The 36 Deadly Styles (迷拳三十六招, Joseph Kuo, 1979)

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First you and your uncle are forced to flee for your life after getting attacked in a forest, then your uncle dies, you wake up in a monastery where you’re not a monk but the head monk keeps making you do all the chores anyway, and you still have no real idea of what is going on. That’s what happens to poor Wah-jee (Nick Cheung Lik) in Joseph Kuo’s wilfully confusing kung fu drama The 36 Deadly Styles (迷拳三十六招) which leaves us as much in the dark as the hero as he finds himself inexplicably pursued by a man with a red nose and his brothers who are each for some unexplained reason wearing ridiculous wigs. 

As much as we can gather, Wah-jee is on the run because the brother of a man his late father apparently killed by accident after messing up a kung fu move seeks vengeance against his entire family, leaving his uncles scattered and apparently unknown to him. As a young man, however, he is less than impressed with life in the monastery and often displays a comically cocky attitude, though if his torment of two of the lesser monks is intended to be comedic, it often comes off as cruel and bullying rather than just silly banter. Meanwhile, he remains clueless as to how to complete basic tasks familiar to the monks and even manages to get himself into a fight when sent to buy soy milk after forgetting he’d need to pay for it..

While all of this is going on, Kuo switches back and forth between a secondary plot strand concerning another man searching for the book of the 36 Deadly Styles before tracking down the man who’s supposed to have it only to be told he burnt the book ages ago without even reading it because it caused too much trouble in the martial arts world. It’s unclear how or if these two plot strands are intended to be connected, but they do perhaps hint at the confusing nature of personal vendettas and ironically destructive quests for full mastery over a particular style. Tsui-jee’s father (Fan Mei-Sheng) effectively splits his knowledge between Wah-jee and his daughter as a complementary pair of offence/defence partners. 

Meanwhile, Huang (Yeung Chak-Lam) and Tsui-jee’s father are also afflicted by pangs to the heart as a result of their previous battles, which can only be eased with strange medicine and herbal wine. Huang is a Buddhist monk but is seen early on skinning a live snake in order to make such a concoction. These are presumably symbolic of a bodily corruption caused by violence and the slow poisoning of the unresolved past. Wah-jee, a child at the time of his father’s transgression, is also forced to inherit this chaos of which he has little understanding and no real stake save vengeance for his familial disruption and a vindication for his father and brothers. If there is any kind of moral it seems to be in the ridiculous futility of vengeance as dictated by the codes of the martial arts world which demands that honour be satisfied even when it has lost all objective meaning. 

In any case, the narrative is largely unimportant merely connecting (or not) the various action scenes each well choreographed and expertly performed. Wah-jee undergoes a series of training sequences both at the monastery and after uniting with his second uncle who has some idiosyncratic teaching practices of his own that require Wah-jee to humble himself in order to learn. Then again, there are enough strange details to leave us wondering what is exactly is really going on such as Tsu-men suddenly turning up dressed as a woman looking for someone other than Wah-jee, eventually used for another bit of awkward comic relief as he struggles to write a letter and has to use drawings to make his point because he can’t remember the right characters. None of this makes any sense, but perhaps it never does when you live for the fight alone. 

Murderer Report (살인자 리포트, Cho Young-jun, 2025)

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“Call it a psychodrama,” the psychiatrist/serial killer at the centre of Cho Young-jun’s psychological thriller Murderer Report (살인자 리포트, Salinja Report) suggests in a meta moment, and the film is, in some ways, a battle of wits between down on her luck journalist Sun-ju (Cho Yeo-Jeong) and a man who claims to have killed 11 people. There is, of course, more going on than it first seems, but also a push and pull between interviewer and interviewee in which the tables are always turning.

One might debate the wisdom of entering a hotel room with a man who says he’s a serial killer (Jung Sung-Il), but Sun-ju insists she’s agreeing to meet him not because she could really use an exclusive, but because he told her she could save his next victim by agreeing to interview him properly. She has no way of knowing whether he’s telling the truth, but leans towards assuming he’s a crank seeing as the victims he named didn’t have any obvious connections and were all killed in different ways, but still it’s a risky business. Despite assuring him that she hadn’t told anyone about their meeting, Sun-ju is being watched over by her policeman boyfriend Sang-woo (Kim Tae-Han) who is in the room below waiting to strike.

