Takashi Ishii thread (A Night in Nude: Salvation etc.)

[logboy]

Game trilogy is fairly recent isn't it. I've only seen the first and it's pretty bad. If they released that then anything is possible. I agree with HungFist, I wouldn't write them off.

Radiance has shown a lot of promise. I never thought I'd see Tony Arzenta on blu ray, but here we are. There was also the obscure Bounty Hunter trilogy. I heard somewhere the owner of Radiance used to work for Arrow. Maybe that's the horse to back going into the future.

there's probably a trailing-off occurring with work that would have long been in the pipeline. don't forget, it's not just a change in ownership that has occurred, but some of the key contributors are now primarily or only elsewhere. radiance is one place they're turning up, the other seems to be 88 films and that's just beginning to head in new directions they've not covered before; the start of radiance seems to be frustration or clear changes within the company making certain projects either never take hold or harder and harder to suggest - arrow academy went, for example. i think things will look a lot more clearly like arrow has gone in a year or so - but for me, now, it's done and dusted. i've watched their releases since the start, and it's just so clearly not the same as it was a few years ago.

aside from this - there's an increasingly desperate and depressing occurrence in recent years, and that's people who follow labels far too strictly. it does nobody any favours. it's extremely negative. lots of the folk taking on physical media as an interest can't see the woods for the trees, and they just plod on building in directions that are bizarre. it's as though they think these labels made these films, rather than just being the latest licensees for them. it's easy to see people having turned up in forums, just looking at popular or pinned threads, and heading down those rabbit holes. as though they're incapable of working out what it is about the various films within that specifically warrants buying them. arrow survives largely because of this. other labels have grown because of this.

[Lou Bloom]

I also think frustration is motivating factor with Radiance. The issue I've always had with Arrow is the unpredictability, you never know what's there to stay or reissued. There are several out of print LE's that should be in the store right now whether it's LE or otherwise. Rabid Dogs come to mind. At least with Radiance you know they will do a standard issue after the LE is sold out. Sometimes the Arrow artwork is atrocious, especially Long Good Friday and Mona Lisa, but that can be said of most companies.

I definitely agree that 'label loyalty' is weird. Criterion collectors tend to be the most pretentious film buffs I've met.

[Guro Taku]

I'm not a huge fan of Ikeda. I do love Evil Dead Trap which I've seen twice in 35mm (at Film Archive and Laputa Asagaya, a total blast both times), but Mermaid Legend doesn't work too well for me. My last viewing was at Laputa where, very unusually for Japanese audiences, the viewers were laughing at the film.

Ikeda is all over the place as far as I'm concerned. I loved Evil Dead Trap, Sex Hunter and Broken Love Killer (sometimes bootlegged as Evil Dead Trap 3, even though it was made by a different studio and wasn't released as part of the series in Japan), think some of his films are OK (Sukeban Mafia, Red Porno, Man Behind the Scissors, Mermaid Legend, The Key) and he's certainly done his share of absolute trash (Shadow of the Wraith, those DTV XX flicks).

A mixed bag for sure, but his 1988 TV movie 夜に頬よせ 過去を抱いた女, also based on a Takashi Ishii screenplay, still is one of my most wanted unavailable films.