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When Daiei Studios and star Shintaro Katsu made “The Tale of Zatoichi” in 1962, little would they have known that in just 8 years, they would be on the 20th entry in the series. No mean feat, they managed to reach the mammoth number by continually reinventing the narratives while still staying true to the same formula and putting a number of different directors at the helm, with five of the twenty titles made by Kenji Misumi. For the twentieth, they aimed to make the biggest and most ambitious entry yet, getting none other than the legendary Toshiro Mifune to share screen with Katsu, playing one of his most famous on-screen incarnations, the nameless ronin he played so wonderfully in “Yojimbo” and its follow-up “Sanjuro”. But how did they fare? Let’s find out.

Tired of all the killings and wandering, Zatoichi returns to his hometown after a long time,...

Filmmaker Kihachi Okamoto, throughout his career, made it abundantly clear he hated war. He experienced the horrors on the battlefield firsthand during World War II and forever was disgusted by the atrocities committed by the Empire of Japan. Okamoto’s war movies boast an anti-war mindset while blending tragedy with dark comedy. His early projects, such as “Desperado Outpost,” primarily showed the director’s sense of humor, with western inspired elements thrown into the mix. Over time, these projects became more grounded and progressively darker. “Fort Graveyard” tells the tragic story of musician youths forced into combat, and “Japan’s Longest Day” recounts the terrifying final hours before the country’s surrender during the Second World War. With his ambitious and brutal epic “Battle of Okinawa,” audiences are reminded war spares no one.

Even with the budgetary issues the Japanese film industry was plagued with at the time, Okamoto would not be stopped.

After their first quite successful collaboration, it was only a matter of time before Meiko Kaji and director Toshiya Fujita would revisit the story of Yuki Kashima, better known under her nickname “Lady Snowblood”. While the first entry into the series followed in the footsteps of the manga series by Kazuo Kioke and Kazuo Kamimura, the sequel titles “Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance” is quite an interesting entry into the franchise, but also within Kaji’s career, as the political undertones which were already present in its predecessor became even more evident, which might have been also thanks to Norio Osada’s script. In that context the second movie about the female assassin wandering the roads of rural Japan in the Meji era is again on the one hand a period piece, albeit quite exaggerated or “heightened” at times, and on the other hand a sign of its times,...

Return Of Ultraman – The Complete Series Steelbook Edition is available now from Mill Creek Entertainment. Order it Here

To Protect Justice and Peace – He Has Returned

The crustal movement and the abnormal climate had occurred repeatedly on a global scale and dormant monsters started to awaken from sleep. A young man named Hideki Go, who was chasing his dream to be a race car driver, lost his life in saving a boy and a puppy that failed to escape in the midst of Monster Takkong’s rampage. However, the new Ultraman, who had come from Nebula M78 to defend Earth, was deeply touched by Go’s brave action and resurrected him by uniting as one. After that, Go is determined to fight any enemy that threatens the freedom and happiness of humanity and joined Mat, the Monster Attack Team. While he struggles with his identity gap between Ultraman and Hideki Go,...

In 1972, Japanese director Akio Jissoji concluded his Buddhist trilogy, whose previous entries were “This Transient Life” and “Mandala”. As viewers are now finally able to experience these films on blu-ray format thanks to a recent release by Arrow Academy, we can take a closer look at an important entry within the Japanese New Wave Movement, which many of us associate with names such as Seijun Suzuki and Nagisa Oshima since they, among others, remain the most known or popular artists of that time (at least for many Western audiences).

In general, Jissoji addition to the movement, or rather Japanese cinema as a whole, is a bridge between modernity and tradition, between the revolutionary ideologies of the 1960s and the system of beliefs which have defined the country for so long (and still do). As film scholar David Desser points out in his introduction to “Poem”, Jissoji has managed to create...

The second film of the Atg-produced “The Buddhist Trilogy” was even more experimental than “This Transient Life”, since the innovation also extended to the narrative, apart from the visuals.

Two couples of university students, Yukiko and Shinichi and Hirochi and Yasuko, swap their partners inside two hotel rooms, in two rather unusually depicted sex scenes that kickstart the movie. The two women then return to their “proper” rooms and through a visual style that could be described as minimalistically kaleidoscopic, we get to know their train of thoughts, particularly of the males. A bit later, during a walk in the seaside, the couple is attacked by two men who end up raping Yukiko brutally, after they have knocked Shinichi unconscious. When Shinichi comes to his senses, however, the two of them seem anything but shocked by the events; instead, they are interested in their aggressors and...

Akio Jissôji created a rich and diverse body of work during his five decades in Japan’s film and television industries. For some, he is best-known for his science-fiction: the 1960s TV series “Ultraman” and 1988’s box-office success “Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis”. For others, it is his 1990s adaptations of horror and mystery novelist Edogawa Rampo, such as Watcher in the Attic and Murder on D Street. And then there are his New Wave films for the Art Theatre Guild, three of which – “This Transient Life“, “Mandara” and “Poem”, forming “The Buddhist Trilogy” – are collected here.

