Cold Fish

Cast

Production

Following Alien vs Ninja and Mutant Girls Squad, Cold Fish is the third film to be released by Nikkatsu's Sushi Typhoon, their gore-themed series. Director and writer Sion Sono was influenced by Japanese crime cases while developing Cold Fish, specifically about an actual killing spree committed by a dog kennel owner in the 1980s (the story of the film involves a family of three that becomes entangled in a string of ongoing murders perpetrated by a tropical fish salesman in Shizuoka Prefecture). Sono also wanted to "depict a sense of total hopelessness" which he felt is "lacking in Japanese films."

Release

Cold Fish premiered at the 67th Venice International Film Festival on September 7, 2010. It was also shown at film festivals in Pusan and at the Toronto International Film Festival where it received its North American premiere. Cold Fish won the best screenplay award in the Fantastic Features section at Fantastic Fest 2010. It was released in Japan on January 29, 2011.

Reception

Film Business Asia gave Cold Fish an 8 out of 10 rating praising the actor Denden who without his "tour-de-force performance...Cold Fish may never have worked." The review went on to state that "Though there's considerable gore on display, it's largely cartoonish. Cold Fish is not so much a blood-and-guts horror movie, more a danse macabre about social breakdown."

In the United Kingdom, Total Film gave the film a three out of five rating, suggesting that plot twists and black comedy offered welcome reprieve from the "largely hysterical acting and rivers of viscera." The Guardian found the film to be "fairly ordinary" in comparison to Sono's other works and felt that the film was too long. Radio Times gave the film three out of five stars, praising the acting from Denden, Fukikoshi and Kurosawa and Shinya Kimura's photography and Takashi Matsuzuka's production design which made up for "some overindulgent directorial moments".