Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (United States, 1989)

NOTE: While going through some old papers recently, I came across this, my first published film review, which appeared in the SF Weekly in February of 1989. It concerns the Charles Bronson vehicle KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS. if I was writing the review today, i would mention that the film was produced by Golan & Globus for Canon Pictures and that it was exactly the kind of film that those two entitites built their reputations upon, and that it was helmed by GUNS OF NAVARONE director J.Lee Thompson. I just didn't think at that time that there were people who cared about that kind of thing. I also would have mentioned that it features an early appearance by a shockingly fresh-faced Danny Trejo if I had been able to predict the advent of the MACHETE movies. Longtime readers of this blog will recognize that, despite the review clearly being written by a less experienced hand, there are certain stylistic through-lines, such as my taking every opportunity the movie offers to make jokes about butt sex. 

CHARLES BRONSON'S FACE, weathered and worn like that of some hellish apple head doll, is, though not exactly pretty, a fitting visage for a man burdened with the anxieties of an entire nation. As one of the media's most enduring personifications of American paranoia, Bronson has reduced his screen performances to a series of choreographed walk-throughs. Questions of role or motivation are irrelevant, as are charges of predictability: Bronson does not act, he performs ritual. Despite appearances, this is no easy job.It was inevitable that, sooner or later, Bronson's burden of projected anxieties would crack his mask of stoic brutality snd give us a brief glimpse of what these "wipe the scum off the streets" movies are really all about.

Kinjite, Bronson's latest vehicle, is a rote action film leaden with underdeveloped subplots and subtexts that give the film's action a backdrop of dizzying ideological ambiguity. After his daughter is molested by a Japanese businessman, an issue is made of Bronson's virulent anti-Asian bias. This racism, once explicitly stated, is never fully examined or resolved, and ends up being, if anything, an affirmation of popular anti-Japanese sentiment. Alongside this, some statement seems to be being made about American vs. Japanese sexual mores. This theme is ultimately abandoned, leaving in its wake a slag heap of sleazy visual residue. Any attempt to turn a Bronson film into a psychological thriller is doomed to fail miserably due to these films' necessary lack of characterization. in Kinjite, the only way we find out what a character is supposed to be thinking is through clumsy verbal exposition.

Kinjite"s most interesting "theme" is graphically introduced in its opening scene, in which Bronson, playing L.A. police Lieutenant Crowe, breaks into a hotel room occupied by a teenage hooker and her snotty, white collar john. After brutally subduing the john, Bronson demands that he make a statement identifying  the man who has been supplying him with teenage girls. When the john refuses, Bronson throws him down on the bed, vowing to give the scumbag a taste of his own medicine. As the john screams in protest, Bronson picks up his nasty looking, foot-long dildo and lustily rams his message home (ow!) The next day, Bronson expresses some reservations about the incident to his wife (played by The Mod Squad's Peggy Lipton.) Soothing him, she observes that the arrogant yuppy probably just got Crowe/Bronson's "Irish" up.

In a subsequent scene, the stirringly androgynous pimp, Duke (Juan Fernandez), gets a formidable rise out of Bronson's Irish when he attempts to bribe him with his diamond-faced Rolex watch. "I'd like to shove this up your ass," responds Bronson. "But I don't want to get my hands dirty." Instead, Bronson forces Duke to swallow the watch at gunpoint. Though it's hard to say why Bronson has suddenly gotten all picky about his orifices, the grueling watch swallowing scene, coupled with the earlier butt-reeming, provides a perfect exposition of the American action film's pornography of consumption (in the course of the film, Bronson--and Kinjite's producers--consume/destroy numerous cars, hotel lobbies and, at the climax, an entire shipyard.) Like most of filmland's pimps, Duke expresses his sexuality/power through his props, be they implausibly stunning young prostitutes or flashy wrist watches. When he actually has sex, it is a grim duty, a solemn rite necessary to the indoctrination of young girls into his harem. When Bronson forces the watch down Duke's throat, he turns this prop into the messenger of his own sexual power, just as he does when he violates the impotent john with his own substitute sex organ.

