Tokyo: The Last War (1989)

Original title: Teito taisen

1945, before the H-bombs are dropped on Japan. Despite loud scepticism from the military leadership, spiritual leader of Japan – so says the voice from the off and who am I to disagree – Kanami Koho (Tetsuro Tanba, of course) plans to send out a wave of bad spiritual energy through radio waves to kill the Allied leadership. Instead of doing that, he awakens Yasunori Kato (Kysusaku Shimada), apparently actually the embodiment of Tokyo’s masses of angry dead from the last thousand years.

Kato’s thing is still destroying Tokyo, and he’s still ridiculously powerful. The last surviving member of the Tatsumiya family, Yukiko (Kaho Minami), isn’t really prepared to fight her ancestral enemy, but she at least slips into the role of protecting a little blind orphan girl Kato shows quite some interest in.

There must have been several novels taking place between those that made up the material for Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis and the eleventh entry in Hiroshi Aramata’s clearly insanely ambitious Teito monogatari series, so there are no returning characters here apart from Kato, and there’s no time spent on getting us up to date on anything that happened in between the movies.

Having said that, The Last War is actually a much less sprawling thing than its epic predecessor, and where that movie simply had no air to stop and breath, this one appears to thinly stretch out too little plot for nearly two hours.

There’s a ponderous quality to the film that is a bad follow-up to the merry insanity of the first one, and where Last Megalopolis was a wellspring of crazy special effects, much of what happens here is people making constipated faces to suggest they are using their psychic powers, until some mild explosion occurs. This gets a little better in the film’s last third when at least a mild sense of the grotesque settles over proceedings, but for a film whose conceptual design is credited to H.R. Giger, whose effects are by Screaming Mad George, whose – possibly not so – assistant director is Hongkong’s prince of the batshit insane Ngai Choi Lam, and whose action is directed by Philip Kwok, it’s all pretty harmless.

The film as a whole feels as if were trying to replace Jissoji’s extremely personal, strange yet maximalist sense of aesthetics, but doesn’t appear to know with what, until all that’s left is the sort of bland professionalism that doesn’t make for a bad movie, but a woefully uninteresting one.

Director Takashige Ichise never directed a feature film before or after Tokyo: The Last One, and concentrated on a successful career as a producer – first as Toho’s man for international co-productions, then as one of the architects of the J-horror boom – and really, this too often feels like the film a producer would make rather than that of a director.

In short: The Five Man Army (1969)

Somewhere in revolutionary Mexico. Certified criminal genius The Dutchman (Peter Graves) summons a group of old acquaintances and friends for a heist. Knife-throwing swordsman Samurai (Tetsuro Tanba, trying to go broaden his reign of being in every Japanese film to Italian cinema too), food-fixated strongman Mesito (Bud Spencer), explosives expert and cardsharp Captain Augustus (James Daly) and unsuccessful bank robber and former trapeze artist Luis Dominguez (Nino Castelnuovo) are perfectly willing to take part in one of the Dutchman's plans, seeing they all have hit rock bottom in one way or the other.

The Dutchman has been hired by Mexican revolutionaries to steal half a million dollar of foreign bribes in gold that are bound to be delivered to the military dictator of the day, and instead give them to the revolution. Officially, every member of the Dutchman's team is promised a thousand dollars, but he heavily hints at further plans to steal the gold from the revolutionaries too.

However, before anyone can think about any kind of double-cross, there are a few problems to solve. Chief among these problems is that the gold is being transported in a heavily armed and guarded train only a fool or an army would take on in a frontal assault. Fortunately, the Dutchman is quite the planner when it comes to impossible missions.

From time to time, Italian producers didn't just import a handful of foreign stars to improve their films' chances at success in international markets, but also made attempts to give the director's chair to an American. Usually, these films didn't amount to much, for the US directors were generally of the dependable workhorse type of filmmaker badly equipped to work through the peculiarities of Italian scripting practices, as well as just not the sort of visual stylists many of even the lesser Italian directors were.

