And all because she thought she could tame the Ronster.

Anyway, as if Columbine wasn’t proof enough, these last few years of moviedom have been a wake-up call for assholes and idiots the world over to stop picking on others because you have a small dick or your daddy didn’t want you or you’re just generally insecure in your existence and feel the need to project those insecurities on others rather than fix your stupid self and get it the fuck over with. If you’re not going to solve the problem by getting yourself some help, then at least do us all a favor and just blow your Godz damned brains out all over your bathroom mirror so the rest of the world doesn’t have to put up with your childish bullying, bigotry and general hate mongering. George W, are you listening?

Not since the grand old ’70s and ‘80s have we been privy to the caliber of violent retribution the global film community has thrown our way these last few cycles, especially 1999’s Audition , 2002’s Irreversible , 2003’s Haute Tension (which became High Tension when it was released here in the United States… which is an oxymoron if I ever heard one!) , 2006’s The Hills Have Eyes remake, the currently-running-the-art-house-market-as-of-this-review Hard Candy and, of course, Chan-wook Park’s critically acclaimed revenge series (Oldboy , Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance) that’s been proving again and again that we’ve gotta look elsewhere in the world these days if we’re looking for envelope pushing films stuffed to exploding with cliché free excitement, suspense, drama and more than a little gut punching nastiness. But, as I’m sure we’ve all seen in reviews for more than a couple of the aforementioned movies above, not every modern revenge movie can live up to those lofty expectation, and for me, Neighbor No. 13 is one of them.

Not unlike Slaughter High of 2 decades earlier, this is the tale of an unfortunate young lad who suffered your typical grade school bullying at the hands of a total dick and his two tag-along balls. Forced to eat bugs, hosed down in the boys room, taunted and terrorized, young Murasaki Juzo’s fate at the hands of this academic mini Al-Qaeda hit it’s apex of pain one day when the lad was held down by the two testies while the lead prick took it upon himself to pour flesh hungry acid on the kid’s hand and face. Like I said, it’s Slaughter High all over again.

A decade later, Mur lives by himself in a little cheap-o housing complex in apartment, you guessed it, number 13. Though his face is none the worse for wear (cosmetic surgery?), he suffers nightmares, blackouts and mildly psychotic episodes, reliving the fateful day in his shattered mind over and over again and engaging in naked slap fights and abusive rave dancing with his fractured alter ego No. 13, who still bears the gooey scars of the socially fatal facial melting. Meanwhile, a new family known as the Akais has moved into the apartment directly above his, consisting of husband and wife duo Toru and Nozomi (played by Yumi Yoshimura, one half of the J-Pop sensation known as Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi) and their son Yuki… whom we meet while he’s shoving a pair of scissors in the crotch of a geeky plumber just trying to turn on the water. God damn it do I hate kids.

Mur heads to his new job at a local construction company, where he’s put under the supervision of, surprise surprise, Toru Akai. It also turns out that Toru’s a complete asshole and likes to bust balls on the new guys, of which Murasaki will be no exception. Not long into his first day though, it becomes clear that our hero’s not going to be sitting for this shit long, as 13’s twisted visage starts to appear in Mur’s reflection and the seemingly wormy lad shows signs of ballsitude early into the abuse. Good for him. If some smell little cock like that tried any of that tough guy dominance crap with me, it would’ve been claw hammers and bits of brain matter raining from the fucking heavens… and don’t think it hasn’t happened one or twice already kids, cuz I’ve got a whole scrapbook at this point.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum though, when Mur hobbles home from his first day of being Toru’s abuse bag for all his wasted hopes and dreams, he’s greeted at his door by Nozomi and little Yuki who give him a little “welcome to the ghetto” gift as a good neighborly gesture. He repays this the next day by breaking into their apartment, eating their food, rifling through their personal belongings, planting a bug in their bedroom, pissing all over their bathroom and flagrantly Moonwalking through their kitchen. The heartless fiend! Is there no end to his bloodthirsty revenge?!

Concerned that Murasaki didn’t show up for his second day at work, co-worker and fellow lifelong loser Seki (and his monstrous Afro!) stops by our hero’s pad to drink some brews and hold the first meeting of The Battered Nerd Boys Club. See, Seki was Toru’s victim before Mur showed up at work and he can relate to the constant beatings and verbal harassment at the man’s hands and overly excitable knee. Of course, where Seki thinks he’s found someone with which to read manga and compare collectible figurines, Mur just gets drunk and fades into a 2 minute animated sequence (*cough*click the rolling head image at the bottom of this review*cough*) where he confesses to Seki that he’s been waiting 10 years for the chance to kill Toru and now the time has come to finally get his revenge. So yes, Toru is the same acid flinging butt nugget that created No. 13 and now it looks as if it’s time to pay the proverbial piper, beeyotch.

