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.

Carlos (カルロス, Kazuhiro Kiuchi, 1991)

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Fleeing a gang war with Columbian drug lords, a Brazilian gangster of Japanese descent tries his luck on the mainland but finds himself a perpetual outsider who can’t get himself taken seriously in Kazuhiro Kiuchi’s moody adaptation of his own manga, Carlos (カルロス). Owing a little bit to Brian De Palma’s Scarface, the tale takes place in a Japan mired in hopelessness and despair amid the spectre of economic collapse, while Carlos tries to play one gang off against another to exploit the terminal decline of the old school yakuza.

What we have here is a succession crisis. The Yamashiro boss (Minoru Oki) is planning to step down due to ill health though in the middle of a long-running dispute with the Hayakawa gang. When two of their guys are randomly killed, they assume only Hayakawa could be behind it little knowing that Carlos (Naoto Takenaka), a Brazilian-Japanese gangster on the run in Japan after killing eight policemen in a gang war in Brazil, killed them because they thought they didn’t need to obey the rules of the underworld with a “foreign” gangster. “We don’t need to treat those Brazilians as equals,” one says while already late to their appointed meeting. They haven’t paid Carlos for the guns he sold them, and when challenged, try to intimidate him into giving them away for free. But Carlos is sick of being intimidated and bumps them off himself. 

Carlos faces constant microaggressions about not being Japanese enough, though he speaks the language fluently without an accent. “Your crude taste doesn’t fly in Japan,” a yakuza tells him, criticising his outfit for being too informal when yakuza of this era generally dress in fancy suits and style their hair with military precision. That’s not really something that bothers Carlos, but he’s annoyed to be so easily dismissed and it’s true enough that he’s being used because they think he’s disposable. Not only is he not a “yakuza”, but as they don’t see him as Japanese either, they don’t need to accord him even the dignity they’d grant to a gang member. When Katayama hires Carlos to knock of his rival for the succession, Sato, he’s pissed off when Carlos takes things too far and puts on a show that threatens to blow the whole thing wide open by massacring Sato’s guys at baseball practice. To a man like Katayama, this is total idiocy and attributable to Carlos’ foreignness, both in his capacity for unnecessary violence and his lack of understanding of the rules of Japanese gangsterdom.

But the one place Carlos and his brother Antonio are fully Japanese is in the home of his aunt who also migrated from Brazil and their Japanese-born cousin Tomomi. Carlos’ aunt refers to them both by their Japanese names, Shiro and Goro, and cooks them Japanese food like sukiyaki. This pleasant domestic environment seems to represent a more settled life Carlos could have found outside of a crime family, especially as his brother Antonio grows closer to Tomomi, but there are also hints of darkness in his uncle’s early death from cirrhosis of the liver which suggests he may have had a hard life in Japan and taken to drink. Nevertheless, his aunt seems to have made a nice life for herself and her daughter and is overjoyed to expand her family by welcoming Carlos and Antonio.

Yet this sort of life seems outside of Carlos’ reach while he continues to play the yakuza gangs off against each other while simultaneously longing for some kind of recognition and almost willing them to figure out it was him who killed Sugita and Yano, the obnoxious Yamashiro guys. Meanwhile, the weakened yakuza have also turned to a foreign hitman, a brooding and robotic American who lacks compassion or compunction and unlike Carlos seems to be a mindless killing machine. When Carlos bests him, it’s an eerie moment echoing Blue Velvet as his body rocks and then falls. By contrast, when Carlos fights his way to the head of the Yamashiro gang, Yamashiro gets puffed up and draws his sword swearing he’ll teach Carlos what a mistake it is to underestimate the Japanese mob, only Carlos simply shoots him in a moment of clear victory over this outdated adherence to a traditional code. Nevertheless, it’s clear that Carlos can’t win here either and there is no room in Japan for a man like him. His only option is to go out all guns blazing as a means of validating himself as a force to be reckoned with, someone who was worthy of attention and of being taken seriously. Shot by the legendary Seizo Sengen, Kiuchi’s manga-informed compositions dissolve into visions of loneliness and despair but in its final moments reaches a crescendo of defiance if discovered only in futility.

Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (전지적 독자 시점, Kim Byung-woo, 2025)

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Fed up with the ending of a web novel he’s been reading since his teens, Dokja (Ahn Hyo-seop) sends the author a message. By this stage, he’s the only reader left, a kind of “lone survivor”, if you will. But he tells the author that the ending has disappointed him and that he can’t accept that the main theme was that it’s alright to sacrifice the lives of others so that you alone can live. Adapted from the popular webtoon, Kim Byung-woo’s Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (전지적 독자 시점, Jeonjijeok Dokja Sijeom) is in part about the conflict between nihilistic pragmatism and selfishness, and a pure-hearted altruism that insists it’s possible for us all to survive and that surviving alone would be pointless anyway.

