Danger Point: The Road to Hell (1991)

Original title: Danger Point: Jigokuhenomichi

A couple – and that description can very effectively be read literally, depending on how you read the film’s final scene – of hitmen (Jo Shishido and Sho Aikawa) get curious when their latest victim offers them more money than they could ever get their hands on through their usual work, while grabbing the photo of a hospital nurse (Nana Okada). Too curious for their handler, who drops them after a single, polite question about what the dead man might have been talking about.

This new state of being out of a job to pay for suits and sunglasses does of course make the thought of a lot of money even more enticing, and so the killers turn detectives, though the sort of detectives that let Mike Hammer look like a nice guy. Soon, they are on the trail a group of gangsters and a corrupt cop, and indeed a whole lot of ill-gotten money.

If the new Arrow Blu-ray box with early Toei V-Cinema films teaches me anything, it is certainly that these early examples of the form were a meeting place of veteran talent making their way from TV or other low budget work, and the young guns that I’ve only known at the forefront of the conversation in western circles about it.

Here, it’s Jo Shishido – all sagging chipmunk cheeks and mild yet cold expression – starring alongside a young Sho Aikawa demonstrating a mixture of casual brutality and eager to please puppy dog charm very fitting to the relationship between these two, and Hideo Murota doing one of his patented villain – though our protagonists are obviously also villains – turns.

The film is directed by exploitation – and at this point TV – veteran Yasuharu Hasebe – not an unknown quantity to Shishido. Hasebe’s direction doesn’t have the energy of his early films, or the sheer nastiness and excitement of his 70s roman porn work, but there’s a moody, bright day neo noirish quality to his filmmaking that makes the simple, slow-moving plot genuinely engaging even in the many moments when there isn’t actually much going on on screen. Hasebe still uses some of his old stylistic flourishes whenever there’s action or violence to emphasise, but there’s a degree of calmness to his work here I don’t remember from his younger and wilder days. He’s rather more Shishido than Aikawa.

This provides the film with limited appeal as an action film, so Danger Point mostly lives off the interplay between its leads and its mood of doomed, brutal struggle, which does turn it into an unexpected joy.

In short: Deadman Inferno (2015)

aka Z Island

Original title: Zアイランド, Z Airando

Ten years after the usual raid and revenge cycle left yakuza boss Hiroya Munakata (Sho Aikawa) with few friends, expelled from the yakuza, with a bad leg, and having to go through the indignity of honest work, his best underling Takashi (Shingo Tsurumi) gets out of jail. Munakata has been taking care of Takashi’s daughter Hinata (Maika Yamamoto) for all these years. Alas, the girl’s a teen, so she isn’t awaiting her father with open arms to mend things between them but has run off with her best friend Seira (Erina Mizuno) to go to a place called Zeni Island that holds sentimental value to the family.

Unfortunately, Zeni Island also turns out to be the place of a fresh zombie outbreak (apparently caused by a combination of the flu and homebrew drugs). Now, the teen girls turn out to be rather competent martial artists, but it clearly is still a good thing the ex-yakuza are coming for them, also bringing with them Hinata’s mum Sakura (Sawa Suzuki), also rather good in a fight.

To make matters more difficult than a mere zombie problem, also making their way to the island are exactly the particularly nasty examples of yakuza-dom responsible for the fall of Munakata’s gang ten years ago, so there is a bit of vengeance in the cards too. If anyone makes it through the zombie hordes alive, that is.

Despite the zombie genre by now basically having been crossed with every other genre imaginable, there really aren’t too many zombie versus yakuza movies, so I’m willing to call Hiroshi Shinagawa’s Deadman Inferno original in this regard, as well as in its use of something that can only be called “Chekhov’s Japanese Ragga Playing Boat-Mounted Sound System”. Plus, it stars former V-cinema hero Sho Aikawa doing exactly what I want him to do, being gruff and honorable and slicing zombies left and right.

Tonally, this starts out as one of those deeply silly yet deadpan Japanese comedies (getting some decent laughs out of yakuza-style manliness treated as absurd as it is) but hits some surprisingly bleak notes before the climax, killing off characters a comedy really shouldn’t kill in rather troubling ways, before ending nicer than a lot of pure yakuza movies do. It’s a bit confusing and probably not to the taste of anyone expecting films to hold closely to formula but I found this bit of unpredictability in a film I didn’t expect any from rather refreshing. As I found the fact that all female main characters here are as capable fighters as the men, which doesn’t necessarily save one from a zombie horde, of course.


