The Fine Art of Tactical Retreat

10:49 am - In short: Toy Reanimator (2002)

A young woman tells a strange, true story to a high schooler who works in a toy shop that looks more like a toy museum. The story pertains a strange creature of the woman's childhood, living in something that looks like a large gas tank in the woods, repairing children's toys magically, but only after exact explanations, just as if the one doing the repairs wouldn't completely understand how the world outside of its tank works.

One day, the girl has an accident when she goes on a walk with her baby brother that leaves her brother dead and herself blind on one eye. Of course, she goes to the toy-fixer to get herself and her brother repaired, but sometimes, parts get mixed up. And what if a person doesn't get the heart she or he needs to be fully alive?

Toy Reanimator was obviously shot on much hated (by me) digital and features mostly CGI effects to boot, but does nonetheless look rather nifty. There is something to be said for a director having an actual vision of how his film is supposed to look, even if the soft focus photography is so soft that it nearly crosses from "dreamy" into "David Hamilton" territory. At least there is a good aesthetic reason for the way the film looks apart from "I thought it would be cool", so I'm rather alright with it.

The Japanese short film directed by someone going under the name of Hakubun is an urban fairy tale, you see, and as such, naturalism has to stay as far away as possible from its realization. The film's style and tone fit its fairy tale aspirations perfectly, hitting the sweetspot between the weird, the wonderful and the slightly terrifying it is aiming for. In its execution Toy Reanimator reminds me of the good moments of contemporary primary world fantasy writers - exactly the sort of thing cinema has chosen to ignore nearly completely. Fortunately, we have random pseudonymous Japanese directors to make up for it.

09:48 am - In short: Ninjutsu Gozen-jiai (1957)

aka Torawakamaru the Hoga Ninja

Being a magical ninja ain't easy. If you are Ishikawa Goemon (Nakajiro Tomita) of the (in this film) rather evil Iga clan, you might be able to ride clouds, teleport, jump really high, make yourself invisible and cut down trees via telekinesis, but your annoying son Goroichi (Motoharu Ueki) has missed every lesson in Being Evil School and your henchwomen like Sagiri (Hiroko Sakuramachi) are so fragile in their evilness that having one good deed inflicted upon them will turn them into do-gooders themselves.

Not that the rather good ninja of the Hoga clan (also known as the Koga clan) have it easy. First and foremost, there aren't exactly a lot of them left, and their youngest and brightest Torawakamaru (Sentaro Fushimi) might be able to do all those sexy things Goemon can plus turn into a big toad, but he also has the laughter of an especially ill-mannered goat. And, you know, who wants to turn into a big toad?

When the Iga decide to throw their lot in with Tokugawa, the Hoga obviously side with the Tokugawa's main enemy, the Toyotomi. The groups are fighting about the plans for new-fangled castle fortifications the Toyotomi are planning to build and use all the silly tricks a good ninja knows.

But not even the kidnapping of the adorable/annoying little Toyotomi daughter Nene is enough to end the difficulties. In the end, only a ninja duel between Torawakamaru and the Iga boss of bosses Momochi Sandayu (Ryunosuke Tsukitaga) can decide who will build a fortification and who will be (quite literally) cooked.

The short programmer Ninjutsu Gozen-jiai was conjured up in the same spirit of silliness that would later produce the best Japanese film of all times, The Magic Serpent. Obviously made for children, and containing the important moral lessons that evilness is not genetic, and that fire-breathing snakes look much cooler than big frogs, the film's naive charms are large enough to make it an excellent Sunday morning choice of film for people receptive to its charms, namely me.

There is probably not all that much technical merit to the film (although its director Tadashi Sawashima manages to smuggle in a very beautifully shot swordfight in the rain right at the start of the movie), but it runs along nicely, from time to time stopping for the nauseating children and some painful humor.

Fortunately, there is always some new magical ninja silliness waiting around the next corner - not as much of it as in, say, Taiwanese productions of the next two decades, yet enough to satisfy me.

The final duel (in the clouds, with people changing into various ugly animal suits) is especially satisfying and reminds of the best animal themed Halloween party that never happened in historical Japan.

09:48 am - In short: Fu-Rai (2005)

aka White Panic

(This time, I will not be able to avoid spoilers for the film's ending. Be warned!)

Four young people - three men and a woman - awaken naked in an empty white room full of something that looks suspiciously like flour. They all remember that they were assaulted in their respective apartments and kidnapped, but have a hard time imagining why they have been brought to this strange place.

Since this is a Cube-alike, they immediately start to bitch at each other for no good reason at all. From time to time, their discussions are broken by the lights turning blue, gas being pumped into the room and guys in white hazmat suits forcing them to swallow a mysterious fluid.

After some time, at least three of the young people form a reluctant coalition and try to find out why they have been kidnapped and how to get away. Turns out that they all share a feeling of guilt for one parent.

With this pooled information strengthening their resolve, they manage to escape from the room, only to spend the rest of the movie crawling through air-ducts and running through corridors and stairways, all the while evading a handful of exceedingly silly death traps like the Mousetrap of Being Stuck and the Foot-Cutting Wire.

It's no wonder these traps are so silly. They have after all been invented by the same scriptwriter responsible for the film's twist ending, such as it is. You see, our protagonists' feelings of guilt notwithstanding, those feelings aren't the reason they have been kidnapped, rather, they have been chosen because nobody will miss them when they end up as food in the giant microwave oven of an evil corporation trying to solve the problem of overpopulation while making tasty treats.