As for why the psychiatrist might want to be interviewed, he describes it as if it’s a kind of therapy session in which he can interrogate himself to ensure his practice is still justified. He believes it is because he only kills bad people that have harmed his patients and sees it as just another part of his treatment plan in alleviating his patients’ suffering as if he were excising a painful tumour from their lives. To that extent, it’s as if he’s providing extrajudicial justice in the face of a justice system in which he believes many have lost faith when criminals get off with light sentences while victims and their families will suffer forever. According to the psychiatrist, revenge is the best way to alleviate their pain. 

Or perhaps, as Sun-ju says, he just likes killing people and is trying to rationalise his actions. After all, even if he doesn’t, the patients probably feel guilty, though the psychiatrist claims to treat that too as part of his holistic service. Little by little he chips away at Sun-ju’s civility, pushing her towards an admission of her hypocrisy that if it were her in this situation and someone caused harm to her child, then she’d probably want them dead too. The psychiatrist obviously knows more about her than she does about him, including her career setbacks and difficult relationship with her teenage daughter whom she fears might rather live with her father instead.

That Sun-ju’s workplace troubles are concerned with a failed attempt to expose the wrongdoings of a major corporation who leaked toxic substances into the water supply leading to an increase in childhood cancers, further deepens the sense of rottenness in contemporary society. The corporation managed to cover it up by bribing prosecutors and politicians, implying that only a man like the psychiatrist is capable of providing true justice despite his claims that he isn’t trying to cure the slickness in his society only alleviate the pain of his patients. The doctor challenges Sun-ju’s ethics too, insisting that she as a duty to social justice and the safety of citizens, so rather than being here interviewing him she should have alerted law enforcement. Of course, Sun-ju has actually done that in having Sung-woo watch her, breaking her promise to keep it confidential, but perhaps trying to have her cake and eat it too. 

Still, the jury’s out on who is really interviewing who as the doctor and Sun-ju each attempt to dominate the narrative. This is indeed a psychodrama, or an extreme form of therapy in which the doctor is trying to force Sun-ju into a self-examination in order to alert her to things going on in her life that she is ironically unaware of. She, meanwhile, begins to get under his skin to the extent that he is mildly shaken from his mission, until hearing that there is another patient waiting to see him so his services may once again be needed. Tense, if eventually outlandish, the film reaches a rather troubling conclusion but is truly at its best in the verbal sparring between the doctor and Sun-ju each of whom has hidden agendas and a singular goal in mind.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Blazing Fists (BLUE FIGHT 蒼き若者たちのブレイキングダウン, Takashi Miike, 2025)

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Ryoma (Kaname Yoshizawa) and Ikuto (Danhi Kinoshita) are boys without brakes trying to get some kind of a handle on lives on that are racing away from them. Caught between compromised father figures, an oppressive social structure, and the overriding despair of a life without prospects, they feel themselves to be beaten down and defeated. But then Ikuto isn’t the sort of guy to be cowed by authority and is willing to speak truth to power even if it might not be advantageous for him to do so.

Indeed, Ikuto becomes a kind of saviour as a figure of idealised masculinity that embodies the paternal presence the other boys are lacking for one reason or another. Ryoma’s father isn’t really mentioned, though he appears to have a strained relationship with his mother’s boyfriend and freely admits that until he met Ikuto in juvenile detention he was floundering. Picked up for a series of petty crimes, he blames another boy, Kosuke, for his predicament having been forced to steal to pay an exorbitant sum to bullies he was unable to defend himself from. Ironically enough, Ikuto has actually been framed and for a crime that Ryoma himself committed and perhaps it’s their sense of defiance against injustice that allows him to stand strong in the face of a corrupt authority represented by the prison guard Hakamada (Wataru Ichinose). 

Though the warden at Ryoma’s admission had told him that he should think of his time there not as a punishment but an opportunity while the reformatory was a space of rehabilitation, but Hakamada openly tells the boys that they are inherently bad and their lives will amount to nothing. In the prison yard, they tend to the pigs which is what Hakamada deems them to be. He abuses his authority because he is weak and cannot bear it that Ikuto might be right when he says that the reason he’s working here as a guard is because he too has failed at life. When Hakamada tries to take revenge by jeopardising Ikuto’s parole, it’s his mother, Haruka, who stands up to him by wielding her old righteousness to insist that he too abide by the rules he is supposed to represent thereby presenting another more positive vision of resistance that goes beyond the purely physical and allows a petite middle-aged woman to challenge a physically opposing man in a position of authority.

