Last weekend, something fairly momentous happened. Lumberjack the Monster, the new film by Takashi Miike, arrived on Netflix. Lumberjack the Monster is a significant release, because it represents the first out-and-out horror movie that Miike has made in a decade, having spent the intervening years dabbling in other genres. For a certain type of fan, it’s like Scorsese coming back from the wilderness of the 1980s with Goodfellas. Even if his films are too violent and perverse for you, you still have to admit that a new Takashi Miike horror movie is a big deal.
Unless you’re Netflix, of course. Because Netflix released Lumberjack the Monster with minimal – perhaps even non-existent – promotion. I only knew about it because I saw a tweet from a guy who had discovered it by accident and couldn’t understand why Netflix hadn’t made more noise about it.
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The big fear for directors – any directors, not just the notable ones – is that being released straight to streaming is roughly the equivalent of tying an anchor to your leg and jumping overboard. Release a movie into cinemas and your only competition are the other movies that have been released at the same time. But debut on Netflix and suddenly you’re competing against every piece of filmed content ever made. Even if you miraculously manage to conjure up a scrap of buzz, a day or two later you’ll be replaced by something else. You’ve dedicated years of life to a project, miraculously turning it from nothing to something with your bare hands, only to find that nobody can find it on the platform because of all the ads for Is It Cake?. No wonder Doug Liman threw such a tantrum when Amazon told him that Road House would go straight to streaming.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Lumberjack the Monster is a significant release, because it represents the first out-and-out horror movie that Miike has made in a decade, having spent the intervening years dabbling in other genres.
I only knew about it because I saw a tweet from a guy who had discovered it by accident and couldn’t understand why Netflix hadn’t made more noise about it.
As it stands now, Buster Scruggs has the feel of a weird little outlier in the Coens’s filmography; a funny little almost-film that came and went without leaving any splash at all.
No wonder Doug Liman threw such a tantrum when Amazon told him that Road House would go straight to streaming.
When it was released in 2018, The Other Side of the Wind was hidden away in a submenu, buried beneath no end of romcoms and reality shows.
That means Takashi Miike will get the reception he deserves, and lots of unsuspecting subscribers will get to watch a Japanese-language movie about a brain-stealing serial killer.
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