Funky Forest: The First Contact (2005)

Funky Forest: The First Contact was a strange Japanese comedy that used different kinds of humour to generate laughs.  There were awkward moments and gross out moments.  There were times when the situations got surreal.  In fact, that was most of the time.  This was one of the strangest experiences I have had watching a movie.  Now I will share it with you.

It didn’t take long to figure out what the post for Funky Forest: The First Contact was going to be. Five minutes into the movie, I knew that I was going to write about it every few minutes.  Hopefully this post didn’t end up a mess.  It’s just that the movie seemed so insane that it would be difficult to remember what happened if I didn’t live journal it.  So that’s what you get this week.  You get a live journal.

0:00 – 5:00

It started with a comedy variety show.  Two men were on stage saying and doing weird things.  They slapped each other a couple times, and nothing really happened.  Then we found out that a man in some sort of flying bean was watching it on television before heading off into the sky.  Cue the opening title card.  It was a strange introduction to a strange movie.

5:01 – 8:33

This part was called Little Hataru.  A girl made a giant molecule almost explode.  Then she shot a laser out of her forehead at some weird beanbag chair looking thing.  It ended with her saying that homework shouldn’t exist.  This segment only helped to fester my confusion.

8:34 – 8:45

The two weird comedian guys were pretend fighting like giant robots.  It sort of reminded me of the fake gunfight from Spaced.

8:46 – 11:52

The title of this segment was The Unpopular with Women Brothers.  Later segments would be called Guitar Brother.  One of the brothers played a song on guitar and asked the second brother if girls will like it, while the third brother told them to knock it off and go to sleep.  I do not understand why this was supposed to be funny.

11:53 – 12:11

The two comedians finished up their fight and saluted the camera.

12:12 – 14:14

A girl jogged through a park.  She hugged a tree and giggled.  Then she went for a nap in a field while a dog watched her.  What does this mean?

14:15 – 22:18

Notti & Takefumi.  A man and woman were hanging out and discussing their relationship.  Notti met Takefumi when she was in high school.  He was once her English teacher.  They weren’t lovers.  They were just good friends.  Takefumi was obsessed with his music.  He played a mix on his turntable because he had a dream.  Notti said it was lame.  There was also a weird moment where something touched Notti’s foot, but it wasn’t Takefumi.  The movie was still swirling pool of weird, seemingly unrelated partial stories.

22:19 – 22:41

There was more of the two comedians.  One was telling the other to “just do it.”

22:42 – 27:02

Another Guitar Brother segment.  Only, it was the third brother.  He was doing an interpretive dance to summon a female demon.  Or to get girls to like him.  Or both.  This made more sense than anything else up to this point.

27:03 – 34:20

So this segment was called Babbling Hot Springs Vixens in Alien Piko-Riko.  Three sales women went to a retreat.  They met a man who knew Guitar Brother.  It was the man’s birthday the day before.  They gave him 10000 yen and sang happy birthday.  Then one of the women told a story.  Her friend Takefumi once saw a spaceship.  He went inside but only remembered coming back out.  The girls then took a bath.  This segment was promising and gave me hope for later, connective segments.

34:21 – 34:30

The guy from the last part turned to the camera and asked what the audience is looking at.

34:31 – 38:39

The Babbling Hot Springs Vixens returned in The Big Ginko Tree.  One of the sales women told a story about a ginko tree that kept growing in different directions when it got cut.  Finally, it was chopped down and turned into cutting boards.  It was a decent story told well.

38:40 – 38:47

The three sales women were in the hot spring.  Two of them thought it was hot and one didn’t.  Okay then.

38:48 – 46:27

The Babbling Hot Springs Vixens in Buck Naked and the Panda.  This segment was a good representation of how I felt during this movie.  One of the sales women told a story about a guy riding a panda and lying about it.  The other two got angry about the ending and attacked the storyteller.  That’s how I felt with this movie, since all of the segments seemed to end with me thinking “What the feck?”  Half of them didn’t even have real endings.

