One night a shadowy trench-coat wearing fellow, surrounded by a bluish halo, busts into the home of one Dr. Hirose. The intruder is looking for GT medicine, an experimental Hirose-invented serum that causes animals to grow ten times faster than normal. The intruder accosts Hirose and, when the latter shatters a vial containing the desired substance, kills the doctor and rips an eyeball out of his head.
…shatters a vial containing the desired substance, kills the doctor and rips an eyeball out of his head.
So begins BIOTHERAPY (1986), the only standalone film directed by the Japanese TV veteran Akihiro Kashima. It hails from a period that gave us no-budget mini-features like GAKIDAMA/DEMON WITHIN, GUZOO, DEATH POWDER/DESU PAWUDA, CYCLOPS/ KIKUROPUSU, CONTON/ JUSIN DESNETSU and the GUINEA PIG/ GINI PIGGU series, all of which were made for the Japanese video market. BIOTHERAPY is for some reason one of the more popular entries in that cycle, even though quality-wise there’s little to be said for it.
Anyway: the following night the trench-coat wearing intruder, still searching for the medicine, breaks into the murdered doctor’s lab. There he stabs a young woman technician to death with broken vials, causing her blood to spurt from the glass cylinders, and then rips her tongue out (a la BLOOD FEAST). And he’s not done: the following night he kills a pair of investigators by knocking out teeth and bashing heads.
Eventually the killer’s true motive is revealed, and it places the proceedings firmly in sci-fi territory, with time travel, extraterrestrial visitations and the apocalypse invoked. But the filmmakers, you can rest assured, don’t forget about the grue, with graphic depictions of intestine ripping and slime spitting closing things out.
From a filmmaking standpoint BIOTHERAPY is serviceable at best. It only runs 35 minutes but could have stood to lose about 15 of them, with an interminable mid-film interlude in which the antagonist disappears and the not-very-invigorating story is developed—a definite mistake, as that antagonist, and the mutilations he perpetrates, are the film’s main points of interest.
It only runs 35 minutes but could have stood to lose about 15 of them, with an interminable mid-film interlude in which the antagonist disappears and the not-very-invigorating story is developed.
The gore effects, hailing from the pre-CGI era, are strong and imaginative (and won the film an award from the long-running Japanese manga magazine Young Jump). That’s a good thing, as gratuitous gore is really the only thing BIOTHERAPY has to offer. See Cyclops instead.
Vital Statistics
BIOTHERAPY
Suna Kôbô/Nikkatsu
Director: Akihiro Kashima
Screenplay: Kazuhiro Kasai, Hiroshi Takatsu
Cast: Jun’ichi Haruta, Yumiko Ishikawa, Hirohisa Nakata