Obviously, in Kinjite, Bronson is finally giving his anxieties their most honest form of physical expression. His desire to literally fuck everyone is further exposed when, later in the film, his pastor suggests that his affections for his teenage daughter are something other than fatherly. "We all have our demons," he counsels.

Along with it's explicit and metaphorical depictions. bungholing is also paid a lot of lip service in Kinjite.  We hear of a young girl who has been raped and sodomized by Duke and his gang. Repo Man's Sy Richardson, tragically wasted here as Duke's monosyllabic toady, ogles a young man's behind as he speaks to Duke about branching out into the chickenhawk trade.

As for its treatment of "normal" (i.e. straight) sex, Kinjite provides little contrast to its lead characters' oddly motivated rectal preoccupations. The wives of Bronson and Hada, the Japanese businessman, are hollow and housebound, used mainly as expository devices. When Hada (James Pax) and his wife have sex, it is brief, joyless and almost entirely without movement. (This, presumably, is how Japanese people "do it.") When his wife asks him why,  after two years of abstinence, he has deigned to make love to her, Hada replies, "I guess because we are so vulnerable here (in America)."

Outside the home, all of the film's women are prostitutes. In this world, the only significant relationships are between male partners; Bronson/Crowe and his sidekick Rios (Perry Lopez) on the one side, Duke and his crony on the other. When these two couples get together, it's something like an overblown, tag-team bitch fight complete with pyrotechnics.

Unlike the film's other themes, which are dropped in favor of car chases and explosions, Kinjite's anal obsession carries through to its last frame.  In the final scene, Bronson, smirking triumphantly, leads Duke to his prison cell and introduces him to his bunkmate-to-be, a leering psychotic rapist. As Duke loudly protest his new roomie's advances, Bronson calmly walks away, almost wistful as he utters the film's final line; 'That's justice."

This vision of karmic justice meted out in buggery makes Kinjite a film that only an asshole could love.   

Massacre Gun (Japan, 1967)

It’s been said that every man must have a code. And, if we’re in a movie, that’s likely to be the code decreeing that no cruelty must go unmatched, no betrayal unpunished, and no slight un-avenged, no matter the cost to you, your loved ones, or society at large. According to this credo, men are nothing more than unfeeling puppets animated by an irresistible moral symmetry that sees violence as its own reward and no brutality too great if settling a score is the goal.

This scenario is often presented as a cautionary tale; as the camera slowly pans over the corpse-littered landscape at the film’s conclusion, it’s difficult not to imagine an unseen narrator clucking his tongue somberly and saying “Do you see?” However, it’s very difficult to imagine what is to be gained from seeing this tableau played out as often as it is in pop culture.

Fortunately for the Japanese, they had directors like Seijun Suzuki and Yasuharu Hasebe to astheticize these revenge dramas to within an inch of their lives, ornamenting their nagging ritualism with the quirks of personal expression. Though, of course, not all of Suzuki’s films were Branded to Kill, and not all of Yasuharu’s Black Tight Killers. Both men, while contributing their share of eccentric oddities to the Japanese crime film canon, were also well capable of towing the line for their masters at Nikkatsu and reliably churning out artful and competently made potboilers.

Such a film is Yasuharu’s Massacre Gun. It is a film generic enough to be a genre template, while at the same time being noteworthy for its style almost to the exclusion of its content. Which is to say that it is a very nice looking film, as dense with gloomy atmosphere and signifiers of urban cool as its heroes are with honor and regret.

The film opens with hitman Kuroda (Branded to Kill’s Jo Shishido) being ordered by his boss, the sadistic Akazawa (Takashi Kanda) to murder his lover. Shockingly, Kuroda dutifully heads straight to his girlfriend’s apartment and, under the guise of an out-of-town getaway, drives her to a remote stretch of road and summarily executes her. Kuroda is a little conflicted about this, as you would be, so, later, when he confesses to his younger brother Saburo (Jiro Okazaki), he responds to Saburo’s outraged pleas that he quit Akasawa’s gang by doing that very thing, thus incurring the kingpin’s wrath. Never mind that he could have quit the gang before killing his girlfriend, which clues you in that Kuroda may have more problems than an exaggerated sense of honor.

