We follow the antics of a mild-mannered chap minding his own business running his small tropical fish shop when one day he gets a call from a local store to tell him to come down and fetch his wayward teenage daughter who's been shoplifting. He races down with his wife (and the girl's stepmother) to find the security guard laying into his daughter verbally, all guns blazing.
During the process, another man turns up who appears to be a local businessman (who also runs a bigger, more successful tropical fish shop in the town). He obviously has some influence because he talks flatteringly to the security guard who lets the girl go. When they all leave the store, he insists that the group go and look at his fish shop, which they do. It seems that he and his wife make a habit of employing wayward young girls to work in the shop, even giving them accommodation. So he offers the family the same for this shoplifter daughter.
Turns out that this businessman is much more than he seems on the face of it and frankly is a bit of a fruit-loop, more of a Dexter-a-like (but with no Dark Passenger to tame him or give him any rules)! He ensnares our mild-mannered chap into a staged business meeting where he's ripping people off for money, then finding the more radical and permanent ways of making sure they don't care or tell the tale to the police or anyone else!
I guess that you're getting the idea by now and yes, the film turns into something of a series of bloodbath (literally) scenes, one after the other as our businessman hides his tracks. In the meantime he's threatened our man that if he tells anyone what's going on, he will be after his family. So our man just gets further and further sucked in and down the road, way over his head before he realises or could hope for a way out. Trapped - and the only way out might be a radical one!
Apparently the director is quite well known in certain circles, Sion Sono - but I don't think I've heard of him. I had a scour through IMDb at the actors in it and I similarly drew a blank, so I clearly don't move in the right circles! The cast does well with the material on offer though - suitably loopy when needed and grizzly in their antics on cue. It's quite shocking in places with scenes or rape, murder and abuse but also, dare I say in the same sentence, decent entertainment and dark fun. Yes, an extreme, uncontrolled likening to Dexter.
It's quite a long film at two and a half hours. Which version of it you'll get to see will probably depend on censorship for different platforms, but the one I saw on an old DVD looked like it was pretty much uncut! Hold onto your hats for the thrill ride and grab a sponge!
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