Fu-Rai is an ultra-cheap imitation of Cube, but one which, unlike the films it copies, is stupid enough to commit to a reason for the things happening to its characters. The cooking angle is of course patently absurd, the earnest and dramatic way the film treats it making the ridiculousness just worse.

This is not the film's only problem. Its production design tries hard to let the cheap and shoddy look minimalist and stylish, but seems to give up after the first twenty minutes or so, and just goes for the usual airduct/corridor/warehouse stuff.

With a running time of 68 minutes, Fu-Rai is also at least half an hour too long, like a classical Twilight Zone episode artificially bloated by flashbacks and people screeching at each other.

While all this does not for a good movie make, I can't help but appreciate that director Shugo Fujii is at least trying to make an earnest and interesting little film, something that puts it automatically above too much of the direct to DVD market in Japan or elsewhere, which is full of films made by people who just don't give a shit about movies or their audience.

With a bit more cleverness, a slightly better sense of pacing and little less (or much more, of course) silliness, this could have been a neat little movie. As it stands, Fu-Rai is just not interesting enough to overlook its flaws. It is also a case where I find myself having a hard time laughing about a film's unintentional humor. It would be a bit like laughing about a one-legged man's troubles with stairs.

10:13 am - In short: Mikadroid (1991)

To the surprise of no one, Japan was trying to build a cyborg soldier during World War II. Just when the war is lost, the Japanese government decides to close down the project. They needn't have bothered, because the building in which the project is based is destroyed in an air raid. Before that, the lead scientist manages to help two not completely converted soldiers escape, while the real prototype in its full early Iron Man glory is buried under the rubble.

45 years later, a building with a parking garage and an underground disco has been built on the site. One day, Iron Man awakens and kills a few people. Fortunately, his old soldier colleagues haven't aged a bit in the intervening years and are coming to kill him.

A young electrician (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, yes the director) and an office drone (Yoriko Douguchi, who still has a career in Japanese genre film and has also played in a few Kurosawa films) will be very thankful for their help.

Mikadroid sounds more interesting than it actually is. Apart from the intriguing Kiyoshi Kurosawa connection and a handful of neat visual ideas, there's unfortunately not much about the film.

There isn't happening enough for 73 minutes of film, the plot would barely be enough for 45, and while the cyborg soldier's design is nice and truly looks like I'd imagine a cyborg made in pulp '45 would, the two directors (Satoo Haraguchi & Tomoo Haraguchi, the latter mostly a special effects guy with a few films like the dreadful Kibakichi as a director) never manage to do much with him. The film does not manage to build the necessary feeling of menace and is also much too slow to ever build up enough momentum to become exciting.

The script is nothing to write home about either. It never bothers to explain why cyborg soldier is going on a killing spree, leaving what is happening too abstract to have emotional impact. The film's tendency for undeserved pathos does not help its case - there is too much baseless melodrama here, too many moments when we the viewer is told to feel something the film doesn't bother to make her feel.

Still, I am not completely down on Mikadroid. Most of its problems are obviously based on a lack of experience and a lack of funds, and I am willing to live with them to a degree when a film at least tries to be professional.

There are also a few slightly surreal sequences making up for some of the film's flaws. Seeing Kurosawa act alongside Douguchi is quite a neat thing to watch, too.

So while I can't really recommend it, Mikadroid has its intriguing aspects.

10:30 am - Dead Girl Walking (2004)

Japanese schoolgirl Yuri (Ayaka Maeda) one day finds her heart stopping and the world around her turning from colour to black and white. The doctor her family calls pronounces her dead, yet she's still thinking, talking and walking around like everybody else.

At first, her family just finds her state rather inconvenient, but as soon as Yuri starts to rot and stink (as dead people do), they decide to stop the nuisance by burning her. That's what you do with dead people after all. The scene turns accidentally bloody.

Yuri flees from home to walk around forlornly, from time to time shedding body parts and thinking if formaldehyde wouldn't be of use in her state.

While she wanders around, she meets and is rejected by her former classmates, has to flee a rude gardener and is shortly displayed in a surreal circus.

Dead Girl Walking is a short film based on a manga by the obsessive horror mangaka and director Hideshi Hino, who also delivers a very hokey introduction. It's part of a series of such films, all of them shot on digital video for very little money. As always, I'm not entirely sure if these films were done for the video market or TV; it doesn't matter much anyway.

This episode was directed by my secret Japanese horror director crush Koji Shiraishi (who directed the good Ju-Rei, the excellent Noroi & A Slit-Mouthed Woman aka Carved, the less excellent Grotesque and a bunch of other films I really want to see on subtitled DVDs right now) and is as good as this crushee had hoped for.

It might feel more like a metaphorical little art film using horror tropes than a pure horror film, but since its basic metaphor describes the horrors of growing up, it still ends up being quite horrifying if one is responsive to these special horrors.

The film is all about the fear of rejection (by family, friends, random strangers), the feeling of being a freak and the loss of the will to live that made being a teenager so much fun for many of us. Shiraishi is using the living dead angle to show the terror of the situation more clearly. Interestingly, he also chose to break the nightmarishness of his material up through the use of black humor (mostly based on the loss of body parts), showing acceptance of the silliness that lies buried under his film's view of teenage life and the general drama of its premise.

This laughter is not necessarily a liberating one - it is much too knowing for that. Still, it is laughter, and without it the film's final, weird moment of hope would just seem campy. With the laughter in mind, I'm just about willing to accept it.

