Cute Girls, Severed Limbs, and the Man Who Loves Both

Noboru Iguchi is one of my favorite directors working in any genre anywhere. This is not a hedged statement. Born in Tokyo in 1969, he makes films that should not work—and don’t, by conventional metrics—but produce something in the viewer that more respectable cinema consistently fails to reach: total, undiluted engagement with the absurd.

His catalog reads like a fever dream assembled from Troma films and idol group content simultaneously. The Machine Girl turns a teenage girl into a cyborg killing machine after her arm is replaced with a Gatling gun. Dead Sushi is exactly what it sounds like. Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead involves a parasite that causes catastrophic digestive distress in its zombie hosts, and then escalates from there. All of it comes with buckets of bright red practical effects gore, short skirts, loud screaming, and an almost operatic commitment to the bit.

Toco Toco TV, a YouTube channel that produces short documentary portraits of Japanese creators, spent time with Iguchi in his element. The result is a portrait of a man completely at peace with his obsessions: idol culture, transgression, blood as aesthetic material. He plays with every assumption the word "otaku" carries and refuses to apologize for any of it. Cute girls and severed heads—that’s his world. He built it deliberately and lives in it with obvious happiness.

There’s something clarifying about watching a filmmaker who has zero interest in prestige. Iguchi isn’t trying to elevate his material. He’s trying to perfect it on its own terms. The documentary catches him in a moment of complete sincerity, which turns out to be funnier and more moving than it has any right to be.