What asian film/series have you just seen.. marks out of 5

[HungFist]

Keep Your Chin Up (上を向いて歩こう) (1962) [TV] – 2.5/5
Mitsuo Hama and Kyu Sakamoto star as two youngsters who escape from reform school and go different ways. One dreams of a career in music while affiliating with gangsters, the other finds new home with an old man taking care of ex delinquents. This is a slightly underperforming Nikkatsu youth film. It’s got style, catchy music, and a great cast (Sayuri Yoshinaga is in it too), yet it comes out strangely unmoving. This should have been better, more engaging, and more dynamic.

Detective Bureau 2-3: A Man Weak to Money and Women (探偵事務所23　銭と女に弱い男) (Japan, 1963) [Streaming] – 3/5
A forgotten sequel to Seijun Suzuki's Detective Bureau 2-3. This was a lower budgeted production that had to settle for black and white film stock and a slightly less adventurous director, yet it's an entirely passable Nikkatsu action with plenty of style and a dynamite cast pitting Joe Shihido against deadly Hong Kong gunman Asao Koike! A solid genre film with lots of cool noir imagery, though a tad long and less energetic than its predecessor.

[HungFist]

Gorgeous Leopardess (華やかな女豹) (Japan, 1969) [Streaming] – 3/5
A slightly pretentious human drama set in the world of arts, following a Japanese woman (Ruriko Asaoka) returning from France to Tokyo where her sister (Chieko Matsubara) resides. The storyline with all its attempts at prestige feels fairly irrelevant; however the film is stylishly directed with some stand out moments of visual poetry and urban melancholy. Somewhat comparable to the many nigh ballad films of the era, but with a more sophisticated, less nocturnal feel. In retrospect, although it was still two years ahead, this feels like a dying breath for Nikkatsu prior to restructuring into the nation's largest soft core production line. The screenplay was, perhaps fittingly, penned by future Roman Porno poet Akira Kato, who would carry similar thematic to his own films.

For This We Fight (街から街へつむじ風) (Japan, 1961) [Streaming] – 3/5
Yujiro Ishihara fights both the yakuza and doctors to save a small hospital in this enjoyable programmer. There's nothing exceptional about it, but it's got a sense of fun, the kind that is missing in modern cinema. Case in point: charmingly handsome Ishihara sings a long duet at a colourful night club while gangsters gather around him, everyone keeping each other on an eye, everyone ready to make the first move… and Ishihara just keeps singing. That is cinema!

[HungFist]

The Dragon Lives Again (Hong Kong, 1977) [BD] – 2.5/5
There's no denying this film has one of the best premises in movie history: Bruce Lee wakes up in hell and has to fight his way out. Standing on his way are Zatoichi, One-Armed Swordsman, Emmanuelle, and many others. But the film is a bit of a disappointment. It has moments of genius (and a pool full of topless women), but it's too intentionally silly. There was no need to remind the viewer every three seconds that it’s a comedy – we know it. With a bit more poker face this could’ve been much funnier, and more outrageous.

Tandem (痴漢電車人妻篇　奥様は痴女) (Japan, 1994) [TV] – 3.5/5
Two troubled men travel through the Tokyo night on motorbike in Toshiki Sato and Masahiro Kobayashi's lyrical pink road movie. Both men are deeply flawed and toxic individuals with violent tendencies towards both women and men, but also pitiable losers. Never does the film approve their actions, but rather see them as humans despite of what they do. Nevertheless, viewers with "modern sensibilities” should probably steer clear of the film. This is another interesting work by the Sato / Kobayashi director & screenwriter duo, with Sato documenting the Heisei era cityscapes like and Kobayashi filling people's mouths with often amusing deadpan dialogue. There’s also a great soundtrack with folk songs sung by screenwriter Kobayashi himself – those are his old recordings from 70s under the pseudonym Hiroshi Hayashi! The film would be even better if not for the rather dull ending and being part of the Molester’s Train franchise (if only nominally: that franchise has produced hundreds of theatrical films, some of which, like this movie, were mainly utilizing the title for additional revenue rather than fully committing to groping in trains). Among Sato and Kobayashi's numerous and nearly always rewarding collaborations this film is one of the best known for having enjoyed international exposure via English subtitled releases.