Stylistically, the film mixes obvious influences of early David Lynch (the terrifying, nightmarish black and white absurdity of Eraserhead), Carnival of Souls and expressionist silent movies, just with even less money to spend. The silent movie influence is especially strong thanks to the soundtrack's synthesizer version of "typical" silent movie music (I'll spare you a digression on why "typical" silent movie music isn't in fact typical for silent movies but for modern interpretation of them) and the title cards that show us Yuri's thoughts, not to speak of some very fine uses of shadow and weirdly angled sets.

Some viewers may find the bluntness of Shiraishi's use of all these elements and the obviousness of his symbols somewhat off-putting, but I don't have this kind of qualms. A symbol that is so cryptic that nobody not reading the artist's mind can understand it does of course have its own charms and uses; Shiraishi seems more interested in communicating what he means than in making communication impossible (very un-Lynch of him, I know), or in making the difficulty of communication the theme of his film.

My tastes run - as they so often do - in both directions at once, so I'm satisfied, as long as a film does what it is trying to do well. Dead Girl Walking does do it well.

10:19 am - In short: Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater: Death-Make (2005)

The operator of a website specialized in the paranormal makes some kind of deal with a local cable TV show and carts a bunch of "sensitives" into the empty warehouse where every second cheap horror flick takes place, ahem, I mean where a group of young girls supposedly disappeared years ago.

The group builds four walls out of white sheets and does nothing of interest, until mildly strange things start to happen. Soon, the intrepid explorers into the paranormal find themselves in another dimension or some such, not hunted by the expected ghost, but by a shitty looking crabmantisspider.

Death-Make (whatever that is supposed to mean) is one part of a series of short films either made for Japanese TV or the direct to DVD market, based on manga by the loveable eccentric Kazuo Umezu aka Umezz. Unfortunately, this one has not been helmed by a real director (for example Kiyoshi Kurosawa) like some of the other episodes, but is directed by the series' main special effects guy Taichi Ito, who is really bad as his job.

The monster looks so terrible that I would find it difficult not to take it as a personal affront, if not for the fact that the rest of the effects is just as bad. Therefore, logic suggest a case of incompetence and not of malevolence.

Of course, I would gladly be willing to just ignore the crappiness of the effects if the plot, the acting or the direction would be any good. Alas, it isn't so.

I'm not going to come down too hard on the actors, though. There is only so much someone can do when given nothing at all to work with. As it happens, "nothing to work with" is exactly how I would describe Death-Make's script. There's no rhyme, no reason, no characterization and not even enough plot for the 50 minutes of my life this thing has stolen from me. Worse, every potentially neat idea (all two of them!) is destroyed by Ito's direction.

I would not be surprised if the man had learned (or rather not learned) his trade making videoclips, what with his love for nonsensical jump-cuts, useless black and white footage, puzzling rewinds and digital filters only a blind man would find appropriate. Ito's direction is just astonishingly bad, at once completely without an ability to build mood and filled with the sort of self-important "look at mah wicked stylez!" stunt directing you can only get away with when you know exactly what you are doing. Ito surely doesn't.

While this may sound less than encouraging, I suspect that the outright stupidity of the script, the inept effects and Ito's interesting ideas about film direction could make for something well worth pointing and laughing at in an intoxicated state.

Too bad that I was astonishingly sober while watching the "film", as always.

10:46 am - Raigyo (1997)

Noriko (Moe Sakura) absconds from the hospital where she is being treated for her pancreatitis. Dressed in black and carrying a knife and the photo of a child in her handbag, she drifts through the outskirts of a Japanese industrial town, trying to connect to either her husband who is now living with another woman or the lover she betrayed her husband with or both via phone - as in many things, the film isn't forthcoming with clear explanations for what is going on.

At the same time, Yanai, an office worker who takes a day off from work to sleep around while his wife lies in pregnant in hospital, is desperately trying to find one among the astounding number of women prepared for a quick fuck in his little brown notebook actually willing to indulge the sleazy bastard.

When Noriko has been rejected completely and Yanai doesn't find any woman willing to put up with him, a dating hotline connects the two lost souls. They meet up, and after a short bit of sex, Noriko stabs and strangles him to death in the shower of a cheap motel.

The police suspect her of the murder, but aren't able to prove anything. The only witnesses who have seen Noriko and Yanai together are a mentally handicapped girl and a gas station attendant (Takeshi Ito?). The latter would very well be able to identify her, yet chooses not to, so that he can ask her for an explanation how it feels to kill someone, hoping for closure for the traumatic death of a child in his past, or perhaps something else he isn't able to grasp or articulate.

Raigyo's director Takashi Zeze is known for his especially bleak variation of the pinku, and this austere but strangely beautiful drama should be proof enough.

The film is set in the bleakest part of the Japanese province, an industrial area where nature itself seems contaminated by humanity's presence. Long shots of dead fish and sickly green and yellow places abide, putting the characters into a setting that is nearly empty of humans but without any of the calming influences of nature.

Places like these can only be populated by people unable to connect, to their own emotions, to each other, to the world or even the motives for their own actions. Raigyo does the same thing many other of the art-minded pinku films do for Tokyo, namely making its provincial location look like a place where sex and death seem to be the only possible ways for people to connect to each other or themselves. Yet even these things don't seem to bring any peace of mind to Raigyo's characters.

Zeze treats his characters much like parts of the landscape, letting the viewer gaze calmly at them from the outside, but never inviting her into their heads. The way he never provides any direct information about the characters' inner lives might be infuriating to some; I found that it perfectly mirrored the disconnection between the film characters and the world they inhabit.