It only obliquely, however, touches on these themes in how they relate to the contemporary society in hinting at the destructive effects of capitalism. Dokja is the hero of this story, but he’s also a face in the crowd as a member of a constant stream of office workers on their way to work, not really so different from little ants squeezed between the fingers of powerful elites. Dokja at least feels himself to have lost out in this lottery, a contract worker let go by a conglomerate, while his sleazy boss Mr Han (Choi Young-joon) slobbers all over his female colleague, Sangha (Chae Soo-bin), who unlike him is no longer wedded to the corporate philosophy and is considering striking out on her own to do something that interests her personally. Perhaps the novel ending on the same day as his contract felt a little bit to much like the end of a world, which is what pushed him to write a message that in other ways seems uncharacteristically mean. 

But then the author tells him that if he doesn’t like this ending he can write his own, perhaps obliquely reminding him that he is free to change his future if he wants. Nevertheless, Dokja is soon thrown into the world of the novel where he is faced with a series of scenarios where he must choose whether to sacrifice the lives of others in order to save his own for the entertainment of celestial beings who watch the whole thing via live streams and occasionally sponsor interesting players. Dokja has an advantage in that he already knows what’s going to happen, but is also aware that things don’t always go the way they should and his own actions change the course of the narrative. He’s convinced that he has to save the “hero”, Jung-hyeok (Lee Min-ho), or the fantasy world will end, killing everyone inside it, but never really considers that he too can be the protagonist of his own story. 

He remains committed, however, that the only way to survive is through mutual solidarity even if he scoffs at the quasi-communist mentality at the Geumho subway station correctly guessing that it’s all a scam being run by a corrupt politician which muddies the water somewhat when it comes to the film’s politics. In any case, Dokja seems to believe that he must save Jung-hyeok not just physically but spiritually in proving to him that his nihilistic viewpoint is mistaken and the only way for them to survive is to support each other by pooling their skills and resources. In dealing with his own trauma and guilt over having once sacrificed someone else to ensure his own survival, Dokja is able to write a new ending for himself surrounded by his companions rather than as a lone survivor roaming a ruined land with nothing to look forward to except death.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s true that he thinks he needs a hero to save him rather than realising that he is also the hero of this story, while the fantasy world too is driven by capitalistic mentality in which Dokja must amass coins to be able to level up or literally buy his survival. Occasionally he wavers, wondering if the others have a point when they tell him he’s being foolish and should learn to just save himself no matter what happens to anyone else, but otherwise remains committed to rejecting the premise of the original novel’s nihilistic ending in insisting that there’s a way for us all to survive if only we can learn to be less selfish, trust each other, and work for the good of all.

Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy is available in the UK on digital download from 15th December.

UK Trailer (English subtitles)

Stranger (夜のストレンジャー 恐怖, Shunichi Nagasaki, 1991)

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Driving through the city by night, a young woman finds herself plagued by a mysterious force while struggling to break out of her self-imposed inertia in Shunichi Nagasaki’s moody thriller, Stranger (夜のストレンジャー 恐怖). The film’s Japanese title, “night stranger terror”, perhaps more clearly hints at a sense of urban threat while surrounded by so many unfamiliar people, yet it is in many ways Kiriko’s (Yuko Natori) mistrust and suspicion that isolates her from the surrounding society and keeps her trapped in a kind of limbo unable to escape her past.

It might be tempting to read her aloofness as a direct consequence of her experiences, but in an early scene when she was still a bank employee we hear a colleague criticise her for being “anti-social” while Kiriko’s rejection of her seems born more of contempt than shyness or a preference for solitude. Working as a cashier at the bank at the tail end of the bubble is a pretty good job, especially given the still prevailing sexism of the working environment, that positions Kiriko firmly within an aspirant middle-class. She still lives at home surrounded by her family, but is in a relationship with a man who pressures her for money to invest in the stock market. She begins embezzling and lives as if there’s no tomorrow, splashing out on fancy sunglasses before meeting her boyfriend having left work early feigning illness. Unfortunately for her, she gets caught and her boyfriend predictably abandons her.