Part of the reason that Hakamada had said that Ikuto was doomed was because his father was prison and Ikuto too had rejected him for that reason. He resented his father because of the way the stigma of crime was visited on him, that he became an undesirable child tainted by his father’s transgression. At this time, he presumably had a solid faith in the justice system and believed his father to be guilty but given his own experience of false imprisonment has now come round to the idea that his father could be telling the truth and is innocent after all. Their struggles become directly linked when Ikuto is scheduled to square off against the prosecutor’s son, but in a more spiritual sense they are both battling against an oppressive society.

This Ikuto slowly comes to see on realising that he and primary antagonist Jun are basically the same as Jun is also battling the spectre of his father, a yakuza. Rejected by those around him because of the stigma of being a yakuza’s son, Jun (whose name means “pure”), has turned inward in bitterness and become a violent thug attempting to order his life through physical dominance. Accepting that he too was careering towards a cliff edge, Ikuto reflects that Jun is still hanging on if barely by the skin of his teeth which is to say he can wants to be saved in the way that Ikuto has been. But it wasn’t the reform system or the prison guards that helped him see a way forward but an inspirational lecture from real life MMA star Mikuru Asakura on whose life the film is loosely based. Asakura tells the boys that they have a right to dream and that their goals are achievable if only they can put their minds to them. That they hear this from a big brother figure rather than an older man in a paternal position makes it clear that these boy must save themselves through mutual solidarity in place of the positive paternal presence that is missing in most of their lives.

The film is filled with figures of those who have turned their lives around from Asakura himself to the former yakuza who runs the dry bar where the kids hang out. The coach at their gym also provides a supportive presence that makes the ring a safe place. But the ring is of course life and the point is to keep fighting. Winning and losing aren’t important, all that matters is getting back up when someone knocks you down and staying in the fight. The young men are not adversaries but comrades supporting each other as they battle a world with few rewards and endless temptations. In Ikuto, Ryoma finds the strength to stop blaming others for his failures while trusting more in himself and learning to value this new community that he’s discovering. Harking back to the Crows Zero series and a wider tradition of high school delinquent movies, Takashi Miike makes a series of loving jabs at the genre but at the same time transforms it into something a little less angsty as these blazing fists are turned not on each other but against the world that refuses to give these young men a chance as they band together to demand the right to their dreams.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hong Kong Paradise (香港パラダイス, Shusuke Kaneko, 1990)

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A tour guide on her maiden voyage finds herself swept into intrigue in Shusuke Kaneko’s madcap caper, Hong Kong Paradise (香港パラダイス). Effectively a Japanese take on mo lei tau nonsense comedy, it’s also a commentary on Japan at the tail end of the Bubble era as the heroine dreams of an exciting world of travel only to find herself shepherding a collection of mostly elderly retirees whose most pressing concern is finding the duty free shop.

Mamiko (Yuki Saito) wanted to go Paris, but according to her boss she’s not really the type, so he’s sending her to Hong Kong instead. Everyone keeps remarking on the fact that she looks just like a fugitive princess, Yoko Kitashirakawa, who eloped with the man she loved to escape from an arranged marriage with a member of the imperial family. Mamiko has also, apparently, recently broken up with a boyfriend which might explain her desire for travel, as the film flirts with the idea she might really be Yoko enjoying a kind of Roman Holiday and not wanting to return to her constrained life as an aristocrat. But on the plane over, she ends up running into Ando (Tsuyoshi Ihara), a man who’s on the run after committing a heist in which he stole a pair of golden chess pieces as part of an insurance scam.

The golden king and the queen who end up getting separated are a representation of frustrated romance as various parties try to get them back together for different reasons. Mamiko evidently took a liking to Ando, but sadly he is soon killed, leaving her to be rescued by Oishi (Kaoru Kobayashi), a man of dubious motivations. Having lost her memory after being press-ganged into being the subject at a hypnotism show, Mamiko must once and for all re-establish her identity by finding her way through the conspiracy while slowly falling for Oishi despite his irritating qualities. In order to find the treasure, Oishi lies to her, telling Mamiko that she’s Yoko while she’s also chased by a man claiming to be a police officer and Hong’s goons who are convinced that she knows where the chess pieces are.

For the criminals, and perhaps for us too, the missing king and queen are a kind of MacGuffin, but they link back to another tragic love story. Believing that Mamiko is Yoko, Mrs Yang (Keiko Awaji) sympathises with her predicament acknowledging that love across the class divide is never easy. The love of her life was an English prince called Charles, incongruously played by an American in the opening and closing voice over, whom she met thanks to her father’s work as a diplomat. Times being what they were (and perhaps are), she knew they could never marry. Oishi tries to trick Mamiko by playing on her sympathy, claiming that the chess pieces were a gift for Mrs Yang from the man she loved in an effort to get Mamiko to help him find them without realising that he has actually stumbled on the truth.

