Junk Food (1997)

Blending widescreen cinematography with digital video, JUNK FOOD casts an unblinking but painterly eye over the darkest, most brutal fringes of contemporary Japanese society. JUNK FOOD depicts the hitherto unseen world of aberrant sexuality and savage violence that emerges when the sun goes down and clean, orderly Tokyo exposes its sordid underbelly. From gambling dens to wrestling rings, through make-shift funerals and crime-of-passion murders, director Masashi Yamamoto expertly knits together a series of smoky, neon-lit vignettes with documentary immediacy and gruesome clarity. Cashing in her antiseptic white-collar world for a white powder hell of lethal sex-play and furtive drug abuse, a beautiful young computer programmer unravels her way to the gutter. Clinging to an empty dream of success, a Pakistani immigrant graduates from armed robbery to double homicide. Using the same copycat precision with which they dress and drive, a carbon copy LA style street gang mounts a bloodthirsty coup d'etat of appalling viciousness.