Saburo, an aspiring boxer and jazz drummer (accompanying Stray Cat Rock’s Ken Sanders as Chico, whose mournful torch songs comment on the action like a Greek chorus) is also in the employ of Akazawa. When, acting as a sparring partner for the boss’s star fighter, he loses control and KO’s him, Akazawa, already enraged by Kuroda’s defection, responds by having his goons crush Saburo’s hands.

At this early point in the film, it’s clear that Kuroda and his two brothers have been chafing under Akazawa’s grip for some time, and the final straw comes when the gang trashes Club Rainbow, the nightclub owned by third brother Eiji (Tatsuya Fuji, likewise of the Stray Cat Rock films.) At this point, the brothers decide to strike back against the crime lord, taking over a handful of his operations with surprising ease.

This turn of events puts Kuroda at odds with his best friend and former fellow gang member Shirasaka (played by Tokyo Drifter’s Hideaki Natani), who runs the Black & White Bar with his lover Shino, whom actress Tamaki Sawa gives a spooky, Cassandra-like presence. Of course, since the world of Massacre Gun is one in which men are rendered incapable of acting in their own best interest by their sense of honor, Shirasaka swears fealty to Akasawa and tells Kuroda that, the next time they meet, they will meet as enemies.

Finally, brother Eiji assassinates Akasawa and is taken down by the gang in a veritable tsunami of bullets that is downright comical in its overkill. Because this is not only hurtful, but rude, the stage is set for Kuroda to have his revenge.

Throughout all of this, Ysuharu employs all the arty bellwethers of alienation and isolation to portray his protagonists’ state of mind. These guys are incapable of relating to anybody, he seems to be shouting, much less even hearing them! I lost count of how many deep focus shots there were of a person having a conversation with a person whose back was turned to them while standing a good twenty feet behind them. Lessening the chances of boring old sanity prevailing is the fact that the only people suggesting that maybe all of this killing isn’t necessary are mere women, those same mewling killjoys who have been keeping us guys from setting off fireworks in our mouths since we were in short pants.

The film’s climax, when it comes, really puts the “mass” in massacre, an all-hands on-deck gun battle featuring a towering platform that seems to only exist so that Jo Shishido can assume his trademark sniper’s pose and pick off all of his former friends and associates with alacrity (I was wondering if Kuroda built it himself, which would have been difficult in the middle of enemy territory, even if he was disguised as a TV repairman or something.) In keeping with the film’s allusions to Greek Tragedy, this scrap ends with everyone dead, except for the relative innocent Saburo, who is left behind to assess the horror.

And the lesson of all this is… what, really? “Don’t try this at home?” But how can us men be expected to heed such a warning when our sense of honor compels us to murder our friends and loved ones simply because someone with a bigger gun told us to?

I’m sorry; I don’t mean to suggest that I don’t enjoy films like Massacre Gun. I do. It’s just that, as someone who grew up with a very different idea of masculine strength from the one presented in this film, I sometimes have to step back and remark upon how absurd it all is.

OK, I’m done.

American Hunter (Indonesia, 1989)

If there were ever an action movie hall of fame, I imagine that there would be a hall dedicated to the humble microfilm, that tiny macguffin that has served as the catalyst for countless car chases, fist fights, acrobatic heists, and scenes of prolonged torture throughout film history. So long is its shadow that nothing in our current technological age has come close to replacing it. The flash drive was a brief contender, but lost its sexiness once people started making them in the shape of teddy bears.