Just like the asset bubble, her life implodes and plunges her into a lower social stratum as a woman with a criminal conviction for financial impropriety and a hefty debt in needing to pay back the money she stole from the bank for her ex’s harebrained stock speculation schemes. All in all, you could say she’s been betrayed by economic forces, but also as she later admits, but her own uncertain desires in being wilfully deceived by Akiyama (Takashi Naito) and making a clear choice to defraud the bank. She realises that it might not have been a desire to please Akiyama that led her to do it, but the illicit thrill she felt in tapping away on her keyboard stealing the money and otherwise being in a position of economic power over a man, buying him things and taking him out for fancy food. Her sense of malaise is only deepened when she meets Akiyama by chance and tries to tell him all this, but he isn’t really interested. He seems to have moved on and planning to marry another woman. 

Kiriko tries to look at his hands to see if he has burn scars like the man who attacked her in her taxi, but he doesn’t. Perhaps there was a small part of her that wanted it to be him. At least if it was, it would mean he still felt something for her, which would also prove that he ever did. And it would make sense, which is less frightening than her stalker just being a nutty fare, another irate man with a nondescript grudge wandering the city. Taxi driver is one of the few jobs open to her with a criminal record, but it’s also an unusual profession for a woman which further isolates her in her working environment. Her boss keeps calling her “little lady,” while patronisingly offering to put her on the day shift because it’s less dangerous. Kijima (Kentaro Shimizu), an obnoxious colleague, picks at Kiriko for thinking everyone who strikes up a conversation must be sexually interested in her. But the truth is that they are and like Kijima demand her attention. When they don’t get it they’re pissed off. The cab is perhaps the place she feels the most safe, though she faces her fair share of weird fares from drunk men trying to flirt to religious maniacs proselytising from the back seat. 

Now living alone in an apartment, her aloofness is both a personal preference and means of punishing herself. When her brother calls, he encourages her to come home but she says she can’t even though she wants to because she hasn’t yet dealt with her past or taken steps towards being able to forgive herself. She tells Kijima, who in truth behaves in an incredibly creepy way that suggests she’s right to avoid him, that she wonders if she isn’t the only one who can see the mysterious Land Cruiser, as if she were really imagining it. The Land Cruiser does indeed come to stand in for the buried past by which Kiriko is haunted and her eventual besting of it is a symbolic act that suggests she’s finally managed to overcome her guilt and shame to be able to leave the past behind.

As she told Kijima, this was something only she could do by her own hand or none. Akiyama’s dismissiveness of her reflects the fact that he couldn’t give her this absolution either, she needed to find it for herself. Kijima accused her of still being hung up on the guy that scammed her, but that wasn’t quite it. The resolution might hint at his being right when he told her that she needed to learn to trust people more in that it seems to lead to a greater willingness to open herself up to the world. Once again, her sunglasses get broken as a new truth becomes visible to her. A lonely little boy she meets who, like her, enjoys driving in circles and going nowhere, probes her lack of human connection by suggesting that she doesn’t know what it’s like to love someone which is why she can’t understand his obviously inappropriate love for her, though it’s a fact that Kiriko has to acknowledge is truth in interrogating the reality of her relationship with Akiyama.

Nevertheless, in the end, she saves herself and embraces her solitude and independence looking out at the peaceful bay in a city that no longer seems so threatening even if the unseen threat in this case did turn out to be random and have no rational explanation. Nagasaki never again worked in the realms of V-Cinema and his entry is fairly atypical in starring an older, established actress as an action lead while requiring no nudity or sexual content, instead quite literally allowing her to grab the wheel and take control of her life to claim freedom and independence rather than solely romantic fulfilment.

Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet (ネオ チンピラ 鉄砲玉ぴゅ～, Banmei Takahashi, 1990)

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In the classic yazkua films of old, going to prison for the gang could be a badge of honour and one of the ways you could catapult yourself into the higher ranks. By the 1990s, however, the yakuza is a much depleted force and it seems few are willing to give up years of their lives on a point of honour for an uncertain reward. At least, that’s how it is for most of the gangsters at the centre of Banmei Takahashi’s Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet (ネオ チンピラ 鉄砲玉ぴゅ～, Neo Chinpira: Teppodama Pyu) , a slacker comedy in which a young hanger on faces a dilemma when he’s made the lookout on a squad sent to bump off a rival only for his squamates go to great lengths to injure themselves first so they won’t have to go through with it.

Junko (Sho Aikawa) is an unlikely hero. With a rockabilly quiff and a red jacket, he’s nominally the driver for gangster Yoshikawa (Toru Minegishi) which means he gets to drive his limo and act like a big man for a while making calls on his carphone. But as much as Junko shows off to his girlfriend Noriko, a hostess at a Korean bar, by instructing the landlady not to clear up his empty bottles because they’ll make a good weapon in an emergency, he’s otherwise something of a joke. The limo ends up getting “stolen” by a young woman who just likes American cars and sexually aroused by gunfire.