Hong Kong then becomes a place of romance not unlike the Paris of Mamiko’s imagination in being the paradise of a tragic love story even if in reality the chess pieces were “stolen” as part of an insurance fraud scam which is about as unromantic as it’s possible to get. Nevertheless, princess Yoko apparently got a happy ending, marrying an ordinary person even if there are many people who think she’s crazy for turning down the opportunity to become a member of the imperial household. Mamiko’s occupation as tour guide, or tour conductor as she keeps reminding the participants, is largely unromantic too, mostly consisting of shuttling disinterested guests from one tourist spot to another which is to say it’s not so much broadening her horizons as narrowing them.

But in any case through her zany adventure she does perhaps get to experience the romance of life in being pulled into unlikely intrigue and fighting to reunite the separated king and queen on a symbolic and spiritual level beyond the simply physical. “It doesn’t matter who I am,” she eventually reflects on embracing her liberated anonymity and enjoying the thrill of the chase, while paradoxically rediscovering her identity in the process. Critics at the time objected to the nonsensical plot and frequent tonal shifts, but they are, of course, a key element of mo lei tau and what gives the film its zany, madcap charm as the heroine careers from one ridiculous situation to another all while falling in love.

List (리스트, Hong Sang-soo, 2011)

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Hong Sang-soo finds himself in a positive, if characteristically melancholy, mood for his hard to see 2011 short, List (리스트). Short as a companion piece to In Another Country, the film opens with the exact same scene as a mother and daughter bicker about the sorry circumstances which have forced them to retreat to the seaside where they’ll be living in peaceful seclusion. This time however, young(ish) Mihye (Jung Yu-mi) sits down to write not a screenplay but a list, a kind of itinerary in order to make the most of this deliberately boring “vacation” taken all alone with her nice but “concerned” mother (Youn Yuh-jung).

Mihye’s List runs right through the day and includes normal holiday activities like having a meal in a famous restaurant, checking out the mudflats, and buying souvenirs, as well as reminders to giver her mum a massage and let her know she’s loved, and a few idiosyncratic suggestions too. Perhaps what she’s really the most excited about is trying out her new tooth brushing technique! At night she plans to dream of “prince charming” which is also something her mother later brings up in pushing a little on why the near 30-year-old Mihye has no boyfriend and is not yet married. Mihye’s mother worries that she has no desires before dialling back and suggesting that Mihye has desires but not the courage to act on them. 

This will, perhaps, prove to be true when Mihye and her mother meet a nice man just sitting on the beach as if waiting for them. Unsurprisingly, the man turns out to be a film director but he’s a far cry from Hong’s general leads. Sanjun (Yu Jun-sang) is a nice, wounded young man who might be slightly awkward but in an affable way. Though Mihye’s mother is taken with him, Mihye isn’t so sure. He seems kind of like a prince charming, but then again he’s just a random man they met on a beach who turns out to be famous and successful. Claiming that her daughter is “shy”, Mihye’s mother agrees to Sanjun’s invitation to a date on Mihye’s behalf (which was bizarrely directed to her anyway) and then offers to come along despite Mihye’s double protests. 

Tellingly, Hong departs from his usual aesthetic with key scenes shot on obvious sets and a strange absence of energy even in those taking place on location. Mihye muses and her fantasies appear to come to life. She completes her list for the day almost by accident while in the company of the prince charming she requested. Still, she isn’t sure. She asks him why he likes her but his answers are vague and perhaps worrying. He likes her “purity” and thinks she’s cute. She’s “special” in a way no one can see. All things Mihye’s wants to hear but doesn’t quite believe. Later she tells Sanjun she’s frightened of what her life will become, that she’s trapped by her mother and feels, in some way, damaged by her though she fails to elaborate further. In true fairytale style the romance escalates improbably, culminating in lifelong declarations of love and a promise of mutual salvation. 

Mihye wonders why people can’t see the good right in front of them. Sanjun replies it’s because they’re too focused on indulging themselves in the now. Yet what Mihye learns is perhaps that occasional fantasies are OK, that vague lists are useful because they leave you open to possibilities while lessening the fear of disappointment, and that even if your mother thinks your plans are “too ambitious”, it doesn’t really matter, you can just see where they go. Mihye might not have cured any of those anxieties. Perhaps she still feels trapped, resentful, even hopeless, but the sun rises anew and there’s another day to explore. It’s as cheerful an ending as Hong can muster, hope mixed with melancholy resignation and a stoic determination to put a brave face on existential despair.