At the same time, the actors, especially Moe Sakura (and that's a bizarre name in the context of this film if I ever heard one), very ably project the feeling that there is much more to their characters than there appears to be - quite possibly much more than they themselves are conscious of. We as viewers are never given enough knowledge of their inner life to make a completely coherent picture, just as in real life.

All this might sound like an exceptionally depressing experience, and it certainly isn't the sort of film that makes you want to party, or live much longer, but at the same time Zeze finds a weirdly abstract and appropriately numb core of beauty in the bleakness of his film's locations. It is as if through the act of looking at them, the corruption of nature and the disconnectedness of things don't lose their terror, yet somehow gain a quality you can't help but appreciate.

However, if you appreciate this quality too much, you might possibly end up like one of Zeze's characters.

10:38 am - XX: Beautiful Weapon (1993)

A young, nameless and blind woman (Masumi Miyazaki), spends her life hidden away in a small villa on the outskirts of a large Japanese city, far enough outside to never be disturbed by anyone or anything. From time to time, a man sends her someone whom she lures into her completely darkened bedroom and shoots in the moment of orgasm.

She is working as an assassin for a big-shot political fixer to keep all his dirty deeds under the carpet. Not surprisingly she is slowly losing her grip on sanity. Leading a life with her only human contact being a father figure who likes to rub his face on her legs and men who don't leave her bedroom alive, she is already on the best way into alcoholism and a good old-fashioned nervous breakdown. When she's not killing she is crying, clutching a glass in one hand and a doll in the other.

What she doesn't know is that her increasingly erratic behaviour makes her boss (who turns out to be a little more than just that) doubt her further usefulness.

Things get complicated when a bar pianist/killer who used to work for her boss ,too, gets it in his head to find out why he hasn't gotten any jobs anymore of late. Supposedly, his drinking and loose mouth are at fault, but he doesn't believe it.

He is able to follow father figure to the woman's place and witnesses her during an assassination and its aftermath. The next night, father figure comes to the killer's bar and tells him that he finally has a new job for him - he is supposed to kill our heroine, but he has to sleep with her first. The killer pianist (take that, Jerry Lee Lewis) knows this to be a trap, yet he still goes to her place, already quietly infatuated.

This entry into the XX series of Japanese Girls with Guns films is a little different from the other parts of the series I have encountered until now in that it really isn't a Girls with Guns film at all. It might contain a girl with a gun, but no action to speak of, and fits more under the genre umbrella of thriller melodrama.

This is not the sort of film I would have expected from a director like Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu, who is best known for the Guts of A Virgin films and the atrocious The Living Dead in Tokyo Bay and therefore not exactly someone I'd connect with concepts like subtlety or the extremely deliberate (people without patience will of course say "boring") pace Beautiful Weapon has.

There isn't a lot happening in the film, but I am a sucker for any attempt to drag the mood of film noir into the neon-coloured 90s. I am also a sucker for films about people who have somehow lost their connection to the world completely and are violently, often tragically, jolted into connecting with it again, which turns out to be what Beautiful Weapon is all about on a thematic level (and which also is an unexpectedly big theme in most of the other XX movies).

On the visual side, Komizu keeps everything as cool and muted as the emotional life of his characters necessitates while doing his best to keep up a certain amount of tension. But it is a film about dead ends and not about sexy shoot-outs, and as such not tense in the way a John Woo film would be.

From time to time, Komizu inserts a dry visual joke viewers not used to this part of Japanese humor will possibly miss completely.

The film has quite a few neat little directorial ideas, just small things like not using any music in the love scene between the two killers, which still go a long way to keep the less than original plot interesting.

Most important for the success of the film is Masumi Miyazaki. The actress is not just putting much more effort into the role than many of her colleagues would, she is putting said effort into the right places. It's one thing to do the cool erotic bit of the role right, but it is quite another one to be believable as a woman both coolly erotic and standing on the threshold of an absolute breakdown.

Also of interest are the very unsubtle jabs at Japan's political culture popping up again and again during the movie's course. Those in power, the film seems to say, would even sacrifice their own daughters to keep it, without a care and without ever making their own hands dirty doing it. That's nothing new, yet also not something you get in every film about blind sex assassins.

10:15 am - 3 Films Make A Post: In Space

Seven Warriors (1989): The all-star cast (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai! Jacky Cheung! Karen Mok! Adam Chang! Max Mok! Wu Ma! Philip Kwok! Lo Lieh!) is the only impressive thing about Terry Tong's version of the Seven Samurai template. I would have expected a Hong Kong variant of the story to replace Kurosawa's humanism and warm intelligence with relentless action and a whole lot of bloodshed, but instead it's replaced by a little sentimentality, a little more unfunny humor and a whole lot of nothing. One could think the plan here was to bore the viewer into submission. Except for the submission part, it worked on me.

Slit-Mouth Woman (2008): Not to be confused with Koji Shiraishi's rather good A Slit-Mouthed Woman (or Carved) from 2007 or the pinku The Slit-Mouthed Woman from 2005. This one shares a DVD with the dreadful Zombie Dead and gives that film a run for its money when it comes to bad acting and boredom. Finally, Japanese direct to DVD films can be just as bad as their American counterparts. Isn't it wonderful?

Roots Search (1986): After a spaceship nearly collides with a research station, the ship's only survivor Buzz and the crew of the station have to cope with an alien that has already murdered all of Buzz's colleagues. The thing likes to use the ole "transforming into the object of someone's greatest guilt" trick, but isn't above a little tentacle use when necessary. But what's that about the creature being a messenger of god?