Even Yumeko (Chikako Aoyama) chuckles that Junko sounds like a girl when he says he wants to see the ocean while they’re driving around. “Junko” is ordinarily a girl’s name. He picked it up as a kind of hazing based on an alternate reading of his name kanji. She says the same thing again when he reveals he’s never brought a girl back to his place before, probably because it’s in a disused building he was given to manage where he’s surrounded by junk like an old barber’s chair and pinball machine while the figure of Humphrey Bogart in the Maltese Falcon looks down at him from a poster as if embodying his unattainable gangster dreams. As masculine icons go, Junko is also plagued by his uncle, Mizuta (Joe Shishido), a legendary gangster and representative of old school yakuza who take the code seriously and wouldn’t put up with people like Junko’s colleagues who engage in “zooming”, deliberately shooting themselves to get out of being ordered to carry out a hit. He’s not overly impressed by Junko either, unable to understand why he’d become an errand boy for a petty gangster rather than be his own boss as a small-time crook.

Junko’s dilemma is whether he’s really up to this task and will be to go through with it or will end up chickening out and injuring himself too. Crows are more cowardly than they seem, Yumeko explains in an obvious allegory for the yakuza. They pick a place and defend it as a group, while their numbers are way up lately so their individual turfs are shrinking. But now Junko’s all on his own and filled with uncertainty not knowing if he can pass this rite of passage and be accorded a man or will forever be trapped in a liminal space of adolescence never to be taken seriously or make any progress in his life. In an effort to toughen up, he swaps his red jacket for a suit and finally puts on a shiny leather overcoat, ripping off the buttons to bind it more tightly around him with the belt as if it were a kind of armour. 

Somehow the lighthearted ridiculousness of this world of bumbling yakuza and creepy corrupt cops lends an additional poignancy to Junko’s final gesture as he sets off on his path, not really believing he will return. He doesn’t even wait for the pictures he had taken at a photo booth. They won’t be much use to him where he’s going, but at the same time it’s like he’s treading water never quite getting closer to his destination but continuing along his long sad walk. Banmei Takahashi sticks firmly to his pink film roots, sticking in a weird sex scene at regular intervals as Yumeko becomes enraptured by pistols, but also has quite a lot of fun with his “uncool” gangsters and the lost young man who looks up to them while perhaps knowing that this image of stone cold masculinity only really exists in the movies.

Crime Hunter: Bullets of Rage (クライムハンター 怒りの銃弾, Toshimichi Ohkawa, 1989)

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Home video may still have been in a nascent and chaotic stage of development when Toei video executive Tatsu Yoshida began conducting customer research in video rental stores, but what he discovered shocked him. Customers were maxing out their five video allowance and watching them all the same evening. How did they have time for that, he wondered. The answer was that they were watching them all on fast forward to cut out the boring bits, like the story and exposition. It was this that gave him the idea to create “movies that will not be fast forwarded,” chiefly because they had already been excised of anything “inessential”.

Only an hour in length, 1989’s Crime Hunter: Bullets of Rage (クライムハンター 怒りの銃弾, Crime Hunter: Ikari no Judan) was the first in Toei’s new V-Cinema range and was indeed made to conform to these aims. Consequently, it focuses mainly on action with minimal narrative and relies on genre archetypes to help the plot move along. In that, it owes something to Nikkatsu’s borderless action films in taking place in Little Tokyo (largely filmed in Okinawa) though otherwise in a world that’s recognisably Japanese despite the English-language police radio and Japanese-American names like that of fugitive criminal Bruce Sawamura (Seiji Matano) and Joe “Joker” Kawamura (Masanori Sera), the cop who’s trying to track him down but only as a means to an end in his quest to avenge the death of his partner, Ahiru (Riki Takeuchi). We can tell that Ahiru’s not going to last long in this film because we’re told quite quickly that he’s been invited to the chief’s daughter’s birthday party and is seen as a potential suitor, while after apprehending Bruce he complains that his mother bought him the shirt that’s now been stained. 

Joker’s attachment to Ahiru goes a little beyond that of a mere partner as he hands back his badge to pursue revenge while picking up the empty packet of pop-corn Ahiru had been eating and placing it over his heart. The film seems to owe a lot to contemporary Hong Kong action films and Heroic Bloodshed such as A Better Tomorrow, and it’s apparent that this almost homoerotic relationship between the men has taken the place of heteronormative romance. The female star, Lily (Minako Tanaka), is (nominally at least) at nun which makes her romantically unavailable to Joker or indeed to Bruce while in some senses she represents opposition because her cause is at odds with Joker’s. While they temporarily align in wanting to find Bruce, Joker wants information that will lead him to the identity of his partner’s killer, while for Lily he’s the endgame because she wants to get back the money he stole from the donation box at her church. 