Phantom of the Toilet (トイレの花子さん, Joji Matsuoka, 1995)

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A transfer student quickly becomes the magnet for the anxieties of her classmates amid an ongoing spate of serial murders of primary school children in Joji Matsuoka’s kids adventure movie Phantom in the Toilet (トイレの花子さん, Toiret no Hanako-san). Loosely inspired by the classic urban legend about the ghost of a little girl who haunts school toilets, the film is less a horror movie than a tale of bullying, mass hysteria, and the ways in which childish emotions can spiral out of control.

Natsumi’s (Ai Maeda) no stranger to that herself. A tomboy, she’s largely excluded from the group of popular girls at her school and exists in a rather liminal space. Her older brother Takuya (Takayuki Inoue) is in the year above, but predictably doesn’t like being bothered by his little sister at school and is for some reason embarrassed by the fact his widowed father is a milkman. Nevertheless, he’s incredibly earnest and righteous and volunteers for various things at the school like the student council. Natsumi’s problems begin when the popular girls insist on doing a Ouija board to find out the identity of a serial killer who’s already killed two children their age from different schools. Natsumi doesn’t realise that it’s a trick the other girls are playing on her, but the Ouija board says the killer is Hanako, the toilet ghost, and Natsumi is the next victim.

Meanwhile, a new girl joins their school in Takuya’s class and is immediately resented by the popular girls because she’s pretty and clever, so obviously they turn against her. Chief among the complaints against Saeko (Yuka Kono) is that she used the cubicle at the end of the girls’ toilets which supposedly belongs to Hanako, because obviously she doesn’t yet know this bit of school lore. After a series of odd things happen, including the murder of the school’s pet goat, everyone comes to the conclusion that Saeko must be possessed by Hanako and is planning to murder them all. Even Natsumi has her doubts, but eventually decides to defend Saeko while Takuya, who seems to have a crush on her, eventually gives in to peer pressure despite his promises to protect her and vision of himself as someone who does the right thing.

To that extent, it isn’t really Hanako that haunts the children so much as the idea of her is misused as a means of social control. A silly rumour soon gives way to mass hysteria as the popular girls bring more of the children over to their side to gang up on Saeko while the teachers are largely absent or oblivious. While in another film the kids might band together to look for the killer of the other children and thereby protect themselves and each other, instead they become ever more paranoid and the outsider figure of Saeko becomes the focus of all their negative emotions from the jealousy of the other girls to the uncertainness of Takuya who doesn’t know what to do with his confusing feelings for Saeko. In a touching moment, he replies via writing on the blackboard rather than speaking when Saeko uses it to communicate with him after losing her voice, but later ends up shouting at her to go away and leave him alone. “Silence means you agree,” one his classmates points out when Takuya attempts to abstain from an otherwise unanimous vote to subject Saeko to a kind of test akin to a ducking stool to prove whether or not she really is Hanako. Only Natsumi remains on her side.

Meanwhile, the real child killer hovers in the background like an abstract threat before finally invading the school like a refugee from a slasher movie. Swinging his scythe around, his crazed moaning may prove too prove frightening for younger audiences while not even Natsumi’s father and their teacher can stop him from murderous wandering. In the end, the “real” Hanako surfaces but as a more benevolent figure who calls the kids back to the school and creates a more positive sense of mob mentality as they all shine their torches on the killer as if confronting him with what he is and what he’s done. The curse itself is lifted as the other kids rally round to save Saeko and finally accept her as one of them. A charming exploration of a 90s childhood from Grandpa playing Nintendo shogi to the looming anxieties of stranger danger, the ultimate message is one of solidarity and friendship as Hanako helps the kids let go of their petty disagreements to confront the real monster and save each other.

Trailer (no subtitles)

XX: Beautiful Hunter (XX ダブルエックス 美しき狩人, Masaru Konuma, 1994)

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An assassin raised inside a weird Catholic hitman cult begins to reassess her life after falling for a reporter trying to expose the cult’s wrongdoings in Masaru Konuma’s adaptation of the novel by Mangetsu Hanamura, XX Beautiful Hunter (XX ダブルエックス 美しき狩人, XX: Utsukushiki Karyudo). In the classic V-Cinema mode, the film is a guns and girls crime thriller, though in other ways perhaps unusual in exploring the heroine’s gradual liberation in the wake of her sexual awakening. 

