Around the turn of the century, Japan acquired a reputation overseas as a purveyor of high-class cinematic schlock. Filmmakers like Takashi Miike and Sion Sono were the luminaries in a wave of extreme cinema, peddling giddy confections of ultraviolence and questionable taste.
There's still clearly an appetite for this kind of stuff, but Japan's movie industry has been increasingly reluctant to come up with the goods. While Sono's recent "The Forest of Love" was a return to inglorious form, Miike has spent most of the 2010s lost in commercial cinema purgatory, and few directors who've come in their wake have managed to make transgression feel like so much fun.
Adapted from the lurid manga series "Peephole" ("Ana Satsujin"), "My Girlfriend is a Serial Killer" would seem destined for a place in the poor-taste pantheon based on its title alone. So it's hard to reconcile the pungency of the ingredients with the flavorlessness of the resulting film.