pink film productions are, by intention, low on resources in most every department, but the poor transfer quality on these discs seems like another matter.  Also, the English-language subtitles are totally wackadoodle with typos, missing words, and wrong words to the point that I suspect that no living breathing human was ever involved in their creation or quality control.

All that said, Redemption seems to be the only game in town when it comes to obtaining films such as this for North American region-locked viewers.  If titles like Uncle’s Paradise interest you, odds are you already know the deal and to some degree are willing to put up with all the shortcomings.  This dark comedy manages to tick all its “pink film” boxes in terms of running time, scope, minimal scale, perpetual edgy content, and the seemingly incongruous restrictions within said content.  

Check into this “Paradise” if you’re so inclined… just beware of the agressive wild kingdom therein.