Shion (Makiko Kuno) comes of age twice, in the sense that in the opening sequence in which she undergoes a kind of baptism to become a “warrior of God,” she appears to get her period shortly after shooting her first target. Raised by the priest whom she calls “Father”, Shion is an emotionless killing machine with seemingly no thoughts at all beyond completing her mission. She does not even really seem to subscribe to the religion and is killing because Father told her to rather than for the glory of God while most of her targets are political figures that have become inconvenient. We can see both how little women are valued in this world and what a bad guy Ishizaki is when he uses his wife as a human shield before being dispassionately assassinated by Shion who does not particularly care about the collateral damage as long her primary target is killed. When the reporter she falls in love with, Ito (Johnny Okura), asks her what she’d do if he tried to run in a crowded public place, she says that she’d shoot him and that a lot of people would die, as if didn’t matter to her on either moral or practical grounds. Strangely, no one seems to react very much to the sound of a gun being fired even when Shion uses hers to bust open a coin locker, so perhaps she simply doesn’t worry about the laws of man.

But she is rattled by Ito’s photo of her executing his friend Sakuma because it reflects something of herself she didn’t want to see and has perhaps been repressing. Ito suggests that maybe she just likes killing people, which seems to bother Shion on some level, but an attempt to masturbate with her gun does indeed suggest a link between killing and sexual pleasure. It is though sexual contact with Ito that seems to awaken her when he rather strangely begins giving her oral sex after tearing at her clothes pleading for his life. As though imprinting on him, Shion becomes fascinated by Ito and the “normality” he represents. He gives her a crash course in dating while seemingly deprogramming her by getting her to eat meat and do “normal” things like going on drives in her sports car. Shion also starts dressing in more noticeably feminine fashions echoing the link between her baptism and coming of age with the suppression of her womanhood. 

It’s through this sexual liberation that Shion begins to break away from her programming and ask questions of the cult such as who her real parents were. Father seems to have a stoical attitude, exclaiming that “women are all the same” as if he knew this day would come and that Shion has evolved on falling in love. He seems to welcome this development on one level, but at the same time reduces Shion from the beautiful weapon he’s created to maternal vessel in suggesting that her true destiny lies in childbirth and that his dream is to hold her child whom he will presumably also train as an assassin. 

Meanwhile, the cult also paradoxically tries to use sex to control by subjecting her to a torture session at the hands of a lesbian dominatrix who insists she’ll show her a heaven men can never know and make her forget all about men. She does this by inserting a giant electrified dildo, which paints a very confusing picture of the cult’s views on sex, whether hetero or homosexual, penetrative or not. Ito turns up to “save” her, but thankfully it isn’t a case of a random man walking in and taking over, so much as providing a distraction for Shion to save herself while further empowering her with the motivation of love. In this world, however, love is futile and elusive. Even after freeing herself from the oppressive control of Father, Shion loses everything and intends to end her life only to turn around with another gesture of defiance though whether one of the killing machine reasserting itself or the desire for life overriding her nascent pain is difficult to say.

Danger Point: The Road to Hell (Danger Point: 地獄への道, Yasuharu Hasebe, 1991)

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A pair of hitmen find themselves conflicted when their latest target dies gripping the photo of an innocent-looking nurse. Who was this man, what’s his relationship to the woman in the photo, and why did he have to die? Asking questions is taboo when you’re a hired killer, and you’re probably better off not knowing anyway, but there’s something that’s bugging veteran executioner Joji (Jo Shishido) and it’s not just the missing 20 million dollars.

Nikkatsu veteran Yasuharu Hasebe’s V-Cinema noir Danger Point (Danger Point: 地獄への道, Jigoku e no Michi) is a classic tale of nihilistic fatalism in which the bond between the two assassins is tested by the intervention of greed and mystery. Shishido’s Joji is the more old-fashioned of the pair yet fascinated by the mystery behind Sakai’s death, not necessarily wondering if he bears any culpability but confused about why he had to die despite not actually having the missing money. This puts Joji partially at odds with the younger Ken, a more dynamic and less morally ambivalent figure played by the contemporary star Show Aikawa who’d come to represent for V-Cinema what Shishido once had for Nikkatsu action. Together, the chase the various clues they’ve been given looking for the person behind the job and, of course, the missing money.

But the money presents a problem too. Ken begins to wonder if Joji will abandon him and take the prize for himself, though that doesn’t seem to be something that Joji is actively considering. The relationship between the two men is more brotherly than paternal, though Joji does scold Ken for his treatment of Yumi (Nana Okada), the nurse from the hospital and their key witness. He beats and sexually assaults her, though it’s less his lack of chivalry that Joji criticises than the wisdom of bringing a woman into their business. He’s suspicious of Yumi in a way Ken does not seem to be, though they both agree that eventually she’ll have to go before she does them any harm because now she knows too much.

