Dead or Alive: Final

Compulsively watchable.

Takashi Miike is a master at making love-'em-or-loathe-'em spectacles, but even fans are likely to consider the final film of his Dead or Alive trilogy a minor entry in his oeuvre.

The movies of prolific and popular Japanese director Takashi Miike evoke many emotions -- nausea, excitement, awe, amazement, shock. One emotion they don't often evoke is boredom. Sad to say,Dead or Alive: Final is boring.

It's a silly but enjoyable farrago from the cult quickie-meister, again set in an amoral universe-on-a-budget.

In Dead Or Alive: Final, Miike trades his grimly comic, sex-and-blood insignia for a self-consciously wacky conflation of Hong Kong action cinema and Japanese anime, with a little cheap science fiction tossed in for good measure.

The home-movie crudeness of Dead or Alive: Final indicates it was made on the cheap with minimal preparation.

Scene-by-scene, things happen, but you'd be hard-pressed to say what or why; occasionally, a poetic moment leaps out of the soup.