Otherwise, this is simply a fun straightforward and well-paced little film with perfectly competently made action sequences – that perhaps suffer a bit from Shinagawa’s clearly deep and abiding love for slow motion – as well as a game cast every viewer of Japanese genre cinema will recognize and love, and some nice if not spectacular gore effects.

Muscle Heat (2002)

Japan in the far-flung future of 2009. Apparently, the country has been in a horrible recession for twenty years, and Tokyo's suburbs have become lawless zones where poverty and gang lords rule. A comparatively new drug named Blood Heat makes matters even worse.

The gang of international evildoers selling and producing Blood Heat also make a bit of extra money by organizing cage matches to the death. After all, what's good for Tina Turner must be good for Masaya Kato too. In fact, the whole drug business is going so well for Kato's Rai Kenjin that he's planning on ruling the world some day. These plans also include blackmailing a scientist into science-ing up a new, improved version of the drug that turns the people who take it into insane fighting machines, but since the new version already exists when Rai is working on convincing the scientist, I really don't have a clue what that's all about. Neither does the script.

Anyhow, someone does seem to want to hinder Rai from becoming king of the world and hires former navy seal Joe Jinno (Kane Kosugi), who has suffered some sort of trauma from not shooting children, and former airborne ranger turned cop Aguri Katsuragi (Sho Aikawa!) to (probably) kill Lai. I think. Things don't go too well for our heroes (turns out just running into the bad guy's lair shooting and screaming is not a very good plan), and Katsuragi soon enough finds himself in one of those cage matches to the death against one of Rai's drug-enhanced humans. Hello, Sho Aikawa-style death scene.

Joe, who somehow escaped the gangsters will obviously take revenge for his dead partner, but before he can do that, he'll have to rescue an annoying little kid, befriend Katsuragi's cop little sister (Misato Tachibana), and kick a lot of people in the face. There's also some stuff about corruption and people living underground rising up against their drug lord oppressors, but really, who knows what that's supposed to be about?

In 2002, the dumb 90s action movie was alive and well and living in Japan, and featuring Sho Kosugi's horrible son Kane. Why hire someone who can use more facial expressions than a vacant stare, a vacant glare and a vacantly puzzled look, after all? To be fair, while Kosugi couldn't act his way out of a paperbag, and has the charisma of that paperbag, he is pretty good when doing action sequences. In a lot of action films, that would be more than enough, but Muscle Heat is indulging in the fine art of self-sabotage in two ways: firstly by wasting Kosugi's actual talent on action scenes that aren't really bad, but are bland and choreographed without much imagination. Although the action choreographer comes from China, the film's style seems more oriented on the worst aspects of US-centric martial arts movies of the 80s and 90s (you know, the sort of thing you just might have found Sho Kosugi in). If the best you can do for your final fight is a cage match (the most boring set-up in all of martial arts cinema), you're not really trying.

Muscle Heat's second problem is a bit more likeable - after all, it seems to be born from ambition and not the lack of it. For some reason, Tetsuya Oishi (who wrote the scripts for some good films, too) tries to shoehorn an incredible amount of plot threads into the film. There's the whole economical collapse story, the minor revolution, Kosugi's weird backstory, the attempt to make the film feel "international" by having the characters speak in Cantonese, English and Japanese (which of course backfires by having the actors frequently talk in languages they aren't speaking well at all), the whole drug angle - it's just an incredible amount of stuff that might have amounted to something interesting in a film that put as much effort in developing these threads, or even (fat chance!) turning them into a narrative that makes any sort of sense. Instead, Muscle Heat just heaps stuff upon more stuff without much rhyme or reason, until it nearly collapses under the weight of accumulated nothing.

This is not to say that Ten Shimoyama's (who can do better, too) film is completely without merit: there is - after all - Sho Aikawa chewing scenery for twenty minutes and doing not just one but two of his patented scenes of EXTREME DYING, a lot of the signifiers of cool used so badly they become utterly ridiculous (basically, everything Masaya Kato's character does, especially when it's happening in slow motion, which it frequently does), action movie physics (who knew you can throw a knife so hard your victim will be catapulted back and upwards by it?) and more throw back scenes into everything that already didn't work in action movies during the 90s than one could wish for - all presented with bad camera angles and editing that does not believe in things like cause and effect. Actually, I suspect without Kosugi's black hole-like charisma, I might have enjoyed Muscle Heat a lot more and would now be singing its praises as a ridiculously silly and entertaining piece of retro action cinema.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,ten shimoyama,kane kosugi,sho aikawa,reviews,action,martial arts

Blood (1998)

(This is the Japanese one with Riki Takeuchi, and not one of the bazillion other films with the same title.)

