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Hosted by Henry Zebrowski, Marcus Parks, and Ed Larson, the “Last Update On The Left” series takes a look back over the 13-year history of the chart-topping comedy horror podcast “Last Podcast On The Left” to answer the question: Where are these horrible people now?

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Each week on the “Last Update On The Left,” Henry, Marcus, and Ed dive back in to add more to the stories they left behind, giving a new look at an old take and reexamining past topics.

Episodes go over new information that has been released, plot-changing events that have transpired, or things the hosts just know more about than in...

After several years of working as an assistant director for Suzuki Seijun, Hasebe Yasuharu finally got the chance to direct his own film with 1966’s Black Tight Killers. While Suzuki’s irreverent whatsit Tokyo Drifter went on to international fame that same year, Hasebe’s debut lurked in relative obscurity outside of Japan. It’s an understandable fate since Suzuki’s relentless abstraction of both narrative and action accounts for much of what still makes it feel vital and fresh nearly six decades later, and Black Tight Killers sticks more tightly to the type of mukokuseki akushon (“borderless action”) film that Nikkatsu Studios had been churning out since the late ’50s.

Still, Black Tight Killers is an immensely stylish film in its own right. And it functions as a fascinating time capsule of a post-war Japan at a time when its youth culture was embracing the spirit of the Swinging ’60s.

Feature Dan Auty 19 Jun 2013 - 06:55

Dan looks back at the best films to come out of Japan's Nikkatsu studio...

Formed in 1912, Nikkatsu was Japan’s oldest film studio, and prior to World War II, one the most prolific and successful. The Japanese government’s control and consolidation of the film industry during the war years effectively forced Nikkatsu to cease movie production, and the studio spent more than a decade working solely in exhibition and distribution.

In 1954, the company resumed production, and entered a period that was not only a golden era for the company, but for Japanese cinema in general. Eschewing the period samurai films being made elsewhere, Nikkatsu focused on contemporary stories - action and crime movies, comedies and the increasingly popular ‘wild youth’ films, attracting young, imaginative filmmakers who had found it hard to flourish within the regimented structure of studios like Toho and Shochiku. Throughout the 60s,...

Yasuharu Hasebe is best known for directing films such as Black Tight Killers and the Alley Cat Rock series. In 1976, Hasebe dove into an entirely different style of film making with titles like Assault! Jack the Ripper (Bôkô Kirisaki Jakku). This film was an early entry in Nikkatsu’s Violent Pink series, which represented the studio’s attempt to toughen up its erotic Roman Porno line. Assault! Jack the Ripper is very far removed from the snappy pop-oriented approach of Hasebe’s earlier works. The film, which is now available on English-subtitled DVD from Mondo Macabro, is a surreal, amoral thriller that mixes and matches exploitation tropes in a way that favors explicit nastiness over engaging story telling. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with this.

With Mondo Macabro dipping their toes into the world of 1970’s Nikkatsu roman porno flicks - see the above post on The Watcher In The Attic for details - the question now is which of these films will be coming and how can we get a peek in advance? Watcher, obviously, is one, and Assault! Jack The Ripper! will be the second and we’ve got the trailer to share. Nikkatsu cooked up a pretty potent formula for these films back in the day and it looks just as effective today ... the trailer for this is weird and compelling stuff and very definitely not safe for work.

The director on this one is Yasuharu Hasebe, who started off as an assistant to Seijun Suzuki before making his own name as the director of Black Tight Killers, three Stray Cat Rock films and one entry in the Female Convict Scorpion series.