[HungFist]

Kiss to Moonlight (満月のくちづけ) (Japan, 1989) [TV] – 2/5
Initially interesting, but ultimately disappointing idol horror film with a giallo influence. A group of school girls perform a spell to make a handsome young teacher fall in love with one of them, but the spell goes wrong and soon people start dropping dead. There’s a fairly good pop swing and some decent suspense with a giallo vibe at first, but film’s insistence on family friendly and harmless idol entertainment causes it to fall apart. All death scenes are edited in such a way that the viewer has no idea what happened (typically we hear the sound of a wind, hear a scream, then cut to a wall or a floor that has some blood splatters on it; end of scene). The last 25 min gets further bogged down with “human drama” that sanitizes the little horror that had preceded it. It’s a shame as there was potential for something interesting.

Married Woman of the Bento Shop: Another Dish, How About Me? (SEX配達人 おんな届けます) (Japan, 2003) [TV] – 3.5/5
Another surprisingly good pink film that draws from early 2000s Japanese indie dramas and slice of life films. Mika is a former call girl now working in a lunch box restaurant. Her boyfriend is a young man working as a driver for the delivery health company that used to employ her. The guy still spends his days behind the wheel, driving girls around the city and dropping them off to their clients while growing increasingly interested in one of the girls on the back seat. Mika wants to get married, he fears commitment. Meanwhile one of Mika’s regular restaurant customers – the most socially incompetent and not handsome guy out there – asks Mika to marry him out of the blue. The idea is ridiculous, but one platonic date might not hurt... Good characters, restrained screenplay and some lovely handheld street cinematography make this an enjoyable little film, though the ending is less interesting than what came before it. This was the directorial of Teiichi Hori, a former AD to Toshiki Sato and a younger colleague of Mitsuru Meike and Yuji Tajiri, all of whom are given thanks in the closing credits. The apple clearly didn't fall far from the tree. Sadly Hori passed away in 2017 at the age of 47.

Reviewed here is the R15 version of the film, which was released theatrically under the same title with an R18 rating. There’s no mosaic or edits that I could notice, but one or two shots in sex scenes have been re-framed.

[HungFist]

Jidaigeki Special: Shingo's 10 Duels (新吾十番勝負) (Japan, 1990) [TV] – 2/5
An underwhelming TV movie based on the same novel as the famous late 50s/early 60s theatrical series. Those films were essentially disposable programmers, yet filmed with a staggering amount of style and professionalism that existed in studio cinema back then. This 2½ hour small screen version in contrast was shot on video, without a single inspired frame or cut. It even pales in comparison to TV jidaigeki shows from less than a decade before, when they still used to shoot on film. It's quite a shame really, as this is packed with talent from the old days, from co-screenwriter Norifumi Suzuki to composer Shunsuke Kikuchi and a star studded cast featuring Hiroyuki Sanada, Sonny Chiba, Tomisaburo Wakayama and Yoshiko Sakuma. The big name cast, and the brief bits of action featuring Sanada, Chiba and Wakayama, are the highlights. Sadly no one seems be doing more than the bare minimum of what was expected of them. The classic storyline still works somewhat, though amusingly it seems a little censored in places – and this is compared to the movies made in the 1950s!

Peonies and Dragons (牡丹と竜) (Japan, 1970) [35mm] – 3/5
Masahiro Makino remakes his own Toei film Tales of Japanese Chivalry: Attack from 1967. This Nikkatsu version has quite a different flavour, trading chivalrous Ken Takakura for a more temperamental Hideki Takahashi, who plays a single father yakuza trying to make an honest living with an honourable tekiya gang. They are being harassed by Toru Abe’s scumbag yakuza gang who want their share of the market. This is a refreshing change from the usual stoic, low-key ninkyo hero narratives (the premise and tone somewhat resemble Sonny Chiba’s Game of Chance trilogy at Toei, also a bit of an outlier in the genre). A particular highlight is Akira Kobayashi as a flamboyant comrade. He also sings the film’s theme song, which sounds more like a youthful pop song than the kind of old fashioned enka tune that could be expected, and gives an interesting twist to the film’s ninkyo march scene. That being said, this film still follows the repressed ninkyo hero formula, and is even sparser on action than most films of its kind. Director Makino often seemed more interested in period and human drama than action. This one works quite well regardless, with a bit of a different flavour added to the usual recipe.

