Festivity, Revels, and Nocturnal Dalliances
Whatever shortcomings Nobuo Nakagawa’s Lady Vampire may have is not enough to counter its chaotic appeal. It may be less gory than his next film, and big parts of it may make no sense, but it has an enthusiastic willingness to be weird.
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Despite secret lairs and spy gadgets, Asia-pol plays things straight where other Shaw Bros. espionage efforts reveled in the most outlandish sci-fi aspects of spy films.
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Mars Men kicks off with a little kid stumbling upon a hidden cave in which he finds a small statue of Yud Wud Jaeng. The kid insists on calling him “Hanamajin”, and the rest of the cast follows suit.
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There are many tales of love, bitterness and vengeful ghosts, but like a certain Scottish play, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan is unique in having a curse associated with it.
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A lone samurai making his way home late at night meets a defenseless woman. So begins the horror of Kaneto Shindô’s tale of ghosts, vengeance, and the wrongs visited upon women by entitled men.
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I’ve been sitting here trying to think of an adequate way to describe exactly what it is that Sonny Chiba does and wears in this second film in Kinji Fukasaku’s highly enjoyable, highly influential Battles without Honor and Humanity series of films that delve into the world of organized crime and the role it played in rebuilding post-war Japan. The
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They Were 11 is an interesting take on sci-fi anime from the eighties, and definitely a marked departure from the space operas overflowing from the previous decades and the wham-bam sci-fi actioners that defined the eighties. There is really only one action scene in the entire movie, and that’s a pie fight. Yet despite the dearth of robots on roller
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