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Toei’s decision in 1989 to begin releasing feature-length productions directly to video—bypassing the ailing theatrical circuit—proved immediately successful. Its first straight-to-video live-action release, “Crime Hunter: Bullet of Fury”, was a profitable venture that laid the foundation for a phenomenon that would profoundly shape the Japanese industry over the next decade: V-Cinema.

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In a style that strongly echoes Cannon Group productions, the movie launches straight into the action. Two police officers, Joker Kawamura and his partner Ahiru (played by a young Riki Takeuchi), arrest a notorious criminal, Bruce Sawamura. As they attempt to transport him to the station, they are ambushed by his gang. A chaotic gunfight follows, resulting in Bruce escaping, Ahiru being killed, and Joker surviving, despite being shot 43 times, and ending up in the hospital.

Defying orders from his superiors to drop the case, Joker resumes his...

In the 1980s, Japanese studios began to increasingly make direct-to-video animated and live-action movies as a means of controlling costs and giving filmmakers more freedom. And as the formerly robust economy of the nation crashed at the end of the decade, Toei Studios inaugurated its V-Cinema industry. Shot quickly on video, V-Cinema productions became not merely an additional revenue stream but a lifeline to keep the studio afloat. Now, Arrow Video’s V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal is the first disc collection in the West to pay tribute to this brief but crucial period in Japanese cinema that helped to incubate the country’s J-horror and gangster cinema of the late-’90s and beyond.

Toei’s first V-Cinema release was Okawa Toshimichi’s Crime Hunter: Bullets of Rage. Barely an hour long, the 1989 film might be best described as a bootleg tape of a Heroic Bloodshed movie with all the “boring stuff” removed,...