After the unsettled fatty departs his new friend/maniac’s abode, Mur is left to jump around and break shit in a boozed up haze. The racket peevs his neighbor Kaneda, who yells through the walls for our boy to keep his shit in check and go the fuck to bed. Unhappy with some faceless jerk-off disrupting his one man rave festival, Mur picks up his kitchen knife, heads next door, and proceeds to put Kaneda’s noise complaint to rest, as in “in peace”. Does Kaneda look a little familiar? He should Slappy, cuz that’s Takeshi Miike right there! Yes, the madman director of such modern day epic Japanese cinematic fare as Ichi the Killer , Happiness of the Katikuris , Gozu and, of course, Audition. What a man.

All celebrity murder victim cameos aside, let’s jump back into the acid bath that is our tale. Not down with taking fatal action against a guy for just being a cock, Seki tries to inform Toru of the plot against his life, but instead learns that it’s never smart to turn your back on a guy once he’s confessed his highly illegal and insane plans to you… especially if he’s wielding a crowbar.

After some twisted Fight Club-ish manipulation, Mur convinces Nozomi to take Toru out for a movie. Toru, unaware that the nice neighbor his wife’s been talking about all this time and whom she intends to leave their son with while they’re out is actually Mr. Juzo, sees no problem with leaving Yuki with their new neighbor. However, Shinigami, the most hardcore loyalist member of Toru’s old biker gang The Dogs, isn’t comfortable with leaving his boss’s son in the care of a virtually unknown babysitter, so he follows Mur as he takes Yuki for a fun filled afternoon at the local arcade/amusement park. Looks like he’s the only smart one looking out for the kid too, as he catches Mur slipping into 13 mode and trying to drown the brat in a mens room sink! Though he saves the kid for the time being, Shin pays for it in the end, found dead in the crapper later by some random kid, his insides on the outside and deader than my wallet 37 hours after payday. As for Yuki, his parents obviously never taught him what to do in case you’re abducted by a lunatic multiple personality killer with a taste for puffy orange vests, cuz he just kinda wanders around the park until 13 picks the kid up again and walks out the front gate with him in tow, the kid giving park security no reason not to stop the whole scene from playing out.

You can bet my kids are getting tasers and karate lessons for Cthulhumas this year. Not that I really have any enemies to speak of, but you never know what kind of crazy vendetta some guy might be harboring for you because you cut him off in line at the drug store, ran over his dog or just fucked his wife or something. I mean Hell, who’s to say that the guy whose face I melted with acid back in grade school won’t came after me some day!?

Later on that night, after Nozo slurps the protein out of Toru over the threshold of their new home (not that I can see why anyone would actually still need a threshold in this day and age of reduced home wheat processing…), the two parents ponder why little Yuki’s not back yet. But, when Nozo finally tells hubby the name of the neighbor playing babysitter to the littlest Akai, Toru gets really concerned really quick and the two bust into Mur’s apartment… though you can’t really call it “break in and entering” when the door’s unlocked, right?

In the crazy’s lair they find Yuki’s clothes, what appears to be blood smeared everywhere, some flyers for a class reunion at Toru’s old public school and a camcorder, inside which is filmed evidence of Murasaki Juzo/No. 13 yelling at and generally abusing little Yuki. Parents, never assume that your neighbor will make a good babysitter just because they live in the same apartment building that you do. That doesn’t mean they’re good, it just means they’re convenient.

Armed with a shotgun and a stomach full of fatherly vengeance, Toru heads to his old school to face down Murasaki/No. 13. What he finds is a graphic log of unflushed feces in the boys room and a badly choreographed chase/fight sequence in which No. 13 takes away his shotgun, then proceeds to run after Toru while swinging a katana through the air and eventually cornering the bully-turned-victim in place. It turns into this whole “you made me suffer and now I’m going to make you feel bad about that and maybe kill you!” scene with Toru on the floor with a shotgun to the back of his head. Does Toru die? Does Murasaki/No. 13 die? Who gets the last laugh and has their vengeance fulfilled? And what happens to Yuki? I won’t say, not because I’d feel bad spoiling the ending mind you, but because I’d rather keep your ass in suspense until you either see the movie yourself or e-mail me offering me some kind of barter for the information you seek. Sex, drugs and/or copious amounts of rock and/or roll should cover it. Who runs Barter Town? Damn straight.