[HungFist]

Shura no densho: Araburu kyoken (修羅の伝承　荒ぶる凶犬) (Japan, 2014) [Streaming] – 2/5
DTV Chiba. A yakuza is tricked into killing the wrong man by someone who fed his clan with false information, and now has to leave his son and wife behind to go into hiding. 30 years later his son has become a yakuza who is involved in a similar dispute when he stumbles into a restaurant ran by whom he suspects is his father (Sonny Chiba). This is a rare (co)lead role for Chiba in a modern DTV film; he was usually delegated to guest star roles with limited screen time in these kinds of productions. It's nice to see him in a big role, and there's even a bit of interest to the father and son drama. Fellow old man Jiro Okazaki and video cinema king Hitoshi Ozawa show up in small roles as well. But the movie is what it is: a cheap, digital looking, amateurish video flick full of talk and very little action (Chiba throws a couple of kicks and punches at the end). These movies are men's equivalent of TV's soap operas, rather than modern equivalent of old yakuza films.

3 Dolls Go to Hong Kong (お姐ちゃん罷り通る) (Japan, 1959) [35mm] – 3.5/5
One of the joys of Tokyo’s still vibrant film distribution scene is being able to walk into a 35mm screening of a movie that you know little to nothing about, that has never been released on video, and often it turns out to be the most enjoyable 90 minutes. All I knew of this film was it being a Toho comedy shot on location in Hong Kong, and the 3rd in the 3 Dolls series. The film opens in glorious color widescreen with a gangster and his woman firing a Tommy gun at the police against the silhouette of a big city. This turns out be a scene in a theatre play, with our heroines being a musical actress and her friends. They get an offer to go on a world tour, which starts from Hong Kong. A couple of noteworthy actors come across in the city, including Ryo Ikebe as a Chinese-Japanese businessman, and a load of Shaw Bros actors from Yiu Kwang Chao to Paul Chang Chung and Pat Ting Hung. This is an all around funny, energetic comedy with a nice musical touch and loads great footage filmed on the streets of Hong Kong in 1959. The characters are also allowed to speak in their native tongues, with lots of Chinese dialogue for the Chinese cast. Also, I never cease to be amazed by how good many of the Japanese films from this era look: it’s not just the sunsets and night clubs, but even scenes set in random apartments look more stylish and colourful than anything in modern digital cinema.

[grim_tales]

Being able to see an obscure film like that in 35mm sure is something

[HungFist]

Being able to see an obscure film like that in 35mm sure is something

It sure is, and not just the joy of seeing these films from beautiful film prints, but being able to see them at all. This and so many other films that screen in 35mm in Tokyo have never been released on video, perhaps never aired on TV, and you wouldn't even be able to pirate them since they simply don't exits in any other form than on 35mm prints, and hopefully the original negative in the studio vault. And many of them are very good films that have just been forgotten in the vaults, perhaps because of the vast number of them (each major Japanese studio used to produce about 50 new movies per year, so the leading Toei, Toho, Nikkatsu, Daiei, Shochiku alone would put out about 250 new films every year... and all the other studios would release another couple of hundred...).

[HungFist]

Seishun toruko nikki: Shojo suberi (青春トルコ日記 処女すべり) (Japan, 1975) [35mm] – 3.5/5
Toei found themselves in hot water when their ad campaign for this film (“the youngest eros star ever”) proved a little too successful. The production was halted in 1973 when 80% of the filming was done. Toei waited till star Reika Yamakawa was 18 and released the film in 1975 with the same tagline! The controversy is really a quite shame, as what we have here is a rather exceptional coming of age tale that turns into a bloody Scarface gangster tragedy by its end. The first 25 min is incredible: a breezy musical ballad narrated with pop / folk songs, depicting the main character’s path from small village to Tokyo Turkish Bath, intercut with gritty documentary footage of the Vietnam War, violent student protest, and Yukio Mishima. A string of comedic sex scenes follows, by the end of which she has secured a sugar daddy (Taiji Tonoyama) to lend her money to open her own business. Meanwhile collateral damage keeps accumulating as bankrupted customers commit suicides, leaving their orphaned children craving for revenge. It all leads to a bizarre demolition derby car chase / death match climax, filmed through distorted lenses. By the time the film ends, all you can think is how the hell did this get from that coming of age opening to this mad gangster action ending? It goes from funny to melancholic, socio-political to lowbrow; it’s a documentation of bathhouse practices, and a prelude to Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs, as well as a genuinely heartfelt youth film, and a hippie era time capsule. It’s also an uneven and problematic product of its own time that probably won’t be released on video... ever. Regardless, one of mediocre director Yukio Noda’s most inspired films.