This whole narrative strand doesn’t make a lot of sense in that Lily says she accidentally told Bruce about the donations after having too much to drink at a party with her non-nun girlfriends, which is strange behaviour for a bride of Christ. Now she feels like retrieving the money is her responsibility, though Joker isn’t really interested in that. What he discovers is further kinship with the fugitive Bruce on realising that they’ve both become victims of a corrupt police force. The opening police radio broadcast implies that Little Tokyo has become an oppressive police state in which the threat of drugs and gangs is being used to control people while cops like Joker have been given blanket permission to aim at the head of suspected criminals as they do while arresting Bruce. Joker had thought that the guys who attacked them were Bruce’s men breaking him out or otherwise trying to steal the money off him, only to later realise they were actually corrupt police. 

But really not much of that matters in comparison to the increasing outlandishness as Lily transitions from wimple-wearing bad ass sister to a nightclub dancer femme fatale in fishnets infiltrating the Cathay Tiger gang with expertly crafted dance routines. Former mercenary Bruce similarly boasts and improbably impressive arsenal of grenade launchers and machine guns before arriving at the depressing environment of a disused industrial complex for the nihilistic showdown in which Joker realises there is no way to right this world of corruption and that he and Bruce weren’t so different in each being controlled and defined by an oppressive society in which there are no happy endings even for heroes.

The Unrighteous (원정빌라, Kim Seon-kuk, 2024)

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After discovering that all of his neighbours have become members of a religious cult, one young man tries to hold fast to his independence but finds himself confronted by the forces of conformity and mass hysteria in Kim Seon-kuk’s paranoid horror thriller, The Unrighteous (원정빌라, Wonjeong Villa). The film’s English title maybe somewhat misleading, though if anyone is unrighteous, it is the cult themselves rather than non-believer Ju-hyun (Lee Hyun-woo), while it’s also true that he lives in an unrighteous society obsessed with property values and social status.

It begins, however, with apartment complex horror as Ju-hyun gets into a vendetta with his upstairs neighbour Shin-hye (Moon Jeong-Hee) who first tries to bully him out of parking in “her” parking space which she is trying to hold for her husband who “always” parks there. Hearing strange sounds from above, Ju-hyun tries to complain about the noise, but Shin-hye ignores him and ironically insists that “neighbours should be more understanding” as if suggesting that Ju-hyun is being selfish and unreasonable and should rather make allowances for her son who is suffering from a serious illness. Ju-hyun had asked for quiet because his mother is recovering from recent surgery. 

The real problems start shortly after when it becomes apparent that Shin-hye has got religion after joining a Christian-leaning organisation that Ju-hyun has been warned is a cult that targets people with bogus surveys in order to recruit them. Though she had looked tired and took little interest in her appearance, Shin-hye is now nicely turned out with stereotypically middle-class housewife outfits, styled hair, and makeup. Grinning eerily, she seems to be intent on converting her neighbours. Ju-yhyun immediately earns her ire once again when he complains about her inviting the pastor to their residents committee meeting without prior notice. He’s not the only one who objects to being subjected to a religious lecture without his consent, though Shin-hye homes in on the neighbours’ various anxieties from job precarity to loneliness to win them over to her cause.

There seems to be a direct correlation between the literal cult Shin-hye is propagating and that of property ownership in that she often repeats that they are now all “homeowners” as opposed to tenants and “true owners of this land”. Ju-hyun is a property owner too, having paid off his mortgage at a comparatively young age, and himself hopes that the redevelopment project takes place so that he can move to a nicer apartment and have a better quality of life. Everyone is obsessed with how much more profit they might be able to make if the house prices rise in the area which is something the cult is also promising them happen. Ju-hyun isn’t disinterested in that, but also wants to see the town come back to life again and is heartened that so many people are moving to the area to take advantage of the currently lower than average prices.

Studying to become an estate agent, he seems to have an interest in finding people happy homes which might on some level be because of his own disordered familial background. Vague allusions are made to Ju-hyun’s long lost father being in some way abusive to the extent that Ju-hyun can’t forget the look in his eyes and is reluctant to let him back into their lives after he contact his mother to say he wants to apologise and make amends. It’s no surprise that he too has joined the cult, though the way that Ju-hyun reacts makes him something of a complicated hero and unrighteous in his actions. He justifies himself that he’s trying to keep his family safe and ensure the home he’s worked so hard to provide for them won’d be taken away, but his mother also has a point in resenting his bossiness and condescension as he repeatedly instructs her not to  have anything to do with the cult or open the door to strangers. When he has an opportunity to save his neighbours, he wonders whether he should bother given how mean to him they’ve all been through this whole ordeal.