This OVA isn't exactly a high point of anime film or of SF horror, yet it is solid enough to not make me rue the three quarters of an hour I put into it. I couldn't find anything special about it, even the design of the alien's different forms is anime standard. The attempts at a philosophical deepening of the plot are wasted, though. There just isn't enough time to develop something deeper.

10:17 am - 3 Films Make A Post: A New Beginning

Taste of Killing (1966): Tonino Valerii's Spaghetti Western about a bounty killer (Craig Hill) protecting a load of gold from the bandit (George Martin) who once killed his brother starts out promising enough and looks quite stylish throughout. Alas, it also suffers from a script that permanently brings up enticing details about its characters without ever making much use of them or finding a unified theme. As it stands, the film is a series of Spaghetti standard situations done well enough, but without the intelligence that makes the best part of the genre so interesting and without much that holds the single parts together.

Goemon (2009): Either I am finally getting too old for this shit, or this is the most horrible, candy-colored mess of a CGI fest I have seen in a long time. I found its director's Kazuaki Kiriya's other big CGI mess Casshern with its wish to be every possible film at once much more worthwhile than the critical consensus says it is, but Goemon is nigh unwatchable.

The insanely broad acting with human actors who are less subtle than your typical anime character alone would be enough to kill the film, yet Kiriya insists on adding the insulting dumbness of his self-penned "script" and the already mentioned terrible CGI. I don't know the words fit to describe this vortex of absolute suckitude.

Kakurenbo (2004): A bunch of kids from a future, retro-futurist Japan comes to a ghost "town" (we'd call it a city, I suppose) to play a hidden, secret game of hide and seek - some of them to find out where all the other children who have disappeared before them went, some of them just for kicks.

This digitally animated one-man project by Shuhei Morita is an exceptionally beautiful anime with a visual style that is at once based on traditional Japanese designs and symbols (the fox masks the children wear, the basic designs of the demons who hunt them) and part of an already aged and lost future. It's a truly inspired piece of work, with every scene hinting at the basics of the film's future without ever actually revealing them. I tend to find storytelling techniques like this highly effective, consequently I am quite awed by the film's perfect and personal style and Morita's choice to let the (at times very creepy) mood do the explaining.

10:17 am - In short: Blowback 2 (1991)

The yakuza Joe (a comparatively skinny looking Riki Takeuchi) and Baku are on the run, carrying a suitcase full of money.

Their flight has led them to the Philippines, but their driver, a certain Lopez (Keishi Hunt), leads them into a trap.

The guerilla boss Yameneko (Mike Monty, known from more Italian genre movies than should be humanly possible) likes money, and he likes dead gangsters, so poor Baku's film life is cut quite short. Killing Riki is of course a different proposition. Getting riddled by bullets and falling down a cliff leaves the exceedingly manly Joe in pain but very much alive, perfectly able to make his way to Manila on foot until he finally loses consciousness in the bar of Baku's ex-girlfriend Rei (Mie Yoshida).

Just a little later, the pissed-off Yakuza begins to snarl, shoot and punch himself through Manila to take vengeance on his friend's killers, supported by Rie and the bounty hunter Ratts (Shun Sugata, whose hobbies are wearing sunglasses, grunting manly and throwing dynamite sticks) who wants to get at Yameneko too.

Atsushi Muroga's Blowback 2 is a typical early 90s direct to video Riki vehicle bound to the action film standards once brought down from some mountain or other by Charlton Heston himself, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Muroga (who would go on to direct the zombie film Junk and the first two Gun Crazy films - the watchable ones) clearly likes the genre he is working in, and while his film diligently hits all the required manly man cheapo action flick beats, it does so with more verve and style than would be strictly necessary.

I am not about to call the film big art here, or even a masterful little genre flick, but the sort of cheap and fun film that is made without the hatred for its own audience that mars too many of its brethren and with clear knowledge of what it can afford to do and what it can't afford - artistically and financially.

The setting outside of Japan helps the film to a mood which is quite different from the typically claustrophobic and stage-bound Japanese direct to video standard of its time, with scenes full of astonishing things like daylight and mud. Obviously, Muroga uses this copious amount of outside locations for some time filling tourist shots and to stage a large amount of explosions, as it should be.

While all the shooting and bleeding to death is going on, there's also time for some well-placed homages to the Spaghetti Western (especially Django and the Dollar trilogy), the exploding huts of the Italian action film post-Rambo and even a bit of John Woo, all presented mostly in the spirit of good fun.

Add to this Riki doing what Riki does best (scowling and mugging), and the friend of a well-placed explosion will have a fun time here.

10:03 am - In short: Zombie Dead (2008)

An acting-impaired, semi-amnesiac young woman (Ai Kawanaka) wakes up in a deserted hospital. After some hospital-gown clad stumbling around, she meets a hair-impaired guy and steals five minutes of his and our lives looking for clothes, while he just wants to take her somewhere to explain something to her, or so he says.

Turns out there is an incredibly cost-efficient zombie apocalypse going on in there (highest zombie count: three) and some guys in especially ridiculous non-hazmat suits are keeping everyone (yes, all three people) in the hospital quarantined.

More corridor running follows, also more time stealing.

If you have ever suffered under the illusion that all Japanese zombie films are necessarily better than their Western counterparts, this one will cure you quite effectively, for the low, low price of one hour of your life you will never ever get back.

I hope you like pointless boredom, boring pointlessness, rubber-faced zombies who do not know if they are fast or slow zombies, non-acting and pervy "let's shoot her from below" camera angles. But wait, there's even more to make you wish director Kanzo Matsuura had never been born or at least never gotten near his digital camera!