Tokyo Untouchable (東京アンタッチャブル) (Japan, 1962) [Streaming] – 3.5/5
This hard boiled thriller is another proof that Shinji Murayama, a director without much personal touch, could nevertheless deliver good films in various genres. Written by former Tokyo police coroner Kimiyuki Hasegawa (best known for the long running Police Department Story series of police procedurals), this film follows a ruthless killer thief (Tetsuro Tamba) as he escapes from prison and gathers together his old gang, while the detectives (Rentaro Mikuni and Ken Takakura) are trying to trace them down. Murayama delivers a stylish, nihilist thriller that sustains its tension from start to end. Two sequels followed.

[HungFist]

In Tears (泣かせるぜ) (Japan, 1965) [Streaming] – 2.5/5
A fairly watchable maritime actioner with Yujiro Ishihara and Tetsuya Watari. The former plays a captain with a badly behaving, testosterone pumped crew under his command. When their ship sinks, they surprisingly get hired for a new job - but something's fishy about the offer. Nikkatsu sold this as a Yujiro Ishihara vs. Tetsuya Watari co-starring vehicle, but Ishihara is clearly the lead while Watari plays a wimp. Regardless, the resulting film is more or less the kind of manly men sailing boats in a Nikkatsu adventure that you'd expect. Neither bad nor exceptional. I have a feeling if I saw this in 35mm, I'd come out of the theatre feeling this was a three star film.

Flower Cards Gambling Diary: Duel to the Death of the Best Three (花札賭博　猪の鹿三番勝負) (Japan, 1970) [TV] – 3.5/5
Masashige Narusawa was a former prestige screenwriter who spent most of his late career penning melancholic, neon-lit films about young people in seedy nightlife. He also directed a handful of films, including Flower Cards Chivalry (1967), one of the best and most poetic yakuza films ever made. Flower Cards Gambling Diary (aka The Final Gamble) could be seen as a spiritual follow-up , though it also shares DNA with his earlier night ballads. It’s a female gambler tale starring Yumiko Nogawa as a bar mama and former gambler. She has to stake everything when a greedy yakuza (Asao Koike) catches her sheltering a runaway prostitute. The dispute will be settled over a flower cards match. The yakuza's beautiful and protective sister (Junko Miyazono), and a wandering gambler (Tatsuo Umemiya) who shares history with both women, serve as witnesses for the match – the first of many. Unlike Flower Cards Chivalry, this movie was left for Ryuichi Takamori to direct, with Narusawa only delivering the script. The resulting film isn't as quite as accomplished, but it's still a near excellent film with stylish neon visuals, some of the best gambling scenes found in any yakuza film, and a shade of Narusawa's trademark melancholy. The final duel is particularly well crafted, with an exceptionally strong and clever ninkyo twist. The two films would make a fantastic double feature for a company like Radiance to release.

[HungFist]

Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death (Taiwan, 1975) [BD] – 2.5/5
An intermittently entertaining Brucesploitation film. This starts quite exceptionally as a documentary, then morphs into a fictional film after the first 15 minutes. Here is the film Bruce Lee intended to make, now screened to us, we are to believe. It's not a bad movie – despite of what the average sane person would tell you –, featuring one hell of a theme song, some good bits of fighting, and a pretty decent tower of death that amusingly enough is even called The Tower of Death! Sadly every punchy bit is followed by a fairly lame segment, the film lacks the more outrageous exploitation elements and nudity, and the storyline doesn't make one bit of sense.