Winner of the Golden Leopard award at the 1970 Locarno Film Festival, “This Transient Life” is among the Art Theatre Guild’s most successful – and most controversial – productions. The film concerns a brother and sister from a rich family who defy the expectations placed on them: he has little interest in further...

Award-winning trailblazing Japanese actress Kirin Kiki died on Sept. 15. Kiki recently appeared in Shoplifters and had been fighting cancer since being diagnosed in 2004, but the official cause of her death has yet to be announced. She was 75.

Kiki was born Keiko Nakatani in Tokyo in 1943. She started her acting career in the ’60s under the name Yuki Chihi in a theater troupe, where she met actor Shin Kishida. They would marry and then later divorce in 1968. In 1973, she married musician Yuya Uchida and they had a daughter Yayako.

She would go on to find success in TV in shows such as Shichinin no Mago (Seven Grandchildren) as well as Terauchi Kantaro Ikka (Kantaro Terauchi Family) and Jikandesuyo (It’s Time).

On the film side, she starred in Tokyo Tawa: Okan to Boku to Tokidoki Oton (Tokyo Tower: Mom and Me, and Sometimes Dad) and Chronicle of My Mother. The two...

Actor Kirin Kiki died Sept. 15 after an award-winning career that spanned six decades and saw her work with many of Japan's leading directors. She was first diagnosed with cancer in 2004 and had said earlier this year it was beyond treatment, but the official cause of death has yet to be announced.

Born Keiko Nakatani in Tokyo in 1943, she began acting in the early 1960s under the name Yuki Chiho in a theater troupe, before finding success in television comedies, in particular as a grandmother in Terauchi Kantaro Ikka, despite her young age. She married actor Shin Kishida ...

Actor Kirin Kiki died Sept. 15 after an award-winning career that spanned six decades and saw her work with many of Japan's leading directors. She was first diagnosed with cancer in 2004 and had said earlier this year it was beyond treatment, but the official cause of death has yet to be announced.

Born Keiko Nakatani in Tokyo in 1943, she began acting in the early 1960s under the name Yuki Chiho in a theater troupe, before finding success in television comedies, in particular as a grandmother in Terauchi Kantaro Ikka, despite her young age. She married actor Shin Kishida ...

The Bloodthirsty Trilogy

Blu ray

Arrow Films

1970 – 1974 /2:35 / Street Date May 22, 2018

Starring Yukiko Kobayashi, Chôei Takahashi, Toshio Kurosawa

Cinematography by Kazutami Hara, Rokurô Nishigaki

Written by Ei Ogawa, Hiroshi Nagano

Directed by Michio Yamamoto

Hell-raising vampires invade the normally serene confines of Japanese cinema in three elegant 70’s shockers directed by Michio Yamamoto. Joining far-flung contemporaries like Jean Rollin, Harry Kümel and Stephanie Rothman, Yamamoto’s trilogy helped rejuvenate a genre always hungry for fresh blood.

In 1970’s The Vampire Doll, a restless spirit’s killing spree is the product of a tragic family secret – a storyline out of a Ross Hunter weepy with arterial spray taking the place of tears.

In search of her wayward brother and his girlfriend, Keiko arrives at a lonely country home only to find the sibling gone and his fiancee Yuko dead. Yuko’s saturnine mother is unusually tight-lipped about the circumstances surrounding her...

Even before I’d seen a single Godzilla movie, I knew Mechagodzilla was my favorite damn thing in the entire franchise. Because really, how could it not be? Regardless of its incarnation, Mechagodzilla is still a giant robot shaped like a monster. There are few things in entertainment that are quite that perfect, and it seems that pop culture agrees. Mechagodzilla has become something of a series icon, up there with King Ghidorah and Mothra as one of the most recognizable non-Godzilla kaiju in the franchise. Yet all legends have to start somewhere, and for Mechagodzilla, it was in the fourteenth film of the franchise, Jun Fukuda’s aptly titled Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974).

Taking place presumably sometime after the previous year’s Godzilla vs. Megalon (although continuity was never the Showa series’ high point), Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla takes place in a Japan already rocked by monster attacks, with a...

Recent hot cinema topics such as the portrayal of the Mandarin character in Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 and speculations about what classic Star Trek villain Benedict Cumberbatch’s character in J.J Abrams’ Star Trek: Into Darkness was modeled after leading up to the film’s release, among others, underline the importance of great villains in genre cinema.

Creating a great cinematic villain is a difficult goal that makes for an incredibly rewarding and memorable viewer experience when it is achieved.

We’ll now take a look at the greatest film villains. Other writing on this subject tends to be a bit unfocused, as “greatest villain” articles tend to mix live-action human villains with animated characters and even animals. Many of these articles also lack a cohesive quality as they attempt to cover too much ground at once by spanning all of film history.

This article focuses on the 1970’s,...