ハサミ男 (Hasami Otoko)
The Man Behind The Scissors

Japanese 2005
http://www.media-b.co.jp/hasami

Two scissor wielding murderers find that someone has beaten them to their next victim and they are called in as police witnesses. Based on the novel of the same name by Masayuki Shuno.

After a long sojourn for most of the 90s in V-cinema territory, directing titles such as the entries in the XX series (XX Beautiful Beast / XX Utsukushiki Kedamono in 1995 and XX Beautiful Prey / XX Utsukushiki Emono in 1996) for companies like Toei, The Man Behind the Scissors is a welcome return to genre moviemaking for Ikeda. A quirky and perplexing police procedural centred around a string of seemingly motiveless scissor murders, it is a surprisingly bloodless and sexless work for the former Nikkatsu Roman Porno director who gave us such exuberant sleazefests as Evil Dead Trap and Angel Guts: Red Porno, but it makes up for its lacklustre veneer with a cunningly tricksy narrative that, for much of the running time remains a step or two ahead of the viewer.

Masahito Kagawa's script, adapted with Ikeda from the novel of the same name written by Masayuki Shuno, keeps us firmly with the two murderers, the cool but methodical serial psycho Yasunaga (Toyokawa) and Chinatsu (Aso), his sweet but sullen younger sidekick who is plagued with her own self-destructive desires and over whom Yasunaga has an inexplicably strong hold. After shearing and stabbing their way through a couple of primly-uniformed high school girls with the sharpened implements of the title, the pair soon find that someone has already got to their next potential victim, 16-year-old Yukiko, and done the job for them.

Finding themselves called as witnesses to the crime, they embark on a series of double bluffs and deceits with police investigator Isone (Higuchi) and his deskbound superior Horinouchi (Abe) involving feeding information to a gutter press journalist out to do some muck-raking and toying with an innocent bystander seemingly unconnected with the victim, all the while trying to pinpoint the identity of the older man Yukiko was spotted with just before the murder.

The Man Behind the Scissors is more concerned with plot and character than gory murders or action-packed set-pieces, which in some ways is rather a shame given how enjoyably over-the-top Ikeda's former work has been. Still, there lingers a vague suspicion that Ikeda isn't really being serious with the material. The arch performances along with the blaring tenor sax score set an aura of perhaps unintentional camp against the otherwise unelaborate visual style, making it far more fun than other attempts at sombre psychological dramas such as Yoichi Sai's MARKS. This makes it all the more disappointing that the film should spend quite so much time in tying up the loose threads at the end in order to provide a serious psychological justification for what has gone before. Shorn of half an hour, The Man Behind the Scissors would prove an even more enjoyable diversion.