Assault! (暴行!) (Japan, 1976) [35mm] – 4/5
Yukihiro Sawada was one of Nikkatsu's action rebels who refused to let go of the studio’s past. For years he kept making films influenced by the studio’s old gangster and youth films even after the Roman Porno switch. This one is a melancholic home invasion Roman Porno modelled after Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. Nobutaka Masutomi stars as a lonely, dumped husband running a lakeside restaurant. One night his wife comes back... with a bunch of desperate gangsters on her heels. Their leader seems to be the wife’s new lover, and there’s another man who’s bleeding his guts out. This film’s opening is pure cinematic poetry. Although it loses some of its steam as it goes on, it builds for an amazing bloodshed climax worthy of Peckinpah's admiration. The music must be mentioned as well. The ballet of violence at the end is masterfully composed to Hako Yamazaki's Tsunawatari and Yusaki Matsuda's Aru kodomo no hanashi. Although this not quite as extreme as some of Sawada’s fellow action rebel Yasuharu Hasebe’s films, it still packs a mean punch, and had the audience twitching during the bullet removal scene.

[HungFist]

Lusty Afternoon (肉欲の昼下り) (Japan, 1977) [TV] – 1/5
Akira Kato began his career during the final years of Nikkatsu's mainstream run. This film evokes the spirit of the nocturnal ballads – the melodramas following young people in the night life, with screenplays often based on pop songs – that the studio put out in the late 60s and early 70s. Kato himself scripted at least one of them (Gorgeous Leopardess, 1969), and echoed their themes in some of his own Roman Porno efforts in the early 70s. This 1977 film is sadly a far cry; a superficial sex film that doesn't give the audience a reason to care. A couple of neon-lit sequences set to catchy pop ballads are all that remains of the past glory days. It's the epitome of a film made by someone who no longer cared.

Sex and Life (謝国権「愛」より (秘)性と生活) (Japan, 1969) [TV] – 3/5
A charmingly dated Toei film starring Kentaro Ishiyama and Teruo Yoshida as a father & son doctor team consulting people in the field of sex. Their patients range from neglected housewives to a couple who can only have sex in their car, thanks to an intrusive mother at home. One desperate young man is afraid to death of female contact. The good doctor tries to cure his impotence by hanging (a very dissatisfied) nurse's used pants on his face. How's that for medical treatment?! And this was based on a famed sexology Sha Kokuken's best selling non-fiction book! The book had already been filmed by Daiei in 1960, no doubt in a tamer and nudity-free version. Sex and Life on the other hand reached theatres in the late 60s, when lavish eros productions by Toei were popping up like mushrooms after rain. Teruo Ishii’s Orgies of Edo had premiered in Toei theatres five weeks earlier, and Abnormal and Abusive Love came out two weeks after this. Teruo Yoshida was featured in nearly all of them (usually in a doctor / researcher / narrator role), and much of the other cast also remained the same. Like many of those films, this one comes off innocent and unintentionally amusing to modern viewers. While there’s no shortage of nudity, it still retains the kind of naivety and breezy 60s swing that would soon be lost in the sleazier 70s productions.

[grim_tales]

Akira (Japan, 1988) - first time view: 4.25/5

In 2019, Tokyo has become a violent city troubled by biker gangs. One member develops psychic psychopathic powers
At times I found this rather weird, especially some of the imagery - the giant creepy children's toys, the children who have grown super-old... then there's the philosophical stuff about the Universe, very odd. Worth watching

[HungFist]

Vixen (女体) (Japan, 1969) [DVD] – 2/5
Yasuzo Masumura made countless great psychological films in the 60s, but he also had misfires like this. Vixen is based on the premise of a modern young woman (Ruriko Asaoka) slave to her own desires and impulses driving everyone around her to their ruin, but no one being able to resist her charm. The audience gets to spend 90 minutes watching how one dumb character after another boards a sinking ship. Perhaps intended as social commentary of its era, the film's character psychology nevertheless falls flat, and probably won't sit well with modern audiences, its main character being an out of control torpedo making money with rape allegations. Masumura's films have always been psychologically brutal, but they were usually more grounded than this.