The Five Man Army's director Don Taylor is quite a good example of the type of American willing to do this type of work for hire. As a very experienced director mostly working on TV, Taylor is enamoured of a straightforward point and shoot style that makes the film look visually impoverished when compared to other Spaghetti Western. Ironically, how much of the film was actually directed by Taylor is not clear at all. Depending on the source, Taylor either directed most everything or was replaced by the film's producer Italo Zingarelli after a day or so. Since not even the actors playing in the damn thing are telling the same story about its production history, we will probably never know for sure.

Personally, I'd go with Taylor as the film's main director, though, because Five Man Army looks like the product of exactly the kind of director Taylor was, someone who doesn't have much of an eye for beauty or for mood, but who knows how to keep a film moving. The script (curiously co-written by US animation writer Marc Richards and Dario Argento) plays more to Taylor's strengths as a director than is normal in this sort of project, replacing much of the moral ambiguity and cynicism typical of the Spaghetti Western with more easily digestible boy's adventure tropes, and featuring a narrative that is as straightforward as the director's style.

Consequently, Five Man Army isn't much to talk about as a Spaghetti Western, but works perfectly fine as a straightforward Western with (also straightforward) heist movie elements. Plus, it has a pretty great scene where Tetsuro Tanba hacks an office full of soldiers to pieces while Nino Castelnuovo looks on with a shocked expression, which is something that can't be said about many Westerns, Spaghetti or not.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spaghetti western,in short,don taylor,peter graves,james daly,bud spencer,tetsuro tanba,nino castelnuovo

The Killing Machine (1975)

During World War II, martial arts expert Doshin So (Sonny Chiba in a role supposedly based on events in the life of the founder of the Shorinji Kempo style of martial arts) works as a secret agent in Manchuria for the Japanese, and is with his concept of honor and duty probably as much of a pain in the ass for his superiors as for the Chinese. So doesn't take too well to the Japanese capitulation, shooting up his superior's office with a machine gun and shouting stuff like "Japan may have surrendered, I never will".

He's not as completely a nationalist tool as he sounds, though, and acts mostly as a protector of the weak and downtrodden, regardless of their nationality.

After his return to Japan, he's trying to make ends meet in the ruins of Osaka, but his overstrained sense of justice and the mustache-twirling evilness of the local Yakuza don't make for a pleasurable life. While he's protecting the local war orphans and saving women from prostitution So gets into trouble that could possibly get him hanged when he breaks some (of course evil, child-harming) American bones, but a suddenly materializing Tetsuro Tanba saves him and sends him to Shochiku to make himself a new - and hopefully more peaceful - life.

There he somehow manages to scrounge together enough money to found a martial arts school whose teachings are based on the things So had learned from the Shaolin Temple in China. His dojo effectively works as a way to keep other male war survivors (although we will see some women at his school, too) from getting in trouble and killing themselves one way or the other.

But So just can't keep his head down when confronted with the local Yakuza gang who make people's lives even harder than they already are. At first, there's just a little friendly brawling, but when the Yakuza rape a schoolgirl, So grabs himself a pair of scissors and does some amateur surgery on the main perpetrator. This isn't something the gangsters will just let sit, and soon the situation escalates.

A film directed by 70s exploitation god/madman Norifumi Suzuki with the glorious Sonny Chiba playing its hero sounds like a surefire winner to me. Alas, The Killing Machine is far from being as good as I had hoped for.

Mostly, it's just a mess of a movie, cursed with a script that can't decide what the film is actually about (a man finding a more peaceful self? The state of mind of post-war Japan? Sonny hitting people?) or to which genre it belongs. While title and cast promise your typical "Sonny Chiba plays a real life martial artist in an outrageous interpretation of said martial artist's life" film, The Killing Machine mostly turns out to be an incredibly overwrought melodrama, trying to do for post-war Japan what Gone With The Wind did for the American South. And it succeeds - it is nearly as hypocritical as its American model, and even a bit more confused about its own political position. Which isn't to say that I don't understand the mixed emotions the post-war years produced in the Japanese cinema of the 70s or the very real suffering many Japanese people had to go through - the problem is that the film's melodramatic vein so overstates the case that it spits into the face of the real suffering, making it seem trite and trivial. Karate Bullfighter looks downright balanced in comparison.

