Based on an incident in 1972, a clash between a radical left wing student group and the police known as the Asama-Sanso incident, Kichiku Dai Enkai is one of the most notorious Japanese horror movies to have seen the light of day over the past years. It’s a brutal, bloody portrayal of gang politics gone wrong. This powerful movie was shot while director Kumakiri was studying during his final year at the university and the whole thing was put together on a shoestring. Taking bits of whatever 16mm stock they could lay their hands on, this movie managed to carve out a global niche for itself in numerous film festivals and even won an award at the prestigious 1998 Taormina Film Festival in Sicily.

The Asamo-Sanso incident was essentially a siege at a lodge in the Karuizawa mountains (Nagano Prefecture, one hour by train from Tokyo), where a radical student gang holed themselves up with a hostage. But rather than being a straight shootout, when the siege ended the police discovered that through the fighting, the gang had seemingly been turning their weapons as much on each other as on them. 60% of the Japanese households were estimated to have tuned in to the live broadcasts from the location of the siege –- an intriguing, prophetic footnote to the events. Kumakiri’s interest with this particular time began after he watched a documentary on the subject, finding the battle lines between friendship and conflicting gang politics particularly fascinating. And it is this very turbulence that sits at the heart of Kichiku Dai Enkai.

The premise is layered but, once peeled, surprisingly straightforward. When a 1970s political group’s leader named Aizawa is imprisoned, his girlfriend Masami immediately sets out to control the group using her sexuality. This backfires when Yamane, one of the students, leaves the group to join a more radical party, and the group begins to disintegrate. But when Yamane returns, Masami loses all control and so begins an orgiastic cycle of sex and violence that leaves them knee-deep in each other’s blood.

Rough and with a blatant disregard for linearity, Kichiku is, at first, very much a student movie. Kumakiri’s particular take on the footage tells the story of a gang determined to violently overthrow the Japanese government, while their own group is disintegrating. Kichiku therefore becomes a hideously explicit exploitation picture while at the same time being a sociological study into the effects of power and isolationism. As the former, Masami’s downward path to becoming a psychotic megalomaniac is an astute portrait of the corrupting influence of power. As the latter, it’s a strong warning against the self-destructive tendencies of political extremism.

Given the sobering subject matter it should be no surprise that this is a downbeat and depressing movie. It sits comfortably alongside other modern Japanese nihilistic entries like Battle Royale, yet the genetic code harks back to more elder, darkly enigmatic and unrelenting works, such as Koji Wakamatsu’s Ecstasy of the Angels (which was released in the same year as the Asama-Sanso incident). Contrasting these two films, Wakamatsu wins hands down on the despair chart but Kumakiri easily tops the scale on sheer brutality and bloody violence.

The movie also appears to draw heavily from the cinema of Italian splatter master Ruggero Deodato, particularly Cannibal Holocaust. Both movies essentially share the same message. Humans are brutally senseless, they have a tendency to manipulate and rule others with an overlying threat of enforced violence, which will inevitably lead to rebellion with equally dreaded methods. Like Deodato’s cannibal tribes, Kumakiri’s sect members find themselves on the receiving end of unprecedented acts of senseless violence, and enact terrible vengeance on the perpetrators. Both movies use political messages as a framing device in order to exploit audience infatuation with violence.

By removing the antagonists from a concrete jungle and placing them in a wild environment, they revert to random acts of animalistic violence. Like Cannibal Holocaust, Kumakiri’s warring sect suffers shooting, penis dismemberment, disembowelment, decapitation, and violent sex. Stylistic similarities between this movie and Cannibal Holocaust include a tendency to linger hand-held cameras on the aftermath of gory torture, the employment of stock-footage, the use of disquieting sounds and music to heighten onscreen explicitness, and the employment of wide lens photography to elicit a mood of isolation from society.

It’s the context created for all this conflict that’s entirely pivotal to getting under the skin of the movie. This is perhaps best shown by another comparison with the already mentioned Ecstasy of the Angels. In that movie, Wakamatsu clearly identifies his group as politically motivated. In stark contrast to this, Kumakiri’s gang in Kichiku only appear to have a political agenda, but there’s never an attempt to explain what they are actually working towards. The truth is plain and simple. There just is no grand agenda, political or otherwise. Instead, Kichiku highlights the vacuum created when there is no solid concept or cause whatsoever.

The ingredient that represents the gang’s sole raison d’être rests in the personality of their incarcerated leader. It’s simply his charisma and presence that the gang works for. They talk about Aizawa in hushed, almost mystical tones, even stating that meeting him is a life changing experience. But the relationship between the leader and the rest of the gang is established only through recollections and fragments of conversation, so this remains vague, unfocused and insular throughout the movie. It is almost as though Aizawa acts as a crutch, to simply bolster the confidence and social skills of the individual losers in the gang. Without him, it’s obvious that they would amount to even less than they already are.

Kumakiri’s low budget approach of using old bits of stock footage of student riots adds a further angle to all of this. It is almost an admission of this vacuum in which Aizawa’s gang operates, a show-reel of second-hand rebellion played over and over. Within the structure of the movie, this spliced-in footage feels like frozen reminders of something lost and obscured, a window into a forgotten world where clear lines were drawn and there still existed a slight glimmer of hope that political change was worth all the blood, sweat and tears. But within Kichiku, the old riot footage feels more like a token gesture, someone else’s passion replayed. Rather than providing a sense of time, it creates a sense of distance.

What really marks Kichiku out is how it doesn’t flinch away from portraying gang violence as graphically as possible. While the first two reels of the movie are concerned with the escalating inner conflict, the third reel is concerned only with showing the conclusion in as extreme a manner as one is ever likely to behold. And it’s this final third that has almost single-handedly given this movie its reputation as a bloody treat for horror fans. And while it’s definitely more than just that, it really is brutal, visceral stuff, with gruesome killings abound.

Performances from the cast are generally all good, but Tomohiro Zaizen (Yamane) and Sumiko Mikami (Masami) really hit a strike on impact. Masami is an unhinged monster while Yamane is simply the type of guy one wouldn’t get tired of smacking around. Overall, the whole cast is to be credited that each make their characters as odious as possible.

Many of the statements in Kichiku may ultimately feel somewhat lightweight and disposable. But it’s the violent, bloody capitulation Kumakiri presents the viewer with that undoubtedly shows where the movie’s real passion lies. While the sociological back-story never really manages to escape the realm of the obvious and henceforth, not too much in the way of illumination is there to be found, you will irreversibly be drawn into one of the bloodiest, mind-numbing spirals horror cinema has to offer. Opinions on this movie may vary, but one thing is undeniable: it delivers on its promise.