Ultimately, the money turns out to be from a bank job in the Philippines that the American criminals were hoping to convert to US dollars in Japan, though predictably everyone wants the whole amount for themselves, not least Joji and Ken along with the kingpin’s horse-loving girlfriend Saeko (Miyuki Ono) who is playing her own side of the game. Neither Saeko nor Yumi do very well out of this particular affair and are each constrained by the men around them. While Yumi was apparently seduced and abandoned by corrupt cop Sakai, Saeko is hemmed in by her gangster boyfriend Takamura (Hideo Murota) and seeks escape through stealing the money with the help of Sakai, one way or another, at least. Though this world doesn’t seem to want to let either of them have it while the  men fight over the spoils in a desperate struggle to assert dominance over the situation.

As the ironic “Dead End” sign at the film’s conclusion implies, however, that chasing money is a fool’s errand and leads only to hell. A chase past the no entry signs into an industrial complex suggests that this world is not quite fully formed or in the process of falling apart. The ironic and strangely obvious product placement for Perrier sparkling mineral water might hint at a more sophisticated world the hitmen are on one level trying to inhabit, but in other ways their presence is incongruous. They belong to an earlier time as does this hidden world of bank robberies, smuggled cash, criminal gangs and fixers that seem out of place amid the tail end of the Bubble era. Or in that sense at least, perhaps it’s Japan heading for a crash desperately chasing the riches that seem only slightly out of reach. Nevertheless, there’s a genuine sense of mystery that leads Ken and Joji to their final destination in which they discover that it might not be greed that does for them after all, but in an odd way, love. Their desire for togetherness and fear of separation in the end can have only one conclusion and as much as it is the money that leads them to their doom, it’s loneliness and brotherhood that eventually seal their fate.

The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses (ザ・ヒットマン 血はバラの匂い, Teruo Ishii, 1991)

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After his fiancée is killed during a yakuza shootout in a restaurant, a former spy in training plots revenge in Teruo Ishii’s Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses (ザ・ヒットマン 血はバラの匂い, The Hitman: Chi wa Bara no Nioi). Ishii has been in retirement for 12 years before making the film but steps right into the zeitgeist with his bubble-era nightclub opening in which a yakuza goon pretends to be the son of a stockbroker to seduce a young woman he intends to press into prostitution, while looking back to classic noir and the borderless action past.

The young woman is rescued, though not soon enough to escape harm, by the titular hitman, Takanashi (Hideki Saijo), though he does not intervene to save her, only to take out the trio of yakuza who were one side of the gun battle in which his fiancée Reiko (Mikiko Ozawa) was killed. Reiko’s innocence is emphasised by her position as a teacher at a Christian school which is directly contrasted with the sleazy world of contemporary Shinjuku in which Takanashi becomes involved with a series of women. The Asia Town that he strays into is another international space with its samba bars and Filipina hostesses, while Takanashi is later sent to track a boat coming in from the Philippines which is thought to be smuggling guns. 

That’s a tip off he receives from Nakatsuka (Kiyoshi Nakajo), an old mentor from the defence academy who now works for the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, the nation’s primary intelligence authority. Nakatsuka is also seen meeting with the police chief who tells him that the yakuza have been complaining that police are encouraging the gang war rather than trying to stop it. So much the better, Nakatsuka says, let them massacre each other then take them all out right before the election to manipulate public opinion. If the election goes their way, the police chief will have additional budget to hire more policemen. Thus Takanashi also becomes a kind of pawn in cynical political machinations conducted by Nakatsuka and CIRO who are helping him both out of friendship and sympathy and because it is useful for him to make use of Takanashi and his desire for revenge. Only veteran policeman Uchino (Tetsuro Tanba) smells a rat, but even he later lets Takanashi go after making a moral judgement that justice has been served and Takanashi hasn’t really done anything wrong.

And so Takanashi tries to avenge Reiko by setting the gangs against each other in a recreation of the original gang war. He’s first frustrated and then aided by Shinjuku party girl Rumi (Natsumi Nanase) who steals his briefcase and gives it to the yakuza, and also be her friend Hisako (Yuki Semba) whom he meets after ducking into a soapland to escape the police. Hisako’s apartment is well furnished with even the modern convenience of an exercise bike, while Rumi’s feels empty, like a hideout with its bare floors and sparse decor. The walls are decorated with posters for Casablanca and Bonnie and Clyde that bring home and older noir past that Takanashi is echoing in his quest to avenge Reiko’s death at the hands of a crime-ridden society. We’re told that he gave up his place at the defence academy and became a truck driver when his parents objected to their marriage, but now fulfils his destiny in tackling the yakuza threat head on.

