REVIEWED - GOZU: The latest delightfully rank effusion from the imagination of Japanese master Takashi Miike, brought to us here by the excellent Tiger Beer Tartan Asia Extreme season at Dublin's UGC, is quite the oddest thing you could ever hope to encounter on Parnell Street, writes Donald Clarke.

Gozu may have its longeurs and its outbreaks of schoolboy archness, but it also offers two or three moments of gloriously sublime lunacy. Some have compared the film's sensibility to that of David Lynch, but with its taste for grand comic absurdity (not to mention its lactating women), Gozu almost seems closer to the surreal Gothic of The League of Gentlemen.

A plot summary is barely possible, but, for what its worth, the picture begins with junior Yakuza Minami (Hideki Sone) being instructed to do away with his older colleague Ozaki (Sho Aikawa), who has begun acting very strangely indeed. Minami drives his quarry towards a dump on the outskirts of town. Before they arrive, however, they are involved in a minor car accident, which seems to cause Ozaki's death. Then the body goes missing.

Minami visits an inn where the landlady serves her own milk to the customers and where he has a terrible dream in which a man with a cow's head licks him with his enormous tongue. And on it goes.

Gozu is far too long and far too meandering. It's not nearly in the same league as Miike's psychosexual masterpiece Audition or his triumphantly disgusting yakuza drama Ichi the Killer, but the sheer vile mischievousness of its finale makes it a an honourable addition to the canon.

Then again, getting any proper overview of this absurdly prolific film-maker's oeuvre - since 1990 he has received a director's credit on over 60 films - or where Gozu fits into it would be a very tricky business indeed.Start here and work backwards, I guess.