In a sinister manner, the cult begins to encircle him as his employer and the leader of the redevelopment project turn out to be cult members. He’s fired from his job for refusing to join the cult, while the police seem to be in on it too and react to his attempts to explain with exasperation as if he were just a delusional conspiracy theorist. Only the local pharmacist with a side line in investigating cults is willing to help to help him. Nevertheless, the escalating darkness from trance-like religious mania to human sacrifice is quite steep even intended as satire that people would willingly sacrifice the lives of others in the name of house prices, even if they’re tricked into handing over the deeds to their properties to the cult become “the true owners of land”. Ju-hyun, however, resolutely refuses to drink the cool aid, in some ways quite literally, looking on with disdain as his neighbours dance in the street on receiving the news that the long awaited redevelopment project will indeed be happening as if it were a miracle fallen to them from some higher powers.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Phantom Lover (夜半歌聲, Ronny Yu, 1995)

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For his last film in Hong Kong before decamping to Hollywood, Ronny Yu looked back to a lost classic in loosely remaking 1937’s Song at Midnight, itself loosely based on Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. A Hong Kong/Singapore co-production, the film was, perhaps surprisingly, shot entirely in Beijing where Yu constructed an opulent set including a full-scale replica of the theatre which he then burnt down for real during the legendary climax of the classic story. 

Set in 1936 (one year before the release of A Song at Midnight and the intensification of the Sino-Japanese war), the film opens with a gothic scene of carriages racing through the fog. A troupe of left-wing actors has come to make use of a ruined theatre to put on their revolutionary play. On arrival, the troupe’s leading man Wei Qing (Lei Huang), who is in a relationship with leading lady Landie (Liu Lin) but claims he is too poor to marry so they will have to wait until he’s famous, is captivated by the auditorium, convinced he can hear strange sounds of a woman singing. The strangeness of the surroundings continues to bother him until he finally decides to ask creepy caretaker Uncle Ma (Cheung Ching-Yuen)to disclose what he knows of the fire which destroyed the theatre 10 years previously. 

Counter-intuitively, Yu shoots the ‘30s sequence in a washed-out sepia with occasional flashes of colour almost like hand-tinted photographs. As Ma spins his story, we transition into a sumptuous world of reds and golds in the old opera house designed, as we’re told, by the famous actor Song Danping (Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing) who is said to have perished along with it in the fire. Danping, to whom Wei Qing is constantly likened, was the greatest actor of the age famous for his performances in Western theatre, such as the Mandarin musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in which he was performing immediately before his death. In a case of life imitating art, Danping had fallen in love with the daughter of a wealthy family, Yuyan (Geng Xiao-Lin), and wished to marry her, but actors belong to an undesirable underclass and in any case, Yuyan’s father had already arranged her marriage to the idiot son of a powerful politician, Zhao (Bao Fang), in exchange for smoothing the path for his new factory enterprise. 

In a direct reversal of the 1937 film, it is Wei Qing who is the left-wing revolutionary proudly singing communist songs about the “national humiliation” which, it seems, partly accounts for their low audience numbers, while Danping is the reactionary libertine performing in “decadent” Western theatre which seemingly has no political import other than its capacity to cause annoyance to the conservative older generation extremely concerned about Danping’s effect on the local young women. With that in mind, it seems strange that Wei Qing is so quick to accept Danping’s offer once he finally reveals himself and drops the playbook for Romeo and Juliet into his hands. Nevertheless he is content to accept the older man’s tutelage, hoping that the increased revenue will save the troupe and, as implied earlier, he doesn’t actually seem to be very invested in the idea of revolution so much becoming famous. 

Nevertheless, it turns out that he does indeed have integrity. To gain additional funding, the troupe’s leaders end up schmoozing with none other than Zhao, the man who eventually married Yuyan after the fire but quickly discarded her on learning she was not a virgin. Now apparently having risen in politics in Shanghai, Zhao is a misogynistic bully carrying a grudge towards women because of his humiliation by Yuyan. In the scene in which we re-meet him, no longer quite so moronic but definitely nastier, he forces his dining companion to eat 60 meat buns because she had the temerity to declare herself full and try to leave the table. When Wei Qing snaps at him he takes a liking to Landie who is more or less pimped out by the impresario in the same way that Yuyan was sold by her father to the Zhaos in order to further his business interests. On discovering Yuyan, who has since descended into madness, wandering the streets, he stops his carriage to give her a public whipping, ranting about how he had her 10 years preciously but she turned out to be a “slut” who’d already slept with the famous actor Song Danping which seems like a curious thing to announce in the public square. 

