All notions of what it means to be a normal family are dropped into a blender and warped to hell in Gakuryû Ishii’s deconstruction of the nuclear household: The Crazy Family (1984).
Katsuhiko Kobayashi thinks his family’s trajectory is declining due to their “civilization sickness,” which he believes is perhaps a consequence of city living. He decides to move them to a more suburban setting away from the city, so they can settle more into the roles he imagined for them. But his plans are gradually disturbed by his own eccentric actions and the rest of the family’s rapid descent into madness.
Gakuryû Ishii is one of Japan’s leading filmmaking Punk visionaries, who aided in the creation of his country’s own cyberpunk movement. His body of work includes the punk-rock cyberpunk showdown film Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001) and the psycho-thriller Angel Dust (1994)