Meanwhile, as a kind of counter to Rumi, Hisako, and Yasuda’s girlfriend, Kumasa’s woman Beniko (Kimiko Yo) who is very much involved in policy decisions and actively fights back in defence of Kumasa who is otherwise a bit useless. The film is sleazy from its opening rape sequence to the soapland escapade and inexplicable closing credits which consist of a number of raunchy gravure shots backed by a power ballad that otherwise have little to do with the rest of the film, but is perhaps less cynical that it appears or at least seems to edge away from nihilism towards something that appreciates that a more emotional, poetic kind of justice is possible and valid. Takanashi is allowed to complete his quest, though it incurs additional casualties, and then leave the scene having achieved a kind of closure and brought the cycle to an end leaving the rest to Nakatsuka and Uchino who now seems to have crossed over to Nakatsuka’s side if perhaps lamenting that he may be working far too hard to a achieve a justice that now seems surprisingly easy to enact.

Burning Dog (襲撃 ＢＵＲＮＩＮＧ　ＤＯＧ, Yoichi Sai, 1991)

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Freedom lies outside the confines of Japan In Yoichi Sai’s gritty crime thriller Burning Dog (襲撃 BURNING DOG, Shugeki Burning Dog). As the film’s name suggests, Shu (Seiji Matano) is a man on fire looking for a way out. When he’s betrayed by a gang member who shoots him and tries to make off with the do., He hot tails it back to Okinawa but as his old friend Takuji reminds him, he’s still in Japan and not as far from Tokyo as he might like to think. 

Takuji welds his desire for a fake passport against him to convince Shu to participate in his plan to rob a nearby American base on payday. For his part, he doesn’t really know what he wants to do with the money, but later tells his wife Ryoko that they could go anywhere together which is to say the money represents freedom in the ability to escape Japan. Then again, Takuji tells her that they could go the three of them, including his minion Koji who has been sleeping with Ryoko seemingly with his knowledge. There’s a strange kind of homoeroticism between Takuji and Koji that suggests that at least from Takuji’s view it’s a kind of proxy relationship. He allows Koji to sleep with his wife because he can’t actually sleep with him, though he doesn’t really appear to like his wife very much either. Shu tells him off when he first arrives in Okinawa for taking him to a club to look for women, pointing out that he has a wife at home, though Takuji describes her as a kind of inheritance and otherwise chases sex workers while dreaming of a life in which he’s not treated like “garbage” in particular by the Americans. 

“Women never forget when they’ve been wronged,” Shu warns Takuji, though it might also go for his relationship with former flame Mei who also took part in the traumatic bank robbery 10 years previously in which one of their teammates shot a policeman and then got killed. Mei now works at a furniture shop supplying Japanese-style furnishings to the resident Americans including Captain Ford, Takuji’s mark who apparently has no combat experience or chance for promotion but does have a drinking problem and a susceptibility to bribes. The fact he smuggles drugs out from the American base is more literal representation of the corruption caused by the ongoing presence of the American military. The Americans are currently involved in the Gulf War, which according to Takuji is why they’ve taken their eye off the ball. Huge amounts of money are flying through Okinawa to pay soldiers and they won’t be expecting anyone to try to steal it. 

The robbery is then a way of rebelling against the dominance of the American military and the marginalisation of men like Takuji. Captain Ford, meanwhile, may actually be smarter than he looks and a little bit ahead of the game or perhaps not far enough ahead while Mei’s allegiance seems uncertain. Shu’s isn’t all that clear either, but in any case just like back in Tokyo committing a heist together doesn’t so much bring people together as tear them apart. Someone’s double crossed them. It isn’t clear who, but it might not matter to Shu whose only goal has been to leave Japan completely with some money he could actually spend unlike the loot from the Tokyo heist which still hasn’t been laundered. He can’t take it all, but at the same time he may not want to share it and is willing to blast away his last chance at romance or redemption in attempt to escape his traumatic past.

Which is all to say, there are no real winners in this nihilistic game. As much as Shu is an antihero outsider trying to rebel against the constraints of Japanese society, he’s also a rampant misogynist sexually abusing the girlfriends of his targets for information and striking women who displease him while pushed to extremes geographical, social, and psychological. But like many of the hero’s of V-Cinema, the truth is that there is no real place for men like him in post-bubble Japan and only finally breaking free of its constraints can he hope to reclaim his identity and live as a free man.