Fear of Sex ((秘)セックス恐怖症) (Japan, 1970) [TV] – 2.5/5
A vice squad detective (Kentaro Kudo) falls in love with a woman (Yukie Kagawa), who is frightened to death of sex – despite spending all her nights in psychedelic nude parties. Every time they're about to get intimate, she freaks out due to something in her past. "She locked her trauma in a safe, and threw the key away" a doctor informs the confused detective, who is determined to solve the mystery. This is a loose thematic follow-up to director Ryuichi Takamori's 1969 film Sex and Life. The amount of time that passed between the two movies (1.5 years, enough to produce four sequels) suggests there was no immediate demand for a 2nd film. Fear of Sex was more likely produced as a programmer to fill an empty slot in a release calendar. The two films share some of the cast and themes, but are structurally different (single storyline vs. multiple episodes, detective tale vs. doctor's office premise etc.) and produced in different eras (again, a lot had changed in that 1.5 years). This doesn't have the 60s charm of its predecessor, though it does come with several moments of absurdity and amusing political incorrectness. Among some of the attempted cures for sex phobia are watching a rape movie and trying out lesbianism. Not for modern sensibilities! For 70 Toei aficionados however, it's a passable if rather forgettable 90 minutes.

[HungFist]

Case of Umon: One-Eyed Wolf (右門捕物帖 片眼の狼) (Japan, 1959) [TV] – 2.5/5
A modestly entertaining jidaigeki detective tale with Ryutaro Otomo as the famous inspector Umon. The film follows him trying to catch conspirators who are plotting to assassinate the shogun. This is an old school Toei programmer picture inside out, designed to entertain and do little else. There's action, silly comedy, and an array of colourful characters, including Eitaro Shindo as a comical rival detective. The hero himself originates from a 1928 novel, which had already produced a 16 film series starring Kanjuro Arashi from 1929 to 1955 at Shintoho and Toho. Toei produced another seven Umon films, of which this was the first, before the character found new a home on television.

Pink Hip Girl (桃尻娘 ピンク・ヒップ・ガール) (Japan, 1978) [35mm] – 4.5/5
This is one of the most charming and transformative movies in the Roman Porno series. Kahori Takeda and Ako star as two best friends struggling with school, boyfriends, and discovering their identities. When one of them runs from home, the other sets out on a journey to find her. Director Koyu Ohara realized the movie as a breezy coming of age tale. He packed the film with youthful energy, catchy pop music, and utilized a road movie narrative. The resulting film earned him a lifelong reputation as Nikkatsu’s leading pop art director. The movie came out when the studio was in mainly the news for their S&M sleaze and violent pink. Reportedly Ohara was initially scolded when the execs saw the movie, however, its box office success ended up transforming the entire production line. Awoken to new possibilities, Nikkatsu would spend the next few years aggressively pushing part of the Roman Porno line toward mainstream, producing youth films, neo noir, literary adaptations, and even rock band docu-dramas, resulting in what I would consider the production line's most interesting years (contrary to the tired old cliché of the early years being the best).

[HungFist]

Underworld series - Pardon My Violent Ways (暗黒街シリーズ 荒っぽいのは御免だぜ) (Japan, 1967) [35mm] – 3/5
A slightly mediocre, but entirely watchable neo noir that was one of director Masaharu Segawa’s few action films. Koji Tsuruta stars as a double crossed assassin who befriends a little boy who witnessed one of his hits. The film is a little too long and doesn’t always make sense, but there’s plenty of style on display, from Tsuruta’s Porsche to the autumn Kyoto setting that serves the film well. Minoru Oki guest stars as a villainous master shooter who can’t hit shit. Not bad for director Segawa’s first action film, but he’d do much better a year later with the forgotten neo noir gem Secret Information (1968).

Eighteen Years in Prison: Parole (懲役十八年　仮出獄) (Japan, 1967) [TV] – 3.5/5
A follow-up to Tai Kato’s Eighteen Years in Prison, although in name only, as Noboru Ando plays a different character here. Ando is a criminal released on parole, instantly hooking up with his two buddies (Juzo Itami and Tomisaburo Wakayama) to plan on a gold heist from gangsters. This is partly a jazzy heist film, mostly a neo-noir, with a surprisingly captivating narrative. The noirish cinematography is low-key impressive, there’s nail biting tension to the key scenes, and the film packs an unexpected emotional punch. Ando acquits himself well in the lead; Wakayama and Itami provide 1st rate support. A surprisingly good film, and easily one of director Yasuo Furuhata’s better efforts.

