Takashi Miike is back! Japan's most prolific genre director returns to the Philadelphia Film Festival with a pair of films that demonstrate the enormous breadth of his filmmaking talent. One Missed Call is an effective Ring ripoff (or satire, depending on your point of view) that represents Miike at his most conventional and commercially appealing. Haunted cell phones and creepy little girls in a Miike film? Say it ain't so!

Film buffs fearing that Miike has "sold out" to "the man" will find solace in Izo, a radically experimental film that tosses all conventions (and a few kitchen sinks) out the window. Bereft of any semblance of narrative structure or traditional storytelling techniques, Miike's insane science project tells the tale of its titular character, who becomes a vengeful spirit after his Christ-like death in feudal Japan. The samurai is then doomed to wander through time for all eternity, killing everyone he meets.

That's pretty much it. I usually provide two to three paragraphs of plot analysis, but I've already divulged everything that Izo's two hour death march has to offer. The samurai-cum-demon haphazardly spirals through time and space to hack, slash and slaughter everyone in the known universe, which is apparently his ultimate goal. It's really hard to tell just what the hell is going in during much of the film, as Miike has truly gone off the deep end in pursuit of the most outlandish brain-buster ever committed to celluloid.

Izo — another collaboration with screenwriter Shigenori Takechi (Graveyard of Honor) — is an extremely uneven experience, and that's putting it mildly. The film lurches forward in fits and starts, gleefully engrossing one minute and flatlining the next. Miike's mish-mash of bloody action segments and overly cryptic expositions is at its zenith when unabashedly indulging in violent excesses that have little or no explanation. But that's also its biggest problem.

Each successive scene contains new twists and surprises, and it is precisely this random arrangement of setpieces that forms the bulk of the films' charm. It is wholly gratifying to watch Izo mow down a squad of machine-gun toting SWAT soldiers within minutes of seeing him carve up a hallway full of mothers who've just arrived at school to pick up their children. The lunacy reaches a fever pitch when the increasingly detestable samurai crashes a wedding and slaughters the hapless bride and groom in front of a throng of horrified onlookers. Miike, you're the king!

But it's not all sunshine and arterial spray, as the film can be outright boring for intolerably long stretches. Miike seems determined to keep a pair of middle fingers firmly planted in the viewers' face the entire time by showing little regard for modern attention spans. At 128 minutes, Izo runs roughly an hour too long; many of its repetitive sequences could have been trimmed to make a much more compact product. The film is further hampered by poor subtitling that drains much of the potential poignancy that its critical scenes might have otherwise had.

Miike's cinematic smorgasbord is littered with footage from various sources (World War II is featured prominently) that anchor the films' intended message. He's definitely making a comment on something — how violence is viewed by a collective consciousness, perhaps? — but it's almost impossible to pinpoint the moral with any degree of certainty. Adding to the surreal spectacle are a number of cameos, not the least of which is from folk guitarist Tomokawa Kazuki, whose impassioned and almost maniacal singing provides a sort of Greek chorus throughout Izo's blood-spilling odyssey.

Izo is an extraordinarily difficult film to digest, not only because of its anarchic narrative pacing, but also due to its inability to focus on any one element for more than a few minutes at a time. It's like a temperamental child, as it will require a herculean amount of patience and attentiveness to deal with it on any level. The "love it or hate it" tautology has never been more appropos than it is here.

Personally, it's hard for me to put myself in the latter category, as I really have to admire the directors' total disregard for commercial appeal in this case. That Takashi Miike can grace us with a crowd-pleasing money maker and a jumbled frankenstein in the same year is truly a testament to his mastery of the medium. Izo isn't great, and diehard Miike fans will likely walk away from this one with mixed feelings. But that was probably his point all along.

Thumbs Up. Not a masterpiece by any stretch, Izo still manages to charm with its ballsy, random approach — provided you can stay awake.