46:28 – 48:38

Guitar Brother was back to poorly play guitar.  I think his guitar was out of tune.

48:39 – 48:49

The sales women were on a train back to where they came from.

48:50 – 1:10:16

We returned to Notti & Takefumi.  Takefumi was sharing the strange dream that he had.  In the dream, he was forced to dance with various people and things.  First it was some weird man with a demon mask and a fur glove on one hand, holding an assault rifle.  Then Notti showed up and demanded that Takefumi dance with two lobster girls, a giant animated robot that became a soccer ball, a group of people dressed in yellow, and a floating animated head.  It was five dance numbers crammed into one dream sequence.  When he woke up, we learned that the jogger who fell asleep earlier was Notti.  I probably should have picked up on them being the same actress.

1:10:17 – 1:13:30

There was an intermission.  This movie had an intermission.  Sadly, it wasn’t long enough to do anything with the time.

1:13:31 – 1:22:55

This segment was called Wanna Go For a Drink?  A schoolgirl walked through the hallway of a school and saw a yellow fuzzy thing dragging across the floor.  She followed it and found a guy in a fuzzy yellow costume asking her to pull on the yellow thing.  It looked like a tail but it came from his penis area.  She pulled on it.  Three hours and ten minutes later, she put some squirming tube thing into her belly button and it set off bells as if she won a prize.  Takefumi was there and opened up a box that the tube was connected to.  There was a giant anus in the box.  Takefumi stuck his arm in the anus and pulled out a doll that was actually a tiny sushi chef.  The chef relayed a “fairly fine” test result.  Then the scene cut to the girl telling a guy that this was a dream and that she couldn’t marry him.  So that was something that happened.

1:22:56 – 1:23:04

More of the crazy comedian guys doing weird things.

1:23:05 – 1:25:37

This segment was called Home Room.  A kid stood in front of the class and yelled at everyone because they stole his shoe.  Nobody wanted to give it back.  He sat down, having lost the argument.  Then the teacher yelled at him because he was wearing both shoes.  It was quick, it was funny, and it wasn’t completely weird.  I liked it.

1:25:38 – 1:27:34

Guitar Brother made a return.  The three brothers decided to have noodles.

1:27:35 – 1:28:03

The two comedians were arguing over who caused the trouble, then they did a weird salute thing.  They like to do that weird salute thing, it seemed.

1:28:04 – 1:30:25

It was another Home Room segment.  In this one, the class president got up and started making a mockery of the classroom.  The teacher told her to stop and she said she couldn’t.

1:30:26 – 1:30:52

Someone was shining a shoe.  They whispered about a singles picnic.  It was probably the same one that was brought up in one of the Babbling Hot Springs Vixens segments.

1:30:53 – 1:36:26

This segment was called Youth’s Classroom.  There were three pairs of school children playing around with weird looking monster things.  One pair consisted of the girl that was playing with the molecule and the class president.  The teacher was the shoe shiner.  The teacher told the kids to begin and they played the monsters like musical instruments.  One of them accidentally scuffed the teacher’s shoe and the teacher freaked out.  There was nothing funny about this segment.  It was just weird.

1:36:27 – 1:36:36

One of the comedian guys asked the other if he wanted to go to the zoo.  These two made absolutely no sense to me the entire movie.

1:36:37 – 1:40:53

Back in the homeroom, one of the girls finally got a boyfriend.  The class celebrated only to have the teacher from the next room come in and yell at them.  The homeroom teacher told him to piss off, and everyone started celebrating again.  I flipped back and forth on these homeroom sketches.  I kind of liked this one.

1:40:54 – 1:48:32

Guitar brother sat with two characters called the Anime Brothers.  They were discussing a new anime and its origin.  A dog thought up the idea and a translator relayed it to the creative team.  The translator had a big fake head.  It ended with everyone being invited to the singles picnic.