Then again, these fascist stooges have an odd approach to public humiliation, stopping Danping’s play mid-performance to call out Yuyan which seems like a counter-intuitive and extremely embarrassing move when they could simply have dragged her out of her box. Danping strikes a minor victory for art when he get the goons ejected from the theatre by the irate audience who, he points out, have had their evening spoiled by officials misusing their authority for a spot of personal pettiness. The intervention is mirrored in the film’s conclusion with the “villains” effectively put on trial in the theatre, as theatre, with an appeal made to law enforcement which is eventually successful as the police commander affirms his intention to act for the public good (though in this case is also serving his own while ironically giving justification to mob rule). 

Despite all of that, however, the major stumbling block to the tragic romance turns out to narcissistic vanity on the part of former matinee idol Danping who has been hiding himself away even though he knows Yuyan has gone mad in love for him simply because his face was ruined when Zhao’s goons threw acid at it and then locked him in the burning theatre. He contents himself with singing on nights when the moon is full knowing that hearing his voice on such occasions is the only thing keeping her going. On learning of his mentor’s true purpose to make Yuyan think he, the handsome young actor, is the Danping of old, Wei Qing is extremely conflicted, unable to understand why the now ghoulish Danping would put Yuyan through so much grief when he could simply have revealed himself a decade ago. Nevertheless, realising the intensity of the romantic suffering all around him perhaps pushes him towards ”forgiving” Landie for having schmoozed with Zhao. 

Full on gothic melodrama, Yu’s adaptation of the classic story is all fog and cobwebs, situating itself in a world which is already falling apart. In photographing the 30s in washed-out greys, he perhaps suggests that something has already faded, or at least become numb, in comparison with the life and colour of mid-20s Shanghai in all its art deco glory. Yet even in giving us a superficially happy ending in which justice, moral and romantic, appears to have been served Yu denies us the resolution we may be seeking with a melancholy title card reminding us that happiness in the China of 1936 may be a short-lived prospect.

Woods Are Wet (女地獄　森は濡れた, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1973)

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As long as people live honest lives, eventually good things will happen to them, according to the sinister mistress at the centre of Takumi Kumashiro’s Roman Porno Woods Are Wet (女地獄　森は濡れた, Onna Jigoku: Mori wa Nureta). Perversely, she may actually believe this to be true but only in the most ironic of senses as she and her “cruel” husband enjoy incredibly happy lives together having decided to “honestly” embrace their true desires, which include things like rape, murder, and eating grapes off the corpses of their victims.

Inspired by the Marquis de Sade’s Justine and set in the Taisho era, the film begins in true gothic style as Sachiko (Hiroko Isayama), a runaway maid in flight from an accusation of having murdered her mistress, encounters Yoko (Rie Nakagawa), an upper-class lady who unexpectedly comes to her rescue in a small town. Yoko takes her back to the Western-style mansion she shares with her husband Ryunosuke (Hatsuo Yamaya) whom she describes as being incredibly cruel. Explaining that she’s been desperately lonely since her marriage at 19, Yoko begs Sachiko to stay but as her companion rather than a servant, which is another act of class transgression for which there will presumably be a price. 

In any case, the atmosphere changes when Ryunosuke arrives and reveals he knows all about Sachiko’s predicament and blackmails her into helping with his schemes to rape and murder guests at the hotel he runs. He explains that he’s very wealthy and does this for kicks not out of financial necessity but nevertheless uses her to spice up his game by directly telling her to warn the guests that their lives are in danger. If she manages to get them to escape, he’ll let her go too, but of course it’s not as easy as she’d assumed it would be, especially as the first two guests she’s sent to brutally rape her. Even so, she vows to escape with them, only they are not quite clever enough to beat Ryunosuke’s game.

Out in the middle of nowhere, the mansion is a true gothic fantasy lit by candle light due to an absence of electricity because of the Depression. Ryunosuke has adapted it so that it contains a series of prison-like doors with iron bars and locks that allow him to trap Sachiko and others exactly where he wants them. He is vile and depraved, as is Yoko, though they later brand themselves as simply liberated and living “honestly” having embraced their true desires. Ryunosuke paints himself as a quiet revolutionary, asking why he should conform with rules and laws dictated by a distant authority to which he himself does not subscribe. He describes commonly held visions of morality as nothing more than a tool of social coercion designed to control the common man (which he is not), in which he may have a valid point despite the depravity of his apparently honest nature. 