Take, for example, the first scene of American Hunter, in which the mere mention of a microfilm causes a man to pilot a jeep through a top floor window of a high rise office building. From there begins a squalid free-for-all in which various competing interests try to get their hands on the film by any means necessary. Among theses are Adam, played by kick boxer Bill "Superfoot" Wallace, who is later revealed to be a criminal mastermind by the name of Judas, an identity shift that is accomplished simply be people calling him Judas instead of Adam. Then there is mustachioed muscle farmer Frank Gordon, played by Mike Abbott and, finally, "Mr. Selleck" played by The Stabilizer star Peter O'Brian.

If a star with as thin a filmography as O'Brian can be said to be cast against type, the snarling uber-yuppy he plays in American Hunter is definitely that, standing as it does in sharp contrast to the stonily inexpressive engines of justice he plays in other of Rapi Films' Indonesian actioners like The Stabilizer and Rambu, the Intruder. Any cognitive dissonance you might suffer as a result will be shortlived, however, as Selleck is among the first of the baddies to be gorily dispatched by one of his competitors.

In fact, so chaotic is the activity that erupts around the microfilm that no one ever manages to give us a satisfying explanation of what is on it, other than a reference, in one scene, to it's contents allowing its owner to "rob and blow up Wall Street." This is something I am wholeheartedly in favor of, because, honestly, who gives a shit? As long as we are a supplied with an endless parade of over-the-top-action sequences, that microfilm could contain a recipe for kombucha or a collection of "babies scared by their own farts" videos for all we care.

And given this film is well served by the "all machine gun fire all the time" aesthetic of Stabilizer and Special Silencers auteur Arizal, an endless parade of over-the-top action sequences is exactly what we get. This despite the fact that most of the car chases--which, I'm assuming, were filmed without permits on the busy streets of Jakarta--are markedly sedate, as if the participants were driving their parents' cars. Of course, this lethargy does not prevent these chases from ending in cars going airborne and erupting in flames. It should also be noted that a lot of the machinegun fire on display is used toward practical household ends, such as opening drawers and cabinets.

And what vaguely defined hero stands at the center of all this mayhem, you may ask? Well that would be Jake Carver, a principled everyman played by the perpetually acid-wash clad Chris Mitchum, who starred in many of these low budget Asian-backed action films during the 80s. Mitchum is, of course, one of the actor sons of noir icon Robert Mitchum, and he bares a striking resemblance to his dad--with one crucial difference: While Mitchum senior's laconic exterior tended to belie a smoldering inner intensity, Mitchum the younger's laconic exterior doesn't appear to belie much of anything beyond an equally laconic interior. Yet, despite this muted charisma, Mitchum has a good natured vibe that makes him nonetheless appealing. This everyday Joe quality is underscored by the dad-joke quality bon mots he spouts whenever faced with danger, such as when, faced with two goons fitting live electrodes to his temples, he says "I don't think I'm gonna like this." Such a gambit would probably confound any central casting supervillain, whose only reply could be, "No, Mr. Carver, I expect you to... well, yes, you're not going to like it, are you?"

Among film enthusiasts, American Hunter--like other of its brethren in the Indo-action genre, such as The Stabilizer and Lady Terminator--is the kind of film that really separates the scholars from the pleasure seekers. By this I mean that it is totally meaningless, yet yields great rewards to anyone who comes to it unburdened by demands for coherence, thematic content, or character motivation. As a director, Arizal trades a lot in the lizard brain pleasures of seeing motor vehicles where motor vehicles are manifestly not meant to be, such as when a motorcycle hops onto a train car and continues down the center aisle as passengers frantically scramble out of the way. There's also a lot of joy to be mined from the exuberant back flips executed by the somewhat slouchy Chris Mitchum's stunt double, as well as the actually competent brawling of heavies Wallace and Abbott.

Would it be a spoiler to say that, at the end of American Hunter, Chris Mitchum's Jake Carver rescues his love interest, played by Netherlands-born Indonesian starlet Ida Lasha, from the villain's fortress, which is then consumed by a spectacular explosion? It would? Okay, well let's just say that this film will leave you satisfied, though perhaps with the type of vaguely undernourished feeling that might lead you to binge watch BBC historical melodramas in its wake.