The film also features the longest and most pointless zombie brain bashing scene in movie history. I have heard rumors people have died and returned as one of the living dead just by watching it, although it is certainly possible that the groaning noises just were snores. I, at least, have developed a sudden appreciation for the work of Bruno Mattei.

Dear reader, please don't watch this, unless a psychopath kidnaps you and it is this or slow bodily torture for you. Even then, I'm not sure which of the two choices I'd recommend.

09:28 am - 3 Films Make A Post: The Final Chapter

Drag Me To Hell (2009): Sam Raimi's return BOO! to the comedic horror genre has its moments, BOO! predictably either when the film is getting surreal or when it BOO! nearly becomes a social satire about BOO! class. Alas, too much of the film consists of SOMEONE SCREAMING "BOO" INTO YOUR FACE VERY LOUDLY, which I found annoying more often than not. Also not very amusing is the bleedingly obvious final twist, I can only explain through a) rampant stupidity on Raimi's side or b) Raimi thinking his audience consists only of mouthbreathing idiots.

Of course, horror films in carnival ride mode are far from my favorite part of the genre, so my barely serviceable movie might be someone else's new favorite one.

XX: Beautiful Beast (1995): This first of the XX movies is of less interest than some of its successors, despite being directed by Toshiharu Ikeda of Evil Dead Trap fame. The story of Ran (Kaori Shimamura), known as the Black Orchid, a professional killer taking vengeance for the murder of her sister and falling for an ex-yakuza barkeep who is of course connected to the men she is trying to kill, just doesn't have much to keep one's interest. It's nice to look at, but so generically bland in every other aspect that I had a difficult time staying awake while watching it.

Giallo (2009): As one of the chosen few (of possibly very dubious taste) who did, well, like Argento's Mother of Tears quite unironically, I was looking forward to this one. I shouldn't have. Giallo is so boring, cliched, repetitive and just plain stupid that I wouldn't even call it an unconscious self-parody of Argento. Self-parodists just misuse their stylistic vocabulary; Argento seems to have lost his completely and replaced it with psycho thriller 101 stuff even more generic than the film's title.

It's worse than The Card Player.

09:39 am - Freesia - Icy Tears (2007)

Near future, alternative history Japan is an unpleasant place. While we never learn any historical details, it is quite clear that the country is dominated by militarism and nationalism, waging a perpetual war somewhere in South-East Asia and driven by casual violence.

The cultural difference that interests Freesia, and therefore us, is the establishment of official vengeance killings, savage murder hidden behind the coziness of bureaucratic process - which also seems to take the place of courts and what we understand under the rule of law - and supposedly fair rules.

There are agencies with professional contract killers hunting down the designated victims in a relatively controlled time and place, while their counterparts are allowed to defend their own lives, but can also hire professional bodyguards. If they can't afford one, there's always the option of getting a national bodyguard, but those aren't too successful.

The ex-soldier Kanou (Tetsuji Tamayama) has just started out in one of the agencies. He's a little bit on the traumatized side since he witnessed a military experiment to test a freezing bomb on twenty war orphans. He was one of the soldiers who lead the children to the testing ground, but his conscience brought him too close to the detonation and left him psychically numb and unable to feel physical pain - frozen inside and out.

What Kanou doesn't understand until deep into the movie is that his boss Higuchi (Tsugumi) is the other survivor of the experiment, as damaged inside as he is. Unlike Kanou, Higuchi wants revenge on the people she deems responsible for her and Kanou's state, and if she needs to fake some paperwork for it and doom herself to death by it, so be it.

Taking revenge is not too easy, though, when the people you want to kill are either by now so senile and physically decrepit that there isn't much of a person to take revenge on there anymore or so shaken by guilt that they have the same psychological symptoms as the would-be avenger.

Freesia is director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri's live action adaptation of a manga written by Jiro Matsumoto, but it changes many of the manga's concepts and characters deeply. Even deeper is the difference in tone - where Matsumoto's manga is sleazy and bizarre with a large helping of the outrageous, the film concentrates its interest purely on one thematic element, trauma. Even the alternative history is just a backdrop here.

I have half a mind of criticizing Freesia for being too monochrome, however, its muted emotional palette is the point of the whole endeavor. Still, one can't help to feel at least a certain inner numbness oneself when watching a film only featuring characters with muted affects, doing some muted feeling violence in pictures with a muted colour palette.  My mind's other half does of course wish to applaud the movie for really impressing its characters' emotional state on the viewer.

A large part of the film's success in doing this is based on Kumakiri's note perfect direction, characterized by elegance and the courage to be slow and difficult instead of overplaying the plot's inherent melodrama for cheap effect. However, Tamayama, Tsugumi and Hidetoshi Nishijima as their object of vengeance are doing fine work here, too, showing again that underplaying can be a very effective acting method.

I have no doubt that the film could have gone in a very different direction in the hands of a different director. The screenplay isn't exactly subtle, with elements like a freezing bomb leaving people frozen inside and all the usual tropes of vengeance plots. Somehow, Kumakiri treats everything as subtle as possible, although the film's ending still wants us to feel a closure its characters don't truly achieve.

But I never expect a film to be perfect, so I'm perfectly alright with that.

09:53 am - In short: XX: Beautiful Killing Machine (1996)

Cheryl (Rei Natsume) works as a top class bodyguard in Tokyo. Thanks to a mysterious and tragic past, she's the silent, affectless type. Her only friends are the one-armed ex-mercenary bar-owner Mark (Shunsuke Kariya), the wheel-chair-bound tech guy and voyeur Lucky Ears, and a doctor with rather unorthodox methods (Saiko Isshiki) who treats Cheryl for some mysterious reason that has something to do with Cheryl "having no womb".