I gave a copy of this movie to my C.H.U.D. fucking friend Claire to watch after telling her it was (a) a revenge movie and (b) has a Miike cameo. After hearing nothing from her for weeks, I sent out a search party to make sure she was okay and finally received word from her that “the search party was delicious, Burial Ground was just as bad as I’d always been told and Neighbor No. 13 tried too hard to be cool”. I don’t know if it "tried too hard to be cool" so much, but I definitely know it tried to mix the more interesting elements of Oldboy and Fight Club, then forgot to add the all important “shock twist” ingredient that both films wear proudly. Of all the so-called “shocking climax scenes” I’ve been privy to over the centuries, 90% were predictable and practically handed to me in the first 25 minutes, 8% were completely out of left-field solely for shock value and had absolutely no relation to the rest of the movie that had come before it, and the final 2% were mind-blowing “final piece of the crazy puzzle” finishes that slap you in the face like a dildo wrapped in razor wire, but will manually masturbate you afterwards so you get the odd sense of fulfillment and pleasure out of the experience as a whole.

It’s a truly beautiful moment in any man, woman or child’s life and a moment that Neighbor No. 13 completely misses the boat on. Yeah, it’s still sitting there on the pier, waving it’s little spankerchief around, dapping it’s eyes and screaming at the departed ship to come back and pick it’s ass up because there’s a little post-op transsexual dwarf in Amsterdam who’s going to be heartbroken when that tug putters into harbor and Neighbor No. 13’s not on board.

The point of Fight Club’s “dual personality character with both roles being played by different actors” was that it was a 2 hour masquerade party of dropped hints as to just who it was that was dancing with you from behind that creepy, big nosed, Eyes Wide Shut rapist mask. And at midnight, when the time to remove said pseudo visage had come, all the little clues added up and you realized that it was Col. Mustard in the Observatory with the candlestick. You didn’t feel like you’d been had and the movie was exploiting your ignorance, but that you’d instead understood all the tips and everything made sense to you now and you were just glad you were no longer confused by whatever the fuck it was that had happened. Instead of trying to duplicate the same big pay-off, 13 instead used it as a gimmick to carry the story along, at which point the novelty quickly wears off and it loses all impact. If somebody punches me in the arm, then continues to do so repeatedly for 20 minutes, eventually the muscle goes numb and I no longer care that it’s happening. Besides, if the guy continues to punch me in the arm, he runs the risk of driving me to Killtown, at which point I’d feel obligated to treat him to a triple scoop of frigid agony at the local malt shop, followed by a strawberry ball buster and a tall frosty glass of fresh-squeezed rib breakers to top it all off. Neighbor No. 13 never quite pushed me that far, but let this be an officially posted warning sign for would-be future transgressors.

As for the “shocking” revenge twist, it fizzled out. Oldboy was the big end-all-be-all pyrotechnics display at the end of the baseball game when the home team’s won and the visiting team needs a big neon reminder in the sky of how they’re all losers and there’s nobody around to kiss their bruised egos tonight. Neighbor No. 13 is the roman candle some drunken redneck misfires into his own face, setting his hair on fire and disfiguring him for life, forcing him to wear an old potato sack on his head. Beyond the lackluster “saw it coming at me like seeing Godzilla doing backflips towards me from the horizon” revenge twist, the end is also no surprise. If you’ve watched enough Asian cinema (Japanese films being the most common committers of the following crime), you know that a lot of them seem to like leaving the viewers in suspense, never putting that definite final period at the end of the sentence. Instead they like to leave the movie on a bizarre, “never quite spelled out for you” finish that leaves not only the finish, but the entire movie wide open for viewers’ interpretations. Some people dig this, because it lets them write their perfect ending in their head and thus enhances the experience. However, there are also people like me who look at these open-ending finales as simple signs of laziness or massive rush jobs done because the movie was coming in behind schedule. Whatever the reason, I’m sick of being told to come up with my own endings and explanations. It’s bad enough I have to write the reviews, now I’ve gotta tie up all the loose ends myself?! Piss-off.