The professional killer Kizaki (Riki Takeuchi) tries to assassinate his former boss, the triad leader Ri (Sho Aikawa), which only seems fair to me, since we later learn that Ri first tried to have Kizaki killed for no reason we will ever be made privy of. Kizaki fails and is caught by Ri's men, tortured a little and then driven off into the woods to be disposed of.

Killing his two would-be executioners, the killer escapes nearly fatally wounded yet manages to get to a hospital. As luck will have it, his doctor there is Kamiyama (Noboru Takachi), a highschool friend of his from the time when was still called Takuya. Both men haven't seen each other in more than a decade. The last time they saw each other was in their late teens, when enemies of Kizaki were trying to rape his then girlfriend Yuki to get at him. The boys took to defending the girl but went a bit further than self defense by killing at least one of the attackers. Kizaki took the fall for both of them, and Kamiyama let him.

Now, Dr. Kamamiya is married to Yuki (now played by Mai Oikawa), who is pregnant. The doctor is still caught in feelings of guilt over what happened. Those feelings are strong enough for him to risk a lot to protect his old friend from the interest of the police and even help in Kazuki's escape when Ri's men attack the killer (through an old lady who is a professional killer like Kazuki, no less) in the hospital.

When Kizaki realizes that the physician is now married to Yuki, he urges Kamiyama to keep away from him in the future to protect the woman he obviously still loves.

Kamiyama, driven by a mixture of self-hatred and bitterness, agrees, but keeping out of Kizaki's trouble is more difficult for him than anyone could have imagined. Two mean jokes of destiny have provided further connections between the two men.

Firstly, the police officer investigating the case is the same one who was responsible for the rape revenge case years ago and is bound to realize what is going on betwenn Kizaki and Kamiyama sooner or later.

Secondly, Kamiyama is also treating Kizaki's enemy Ri for an inoperable and lethal cancer, and when the gangster boss learns of the men's connection, he does the obvious gangster boss thing and kidnaps Yuki to convince the physician to kill his old friend.

Of course, these problems can only be solved in a blood bath.

Before watching Blood, I only knew its director Kosuke Suzuki from his rather extreme sexploitation films in the Stop the Bitch Campaign series, so I didn't expect his earlier Yakuza film to be less interested in bodily fluids and much more in classical notions of tragedy.

Usually, I would complain about the heavy weight Blood's scripts lays on fateful coincidences, but if you read the film as a tragedy (like many yakuza films are between the shouting and the shooting), those really aren't coincidences but fate's way to fulfill a destiny a long time in the making for all of the characters, from Kizaki to the cop.

I think Suzuki manages to keep his film's tone earnest enough to make this reading as a tragedy instead of a melodrama tenable. There is something deliberate and consciously slow about many of the film's scenes. Blood is very - not as atypical for a film made for the V cinema market as one would think - focused on the feelings of its characters, or rather the part of their feelings that is readable in their eyes and in their posture. These aren't people really used to giving voice to their feelings, and when they do, their death can't be far away.

There is of course room for the genre-necessary violence, but much of the action is wilfully occluded through Suzuki's often elegant choice of camera set-ups.

When in doubt, Suzuki prefers Riki's angry "I EAT THE CAMERA!" face to spurting blood. In Blood's case, this technique doesn't have the unpleasant whiff of a film too cheap to have any action or a director too amateurish to show it, but works as a hint that the film's main action takes place not through gun play but in the lost places hidden in its characters' heads.

Instead of expositing the characters' inner lifes directly, Suzuki chooses to let the viewer fill in most of the blanks herself, a good method to infuriate everyone in dire need of having everything spelt out, and endear a film to people with an overactive imagination like me.

All this doesn't mean that Blood is a very subtle film. As you know, Jim, Riki Takeuchi is one of the great scenery-chewing, shouting and scowling actors that grace cinema and just doesn't do subtle like normal people understand it. Riki isn't so much acting as pushing a persona made of hair, rage and an underlying odour of being lost through the screen right into one's living room. Good thing that he's usually not playing the sensitive poet type but violent, angry and lost people like Kizaki. And he's as good at it as I can imagine. Noboru Takachi nicely manages to hold his own beside Riki without getting into a shouting competition, staying believable as someone driven by an unhealthy mixture of self-hatred, unspoken rage and the feeling to live someone else's life.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,yakuza,sho aikawa,riki takeuchi,kosuke suzuki,noboru takachi,reviews