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"You're good with radio-controlled cars and stuff, right?"

Takagi (Shinichi Tsutsumi) wakes up in a motel room. He's wearing his good suit. He doesn't know where he is, what day it is, or how he wound up there. Then a packet of "purification salt" -- used to rid something of evil spirits -- falls out of his pocket. Memories start flashing back. A funeral. A Yakuza. A meeting with a local mob boss. An incident of violence with a random couple on the street, and then...

Monday, an action comedy from the celebrated Japanese director Sabu, will probably never see wide release in the US of A, though it certainly was a big hit as part of the Action Asia program in the Philadelphia Film Festival, which is where I had the pleasure of seeing it. I loved its irreverence, its genuinely twisted sense of humor, and the way it turned the table on action movie conventions. There's no box-office draw in sight -- there isn't even a good action scene to put in the trailers -- but those who go out on a limb and watch it should be completely entertained.

Consider the flashback to the funeral (or wake, to be more specific). The solemn affair is interrupted by a phone call from the doctor. The widow is informed that the deceased's pacemaker is still on and will explode if not deactivated. She is told to open his chest and cut the red wire. After much deliberation Takagi is chosen to be the makeshift surgeon, on the basis that "he is good with remote-controlled cars and stuff." We wonder, at this point, what the outcome of this scene is going to be. In most movies, the dilemma is over which wire to cut, but that option is gone since they were told to cut the red one.

There are two red wires. Takagi cuts both of them -- dubious logic, but that's not the kind of thing you're supposed to say -- and the corpse explodes. At that point, Monday was already the first film I had ever seen with an exploding corpse (offhand; don't bother sending examples). In the scenes that follow, among other things, those of us who like to humiliate ourselves by laughing at inappropriate moments are almost completely redeemed. So are those of us who sing in the shower.

The insanity only builds from there. For a while, I thought that Monday wasn't going anywhere, until a shocking revelation about two-thirds of the way through that yanks the film back on track. At that point, the urgency level increases, but Sabu never abandons his offbeat sense of humor. The abstract ending toys with the audience -- it may anger those who want a definite resolution -- but I appreciated the lack of a climactic shootout that inevitably solves all the problems.

Monday is unlike both the generically comedic Jackie Chan imports and the all-out martial arts action extravaganzas that Jet Li has starred in. It takes conventions of both genres and mutates them to its own twisted ends. The result is one of the most bizarre cinematic experiences I have ever had; I was trying to laugh with my jaw at about ground-level.

I'm not sure how unusual this film is to Asian audiences; my experience with their cinema is spotty at best. But I've never seen anything like it.