Is the mysterious Joe a serial killer?
In The Forest of Love: Deep Cut, we follow people who meet the charismatic and disgusting con man Joe. Some believe that he is a serial killer and want to make a movie based on “Joe the Serial Killer.” Joe is a sadomasochist, and he loves to hurt people, especially young women. He is a con man, and the women can’t resist this man from hell who looks like he’s 55 years old and melting. Is there anyone who can stop Joe?
I’m not going to waste too much time on how much I love to hate the director Sion Sono. He has made some good movies, but I can’t stand his yelling cartoon characters from hell. I have always called him the cousin of Rob Zombie because both directors’ characters are obnoxious, and everything I hate about Sion Sono’s characters can be found in The Forest of Love: Deep Cut.
What you should know about The Forest of Love: Deep Cut is that Sion Sono celebrates himself and his career. If, like me, you have watched most of his movies, you will recognize all the movies he pays tribute to since he likes to sniff his own farts and sit in the corner doing what a man would do in this situation if he were a pervert like him. It’s really pathetic.
The series has some funny scenes, but for the most part, I just hated the characters, the childish humor, and the director’s obsession with young women. For me, he has always been the Takashi Miike wannabe director—but the childish one. I find most of his movies childish, and I have never understood why he has become so popular outside of Japan. If people associate Japanese acting with overacting—and there are many of them—then The Forest of Love: Deep Cut is their proof. So don’t watch this series if you can’t stand Japanese overacting multiplied by ten.
The tone of this series is all over the place. The first episodes are lighter, but then it gets darker and darker, and people get killed. We see some really graphic scenes in the last episodes. The Joe character that charms everyone is a sadomasochist, but is he the serial killer that some of the characters we follow believe he is? He has a big mouth, but you sense that he may not be the killer you think he is. It’s so ridiculous to watch him beat up men and women when the man doesn’t have a muscle in his entire body. Everyone is afraid of good old Joe, and you have to sit there in your chair and watch so-called men who don’t knock this old geezer out cold.
What Joe has going for him is his big mouth and how, as a sort of cult leader, he manages to convince people to follow him and do as he says. He is like Charles Manson. That is interesting, provocative, and frightening. So that works, and we see how he destroys the minds of many innocent people.
For me, it’s hard to review The Forest of Love: Deep Cut since I have watched most of the director’s movies since the release of Suicide Club. After three episodes, I almost had enough, and I had to force myself to watch the last four episodes because I felt at home and remembered how much I could hate this director when he amps up the energy to ten, and the characters feel like they are old, retarded children from hell. But I would have loved the series if it weren’t for Sion Sono and his way of directing. If another director had directed it—an adult director—and made it dark as hell with characters that felt like actual humans, this would have been a classic. Because the story is interesting, and so are many of the characters, but Sion Sono drowns them with his childish behavior.
But do you need to have watched his earlier movies to catch all the references? No, not really, because if you haven’t watched any of his earlier or most well-known movies, you will get the full package in The Forest of Love: Deep Cut. Maybe you will like his childish style of filmmaking. But I have a feeling that 70% of viewers will hate the series, especially how silly the characters are. However, there are some funny scenes in the series, and even though I will never be a big fan of the director, I have to admit that there is only one Sion Sono, and we should thank God for that.