[HungFist]

Ah! That Pep Squad (嗚呼！！花の応援団) (Japan, 1976) [35mm] – 2/5
The first film in a trilogy of manga based school / yanki / sports comedies that allowed director Chusei Sone a small break from Roman Porno. Contrary to the goofy poster, however, the film is fairly mundane and short on laughs. It follows poor 1st year students in an all-boys baseball cheering squad, where army-like discipline, violent bullying and gang wars are all everyday reality. It's quite a repetitive and heavy film for a comedy, despite some fun gags. Some of the music is good, though, and there's a superb dramatic scene near the end that comes as a surprise. Roman Porno fans will recognise familiar faces from Hiroko Isayama (female cop having sex in the bushes) to Junko Miyashita in supporting roles. Frankly, I'm a little surprised this turned into a trilogy. There must have been a demand for these types of manga-based delinquent boy films since Toei were also doing many of them in the mid 70s.

Secret Information (密告) (Japan, 1968) [35mm] – 4/5
This criminally neglected neo noir remains one of gangster turned actor Noboru Ando’s best movies. Ando plays a bitter gangster just out of prison, quietly searching for the traitor who sent him behind bars eight years earlier. Director Masaharu Segawa only made three gangster/action pictures in his career, all of them highly stylized, and this one coming out as the best. There’s an evident Jean Pierre Melville vibe to the film, which is almost experimental in its editing, sound design and minimalism. Another reference point is John Boorman’s Point Black, which is quite directly referenced in the film. That being said, this is still a Toei gangster picture with the expected gunplay, car chases, and a shade of romance. There are some less inspired bits that fall into the potboiler territory and prevent this from being a masterwork. Ando himself fares quite well in a role that doesn’t require big acting, but rather draws from his natural, silent charisma and scarred face.

[HungFist]

Turkish March: Castle of Dreams (トルコ行進曲 夢の城) (Japan, 1984) [35mm] – 2.5/5
Stranger things have probably happened than mainstream director Masaharu Segawa helming a Roman Porno, but seeing a man best known for his dramas and comedies with Frankie Sakai and Kiyoshi Atsumi directing a Nikkatsu sex flick at the end of his career is still quite a curiosity. It’s essentially a slice of life drama that feels much like a product of its time – and could have been made at Toei or some other studio if not for the fairly graphic sex scenes (which appeared without any censorship in the 35mm print – a little surprising considering their intensity). The film follows an emotionally immature little sister (Chie Yamaguchi), who traces her older sister (Etsuko Nami) down to a Turkish bath establishment in Ogoto, Shiga Prefecture, where she’s working her last day before marriage. The basis for the film was a sex industry reportage book about Turkish baths in Otogo, though mainstream actress Etsuko Nami in her only Roman Porno film was probably the main audience attraction. It's not the most exciting film out there, but it's also far from the decade’s dullest and greyest output. Decent enough characters, a slight documentary touch utilizing the book's structure, partially authentic locations, and pretty neon lit visuals help make this fairly watchable.

Yoko of the Port: Yokohama to Yokosuka (港のヨーコ・ヨコハマ・ヨコスカ) (Japan, 1975) [35mm] – 3.5/5
A criminally under seen youth film / murder mystery / disco dance flick, based on one of the coolest rock songs of the 70s. This plays out a bit like a Japanese Saturday Night Fever with a murder suspect plot. The film follows a teenage girl (16 year old Ai Saotome, who shot the film during her summer vacation from school) working part time jobs in Yokohama in hopes to tracing down her runaway sister. After being fired from multiple jobs for poor attitude, she lands a more interesting job at a club hosting a dance till you drop go-go dance competition, which she takes part in. Meanwhile not one but two friendly men (Hayato Tani and Takeo Chii), both with hidden agendas, help her in trying to find the missing sister. She also befriends a Stray Cat Rock style youth / biker group, from which she gets kicked out after driving one of their bikes into the sea! Though a bit sloppy in parts, this film is strangely fascinating and features a terrific use of the Down Town Boogie Woogie Band title song, especially in the insane opening segment. The band members, including Ryudo Uzaki, are also featured in the film (they also cameo’ed in Truck Yaro in the same year), as are loads of rising female talent from Mieko Harada to Keiko Matsuzaka, Yumi Takigawa and even future Nikkatsu star Erina Miyai.