Cheryl's newest job is to protect the sleazy misogynist creep Kou Sawamura (Naomasa Musaka) from a group of even less pleasant yakuza he stole some jewels from.

Although her client has quite a talent for making her life more difficult, Cheryl succeeds protecting him without much sweat, until she meets the bad guys' main assassin, only known as "The Owl". When the moment comes, she isn't able to shoot the Owl, for she remembers him from her mysterious and tragic past.

So she stows her client away in a storeroom and falls into an existential crisis she is only just beginning to crawl out of when the Owl begins to target her handful of friends.

Beautiful Killing Machine is (as far as I know) the final of the XX movies. Like the last film of the series I saw, this one too likes to get the girls with guns business behind itself as fast as possible and concentrate on character and mood. Even the sleaze has to take a backseat. Of course, having less action and more talk is a lot cheaper than making your movie a full-grown barrage of action and explosions, but director Takahito Hara's careful way of dealing with his characters and the coolly melancholic mood he often manages to achieve point at a director able to make a virtue of necessity.

The plot might be cliched and the characters far from original, but the same goes for some of the best of film noir - a genre that could have had a certain influence on this film. Hara's earnestness and the slow, thoughtful rhythm to the film really won me over, even though the actors weren't always able to commit as fully as their director.

Of course, if you are watching girls with guns films just for the action and the sleaze, you'll probably be disappointed here. In these two aspects, the film is adequate at best. Personally, it's not a lack that bothers me, as long as the rest of the film keeps my interest as well as this one does.

There's also the point of a very uncommon and therefore slightly strange twist at the end of the film that merrily abuses some of the basic assumptions of every girls with guns film ever made while at the same time fulfilling all genre expectations. It's a thing of beauty - and also quite silly, but just in the best and most earnestly presented way.

09:55 am - In short: XX: Beautiful Hunter (1994)

Orphan girl Shiori (Makiko Kuno) has an impressive streak of bad luck. As if the whole being an orphan thing wasn't enough, she is adopted by an evil Catholic secret society and trained to become one of their killers (or Warriors of God).

The grown-up Shiori is well loved by the organization's boss, a priest usually just called Father (Koji Shimizu), for reasons of him being a sleazy, blind old man and her being ruthlessly efficient.

Until she makes a mistake on a job and lets two journalist witnesses escape with some very incriminating photos. The first of the two is easily hunted down, but Ito (Johnny Okura) the second one is more of a problem. His attempts at lying low aren't too successful, but when Shiori finds him, she for once in her life isn't just able to kill him. As it goes in films like this, all her carefully suppressed sexuality explodes and she falls in love with him.

Both have to go on the run together, always trailed by Shiori's former colleagues.

Beautiful Hunter is the second part of the XX series, a handful of Japanese girls with guns films made for the video market. As such, the film always has to fight against its low budget, but director Masaru Konuma was veteran of intelligent smut filmmaking enough to be able to roll with it. Although the lighting and colour schemes betray the film's year of production, the film has a distinct 70s feel to it, with much of the scenes as carefully laid out by Konuma as his Roman Porn films for Nikkatsu were and more than one moment of guerilla filmmaking.

Not surprisingly, Konuma seems to be more interested in the script's sado-erotic undertones and the sexualization of violence with the gun as phallus stand-in than in the actual action scenes and even finds some honest human emotions in the ritualized sex and the sadism. At times, it looks as if the director is trying to marry pulpy exploitation in the style of a Kazuo Koike manga with the sado-masochistic psychological clarity of some of his earlier films.

He is not completely successful with it for two reasons. Firstly, as much as he tries to ignore the plot or the non-sexual implications of girls with gun cinema, the film still needs to function as part of the genre or at least do something, anything with the genre's clichés. Alas, it just doesn't.

Secondly, Makiko Kuno is good enough when she doesn't have to show emotions, but has her problems with the more emotional scenes, coming off less as someone with lessened affect than slightly bored.

Still, while Beautiful Hunter is less successful than I'd hoped it to be, it is a very interesting and worthwhile film with a handful of aesthetically impressive scenes. I always prefer a film with ambitions it doesn't completely fulfill to a film that isn't even trying.

05:50 am - In short: Zombie Hunter Rika (2008)

Initially, Japanese schoolgirl Rika (idol Risa Kudo, who is not one of those members of her guild with any acting ability) and her best friend Nami skip school to visit Rika's grandfather and get some important life advice. When they arrive in the small town where the genius surgeon ("Just like Black Jack!", we are informed) and swordmaster lives, they stumble into the beginning of a localized zombie outbreak - "zombies" is how you call camembert-faced people with movement disabilities, right?

The Japanese government is at fault this time. An experimental euthanasia drug to get rid of all those pesky old people has turned out to have some problematic side effects.

Worse for Rika, grandpa is utterly senile and his gold digger wife is trying to poison him to finally be able to spend his riches with her low-life boyfriend. The first larger zombie attack ends with Rika getting bitten. Fortunately, grandpa has still enough brain juice left to amputate his granddaughters bitten arm, well, to hack it off with a sword to be precise, and stitch on a new one.

Rika's new member is the arm of a dead American zombie hunter (don't ask) in a sort of package deal together with his magic sword, which will come in handy.