1:48:33 – 1:55:08

In this Guitar Brother Special segment, we got to see the singles picnic that was mentioned throughout the movie.  Most of the guys that we have seen were there.  The angry teacher and the homeroom teacher (who was the hot springs guy), Guitar Brother, the little brother, the Anime Brothers, and two other guys were there.  They talked about how they plan to get women.  One guy danced really well and they praised his skills.  Notti also ran by.  This segment paid off threads from earlier in the movie.  I started to like Funky Forest more with this segment.

1:55:09 – 2:00:19

Two guys were screaming about teachers getting equal pay.  Good idea.  Then a dog was thinking.  Then we saw the most insane animated segment ever.  This was a representation of the dog coming up with the idea and the idea having been made.  The thought behind this was brilliant.  The execution, not so much.

2:00:20 – 2:00:33

A teacher was a police officer and he threatened the students but wouldn’t do anything since he was a teacher.

2:00:34 – 2:11:12

This segment was called After School Club.  This segment went semi-viral on the internet.  A man sat on a chair.  He had long nipples.  He squirted milk while a girl swatted at it with a badminton racket.  Then he pulled monster things out of his pants and threw them at her.  One of them latched onto her arm and sucked her blood.  A doctor pulled off the monster to reveal a tiny monster man hanging on her arm.  He pulled a name stamp out of the monster man and made fun of its name.  Then the girl’s coach, who happened to be Guitar Brother, asked if she wanted to quit the club.  Takefumi showed up for a bit.  This segment perfectly encapsulated how weird the movie was.  It was just plain weird.  Funny, I guess, but weird.

2:11:13 – 2:11:19

The after school club was practicing gym stuff.

2:11:20 – 2:11:50

Guitar Brother shamed Takefumi for believing in the alien piko-riko.  I’m not sure if the alien piko-riko ever paid off.  Is that what Takefumi’s weird dancing dream was supposed to be?

2:11:51 – 2:26:30

Back to Notti & Takefumi.  Notti described her dream.  She was dressed all in white and playing violin in the forest.  Three girls were manipulating the sound of the violin through different soundboards in the woods.  It was basically the musical equivalent of porn.  There was a brief animated segment explaining who the three girls were then Notti woke up in the park.  The segment came out of the story as she and Takefumi were talking to each other.  They started dancing in the backyard for some reason and I ended this movie wondering what the heck I watched.

2:26:31 – 2:30:01

The end credits had some of the worst music I’ve ever heard.  Ugh.

Concluding Thoughts

I’m not really sure what this movie tried to be.  Weird is the best description.  Sometimes it worked.  I enjoyed the dream sequences.  But there were other parts like After School Club where I was left wondering why it existed at all.  Half the time I was entertained and half the time I was baffled.

If you’re interested in weird Japanese humour, Funky Forest: The First Contact is the movie for you.  Be warned, it is two and a half hours long.  You probably knew that by the timestamps throughout this post.  If you’re going to watch it, you need to invest that time into it.  I feel like a changed person having seen it.  You might too.

Now for some notes:

• Funky Forest: The First Contact was suggested by @ddogfilm.
• A few foreign language films (either with subtitles or dubbed in English) that I’ve covered are Infra-Man, Dig Your Grave Friend… Sabata is Coming, Attack of the Super Monsters, and An American Hippie in Israel.
• Have you seen Funky Forest: The First Contact?  Do you agree with me about how insane the movie is?  Have you seen any movies like it?  Have you seen the After School Club segment online?  You can discuss this movie, post, and other related things in the comments section below.
• If there are any movies that you think I should watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can share those suggestions in the comments or you can tell me on Twitter.  I like adding suggestions to my schedule.
• Sometimes when I watch bad movies, I share clips of them on snapchat.  You can follow me there.  My username is jurassicgriffin.
• Next week’s movie is going to be a newer movie called Bark Ranger.  It stars Jon Lovitz as the voice of a dog.  If you’re interested in this movie, or my posts in general, come back next week to see what I say about that one.