This aspect of Ryunosuke as an anti-social force was apparently something very much intended by Kumashiro, who was himself rebelling against a moral panic which had seen Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno line condemned under public obscenity laws. To make a point, he inserts large black blocks and lines throughout the film to mimic those sometimes demanded by the censors, though enlarged to an absurd degree and often not actually covering what they would presumably be intended to or actually drawing attention to it. In any case, what the censors objected to in this case was not apparently the sex itself but the violence which accompanies it, notably in the scenes in which blood-soaked sex continues after Yoko has shot one of the male victims she effectively raped at gunpoint. 

The central part of the film is a lengthy orgy scene in which Ryunosuke has his maids whip the victims while he anally rapes them while they are forced to have sex with Yoko and Sachiko on the pretext of saving their lives. It only gets grimmer from there, though there’s a censoriousness about Sachiko’s insistence that happiness should come from correctness to counter the “happiness” that Yoko and Ryunosuke exude in their embrace of their baser desires that undercuts her role as the innocent heroine standing up to their depraved inhumanity amid the absurd interruption of a radio taiso broadcast signalling the arrival of the next unhappy guests to rock up for a less than pleasant stay at this decidedly unluxurious hotel.

The 7 Grandmasters (虎豹龍蛇鷹, Joseph Kuo, 1977)

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“The way of kung fu, no one is invincible. A fighter shouldn’t be arrogant and bully others,” according to one of the mini lessons given by the ageing champion at the centre of Joseph Kuo’s 7 Grandmasters (虎豹龍蛇鷹), though it has to be said there is a fair amount of cockiness in play while bullying does seem to be a part of his training programme. Arrogance is in fact what he has himself been accused of at the ceremony at which he has been honoured by the emperor and after which he planned to retire if he had not received a rude note telling him he is not a real champion and shouldn’t lay claim to the title until he’s defeated all of the other regional champions in each of their signature fighting styles. 

A 30-year veteran of the local martial arts scene, Zhang Shenguang (Jack Long) is tired and ready to pass his school on to the next generation but feels he cannot retire until he’s proved once and for all that he is the greatest kung fu master. Setting out with his daughter and three pupils, he roams around the land easily defeating his rivals and teaching them a lesson to boot. Unfortunately, however, his first target, Sha (Wong Fei-lung), ends up dying while he’s also being followed around by an over-earnest boy, Shao Ying (Li Yi Min), who insists on becoming his pupil, though Zhang is unwilling to take him on because his own master was betrayed by a bad faith student who stole the final three pages of the book he’d been given to safeguard outlining the 12 Bai Mei strikes.

Zhang is definitely all about righteousness, constantly reminding everyone about the responsibilities that come with kung fu but his own students are fairly merciless to Shao Ying firstly mocking him as he trails along behind them like a stray puppy and then continuing to bully him until he finally surpasses their own abilities. They are all also supremely confident and often resort to cocky banter during fights which it has to be admitted they usually win. The film is structured around Zhang’s quest abruptly shifting from one expertly choreographed fight sequence to another, each showing off a different style and the ways in which Zhang can overcome it while some of his opponents accept defeat gracefully and others not. In one town they are ambushed by goons working for the local master who wanted to avoid potentially losing his title by underhandedly taking Zhang out first but as Zhang puts it losing his good name instead. The final challenger meanwhile refuses to Zhang directly because he can see Zhang is already ill and it wouldn’t be fair so has their students square off instead. 

Nevertheless, Zhang is not permitted to exit the world of kung fu until dealing with the left over baggage of the three missing strikes of Bai Mei, Shao Ying eventually becoming its inheritor after a twist of fate connects him with Zhang’s past while causing him a paradoxical dilemma in temporarily becoming Zhang’s enemy in order to avenge the death of his father as his code dictates. Like Zhang however he is perhaps only trying to make a point, never intending to harm his former mentor, at least physically, but only to close the cycle through symbolic revenge, later returning to Zhang’s side on realising he’s been used and deceived. 

Featuring top choreography from Hong Kong’s Yuen Kwai and Yuen Cheung Yan, Kuo’s low budget indie kung fu drama is pure fight fest less interested in the emotional conflicts between the men than the physical which might explain its incredibly abrupt conclusion which largely implodes the moment of catharsis achieved in the villain’s defeat. Even so, it succeeds in showcasing a series of fighting styles as Zhang continues with his quest to prove himself the ultimate grandmaster so he can finally retire while throwing in some comic relief thanks to Shao Ying’s dogged determination to become one of the gang before finally proving himself the most talented of all the students, not least because of his perseverance and willingness to learn. Shooting mainly in the open air to avoid the expense of sets, Kuo’s approach is unfussy but to the point of removing all distractions in order to showcase the immense abilities of his performers in an otherwise generic tale of rivalry and revenge.