The local exposition machine, made corporeal by the zombified but intelligent scientist Takahashi (only genuine with his self-built muzzle to stop him from spontaneously eating people), explains that all problems will be solved and all the undead people will become alive again if just someone kills the zombie boss Grorian. So our obligatory motley bunch of survivors (Rika, Gramps, Nami, Takahashi, an otaku, a sushi cook and hippie/drop-out type - a representative cut of Japan's population) proceeds to stumble through the woods in the traditional manner until it is time for the final fight.

Yes, this is definitely one of those films, consciously silly, full of loving but moronic references to Japanese pop culture clichés and only peopled by the worst possible stereotypes. There are bad (but mostly physical, yay) special effects, terrible acting, but also maid zombies, a rubber arm, a zombie who has stolen Godzilla's breath weapon, sword-swinging schoolgirls and zombies.

Zombie Hunter Rika was produced for the DVD market and has the obvious non-budget that comes with the territory, but its director Kenichi Fujiwara tries a bit harder than many others in his part of the business and gives the film a little more drive, sometimes even a sense of silly enthusiasm, although there still are some dull moments. However, if one is inclined to, (and I always am) one can find a lot of love for the less savory parts of pop culture and moronic entertainment in general in the film, which seems to me to be a perfect fit for a film that is definitely situated in the less savory parts of pop culture and generally quite moronic entertainment.

As I said, acting and special effects are bad, yet they are also exceedingly enthusiastically done, and a little enthusiasm goes a long way in the realm of the bad zombie movie, even if it might be misguided.

Compared to something like Onechanbara, this is genius-level entertainment, measured with a slightly more strict standard, it is a fun little film if you don't expect it to be The Machine Girl.

09:43 am - On WTF: Oh! My Zombie Mermaid (2004)

As a self declared wrestling film expert who doesn't actually like wrestling, I send my gaze into the direction of Japan and get rather excited about Oh! My Zombie Mermaid, the best zombie mermaid and wrestling film without a zombified mermaid.

09:42 am - In short: Gakidama (1985)

aka The Tastiest Flesh

aka Demon Within

A newspaper sends a writer and a photographer with a special talent for shooting the really weird stuff into the woods to get a picture of a will-o'-the-wisp reported to appear there. The thing actually does appears, obviously lured in by the tasty treats the two have hung into the trees to attract it. During the photo action, the thing transforms into a worm and stealthily sneaks into the writer's ear.

The next three months of his life, he doesn't do much more than to eat and eat, and then eat some more, until he falls into a comatose sleep from which he - to the shock of his wife - only awakes when a gremlin-esque creature (here called a "ghoul") escapes through his mouth. Fortunately a strange man with a face mask is there to catch the little beast; unfortunately he let's the bugger escape without telling the couple about it.

In the following weeks, the writer will learn that he has now developed an addiction to eating the (cooked) flesh of these ghouls and his wife will have to cope with a classic zuni doll situation which can only end in pregnancy.

"Oh those wacky Japanese etc etc" are words that of course do apply here, as they do all too often where my movie watching politics are concerned. Apart from this - what we call "the obvious" - Gakidama is 54 minutes packed full of weird, blackly comical fun, with some slightly gross moments and more off-kilter ideas than most of us could use up in a two hour film.

That the photography is very nice and the main monster is a charming latex muppet seems somehow beside the point when you're talking about a short film that has the bizarre exuberance of a Kazuo Umezu manga, but there you go: the film's photography is in fact quite excellent and the muppet cute in a very toothy way.

It's all cobbled together from disparate elements most friends of genre films will recognize without my help, yet its Frankensteinian construction has a beauty all of its own. Just don't ask for explanations or a logic that isn't emotional and (at least partly) thematic. You won't get any, because the film has already jumped to the next idea, without looking back. And why shouldn't it?

11:07 am - In short: Neko Ramen Taisho (2008)

aka Pussy Soup

The cat (puppet) Jeff III has had a hard life until now. Brought up by his cruel father, Jeff II, to become a popular cat idol just like dad (and presumably Jeff I), poor Jeff hasn't the necessary cuteness that it takes to get through life in showbiz.

Jobless and rejected by his father after a very bad performance in a commercial, the cat decides to get a decent job. But all his promising career choices go to waste. Work as a sushi chef turns out to be impossible for someone addicted to fish, while nobody wants to be operated on by a surgeon who is also a cat. After his taxi driving job doesn't pay off either - surprisingly, passengers don't appreciate it when you try to run over rats - the desperate Jeff wants to drown himself to end his ordeal, but is saved by a gruff yet kindly ramen cook.

The master teaches Jeff the art of ramen cooking, and soon our hero has a small but fine noodle bar on the outskirts of Tokyo. All could be well, if not for his rather evil father who is trying to lay Jeff's life to waste by opening a new, flashy ramen place nearly next door.

That's the sort of problem only a TV cook off can solve.

Yeah, Minoru Kawasaki is at it again, making another comedy in the spirit of his Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala, just with even more dubious looking dolls.

It is in fact so much in the spirit of those earlier films that one could be tempted to decry a certain lack of originality in the new film. But then one would be the kind of person who complains that a film about a ramen cooking cat isn't novel enough, or, as we here call 'em, a twat.

The viewer's enjoyment of the whole affair probably depends on her ability to find the type of parody that nearly emulates its sources funny. If you like the clichés of Japanese pop culture targeted here at least a little, you'll probably have some decent fun, if not, you are way outside of the film's target range and will probably just stare at the screen in befuddlement.

If, on the other hand, you're like me and have read and enjoyed one bread baking or cooking manga or the other, Neko Ramen Taisho comes recommended. Unless you don't like ramen.