The film's loose, episodic structure doesn't do much to improve this impression. Nothing here really hangs together in any meaningful sense, character development is as disjointed as the film is confused about its own themes.

Still, even this mess has its good sides. Chiba is as scenery-chewingly good as he always is, the small amount of action scenes is competently choreographed and while you can't say that Suzuki does anything that helps the film hold together, he still wastes a number of beautiful shots on scenes that just don't deserve it.

As disappointing as The Killing Machine is, it at least should encourage you to seek out better films about the same themes, say Karate Bullfighter or Karate Bearfighter to see the Killing Machine done right, or Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor And Humanity (and its sequels) as a much more complex and honest analysis of Japanese post-war society.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,reviews,sonny chiba,martial arts,melodrama,norifumi suzuki,tetsuro tanba

Yakuza Demon (2003)

The smallish Yakuza group of the Date has taken on more than they can handle when they trespass onto the turf of the considerably larger Tendo group. One things leads to another, and the Tendo start attacking some of the Date's lower tier of members in retaliation.

The leaders of the Date think that it will all work out like it usually does in their business - both sides killing off some footsoldiers and then making up again with slightly redrawn borders between their territories.

Times like this are also a very fine opportunity to milk one's underlings dry "to finance the war". One of these underlings is Muto (Koichi Iwaki), himself the leader of a small sub-"family" of the Date group, consisting only of himself, Seichi (Riki Takeuchi) and Yoshi (Hideki Sone). Their little family unit once was completed by Muto's bar-owning girlfriend (Yoko Natsuki), but she left them a short time ago, wanting her man to go legit.

Trouble is, Muto hasn't the money his superiors want from him. With not much of a way out, Muto promises to assassinate a higher-up member of the Tendo to keep up his reputation. Seichi is dismayed at the thought of his father-by-choice going to jail for fifteen years (that's the typical muder sentence in modern day yakuza films) or dying in a futile effort to kill someone, and gets Muto jailed for two years for some smaller crime. He also delivers the money they want to his bosses, money that he has stolen directly from the war chest of the Tendo group. Of course, that's not enough for them to make up for Muto's supposed cowardice of landing himself in jail, so Seichi makes up for it the only way he knows and kills the highest boss of the Tendo (the Emperor of the Universe, Tetsuro Tanba).

Which obviously leads only to a further escalation of the conflict into an all-out war the Date never wanted and most certainly will not be able to win. It won't be long until the Date group is going to expell Seichi to somehow finagle out of their little war.

Yakuza Demon is supposed to be one of Takashi Miikes weaker films, but I don't think it weak at all, unless one only appreciates Miike's films when they're trying to be as mad as possible.

This one's a very different sort of film, a classicist Yakuza film that replaces most of Miike's typical absurdism with classic, stoic gangster film existentialism. Yakuza Demon is mostly a film about love and family as seen through the eyes of people who are nearly completely unable to express their feelings through anything else than violence or the seething anger and frustration Riki Takeuchi is so good at showing through his glare.

It is also a very slow film, with many static camera set-ups that often position the viewer as an audience sitting one or two tables away from the characters. Miike consciously ignores many possibilities for kinetic violence. This time around he's more interested in watching his characters when they are not spilling anyone's guts (and noodle soup) on the floor. In many aspects, it is much more painful to watch the characters never directly express anything they feel than watch them kill and die (although there will be more than enough dying before the film is over).

As much as I like Miike's madder outings, Yakuza Demon is something very special, akin to Kinji Fukasku's Graveyard of Honor and similar classics of the jitsuroku eiga or the bleakest, saddest film noir you could imagine.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,yakuza,riki takeuchi,takashi miike,tetsuro tanba,reviews