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IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SONATINE (1993)

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DIRECTED BY: Takeshi Kitano

FEATURING: Takeshi Kitano, Aya Kokumai, Tetsu Watanabe, Masanobu Katsumura

PLOT: The yakuza dispatches an enforcer to Okinawa to resolve a dispute between rival gangs, but the ensuing conflict threatens the future of his clan and his very life.Still from Sonatine (1993)COMMENTS: If you made a checklist of essential gangster-film elements, Sonatine would check a lot of boxes. Lone assassin, shootout in a bar, car bombing, cute moll faithfully standing by, thoughts of retirement balanced with the inescapability of the criminal lifestyle… they’re all here, and yet not one of them hits in the way you expect. Sonatine is unquestionably a crime film, particularly the Japanese-yakuza-chronicle variety, but it operates at a wildly different pace than its brethren.

At the time he made Sonatine, Takeshi Kitano was as close as Japan had to a “king of all media,” having found success in film, television, and even stand-up comedy. This project, however, found him ruminative and depressed. So it’s probably no wonder that his mob middleman, Murakawa, is similarly disenchanted with his life. Audiences were well-trained to expect an antihero with deep emotions, but very little would have prepared them for the taciturn, blank-faced hitman presented here.

When Murakawa complains that he lost three men on his last assignment, his protest—“I don’t like it”—feels like it would be a threat for retaliation coming from anyone else. But as Takeshi delivers it, it’s a resigned grump. Faced with other threats or inflection points, his response at every turn is quiet contemplation. Rivals have bombed his headquarters? Quiet contemplation. One of his underlings shot in the head right in front of him? Quiet contemplation. He witnesses an ugly attempted rape? He slaps the perpetrator, then quickly shoots the surprised assailant in the belly before quietly contemplating the victim. Murakawa is tired and devoid of hope, a character well-past finding bursts of violence to be alarming or invigorating. Takeshi does more to point up the essential hollowness and indignity of organized crime than 20 film scoldings could accomplish.

The desperate blankness of Murakawa brings brief moments of diversion and happiness into stark relief. As he and his underlings are stowed away at an Okinawan safehouse, he finds moments of pleasure that are surprising in their simplicity. A game with folded-paper sumo wrestlers is transformed into a live-action version, and Takeshi’s smile is captivating. He also has fun shooting fireworks and prankishly digging sandpits on the beach. But he knows all too well that death is close at hand; no pleasant distractions or pretty admirers can solve the fundamental malaise.

The climactic showdown is the ultimate proof of Takeshi’s concept: cornered on all sides, Murakawa plans and implements a bloody revenge on his foes. True to form, we see almost none of it, save for distant flashes of light and smoke and brief intercuts of bloody reprisals (set to the Tangerine Dream-esque score of legendary composer Joe Hisaishi). There’s no joy in it, no escape, no “one last showdown” to give him a brighter future, even if the plot conspired to provide him with one. Filmgoers expecting a gritty crime drama must have found this slow, grim-faced character study a strange proposition. But say this for Takeshi: his checklist might have been different than his audiences, but all his boxes are checked.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sonatine doesn’t encourage a straight reading, where logic dictates meaning and importance. When our normal responses are broken down, we relate more directly to the film… at a time when action movies typically hand us a canned experience, [Kitano’s] pictures carry a charge of originality.”–Patrick Z. McGavin, The Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by film izle. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

Sonatine

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    CAPSULE: BATMAN NINJA VS. YAKUZA LEAGUE (2025)

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    ニンジャバットマン対ヤクザリーグ

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    DIRECTED BY: , Shinji Takagi

    FEATURING: Voices of , Romi Park, Yûki Kaji, Takaya Kamikawa, Rie Kugimiya,  Kazuhiro Yamaji; Joe Daniels, Molly Searcy, Bryson Baugus, Aaron Campbell, Karlii Hoch, John Swasey (English dub)

    PLOT: The morning after returning to contemporary Gotham from feudal Japan, Batman finds an ominous landmass floating in the stratosphere and an entire nation wiped from the globe.

    COMMENTS: It is another normal day in Gotham. Batman, Robin, Red Robin, and Red Hood are assembled in Wayne Manor. Yakuza are falling from the sky. This unlikely weather has been plaguing Gotham for the past month, claims Commissioner Gordon, who at least is spared the sight of the islands of Japan floating ominously above the city. Batman, as befits a Detective Comics hero, suspects that something isn’t quite right.

    Junpei Mizusaki and Shinji Takagi pick up where Batman Ninja left off. Gorilla Grod, it appears, was not the mastermind behind the diabolical doings which grafted DC’s rogues gallery to feudal Japan. Grod’s space-time disrupter has apparently switched gears to plant the Justice League into a facsimile of contemporary Japan: one ruled over by warring yakuza clans, which are in turn lorded over by the erstwhile crime fighters. As Batman comes to terms with this development, his family team of good-doers square off in grand comics-cinematic style against the West-meets-East imaginings of impossibly powerful villains.

    The filmmakers pull off this stunt with aplomb and plenty of explosions. There is never a dull moment as the plot twists along its appropriately circuitous path. Exotic delights abound, be they Green Lantern’s “death dice” tumbling their luminescent emerald destruction down upon one of the heroes, Robin being trapped inside a claw machine filled with California rolls, origami folds of space and time shifting disastrously in the arch villain’s lair, or more prosaically when evil-Aquaman tumbles to the ground after sparring with time-shifted—but thankfully, still Justice-League-y—Wonder Woman. (The subtitle options obliged me to watch the Japanese-dialogue version with “English for the Hard of Hearing”. This kept me informed of explosions and music, but regrettably did not provide the written explanation, “Massive Thud of a 20-Foot Silver Catfish Crashing to the Ground.”) Whoever may have had the power to restrain the creative team her obviously had no inclination so to do, which reminds me that never before have I seen an orbital yakuza launcher powered through a cycling gyre manifested by the world’s fastest man.

    It’s all pretty nuts and a whole lot of fun. The surprises found in the interpretations of this solidly American franchise throughout the two parts (Batman Ninja / vs. the Yakuza League) are plentiful enough that I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that both films together would fit nicely in our Apocrypha: their voracious vim, endless excesses, and infinite ingenuity make this epic adventure a mighty Boff! Bonk! and Pow! right to the brainpan in manner you don’t see over here on the boring side of the Pacific.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…equal parts exciting action and completely ludicrous comedy, making it a faithful, loving tribute to both anime and Western superheroes. It looks great, the character designs are brilliant, and it features surprisingly funny gags. Anyone looking for more will be bored or (more likely) confused.”–Sam Barsanti, IGN (contemporaneous)

    Batman Ninja vs. Yakuza League (Blu-Ray + Digital)

    Batman Ninja vs. Yakuza League (Blu-Ray + Digital)
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    CAPSULE: VERSUS (2000)

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    DIRECTED BY: Ryûhei Kitamura

    FEATURING: , Hideo Sakaki, Chieko Misaka

    PLOT: Two escaped convicts make their way to the location where gangsters are supposed to pick them up; double-crosses follow, complicated by the fact that the rendezvous spot is a mystical forest where the dead quickly return to life.

    Still from Versus (2000)

    COMMENTS: Although there’s a token plot involving a gate to Hell and reincarnation, Versus is basically nonstop dopey comic book violence, choreographed by filmmakers who don’t care as much about logic as they do about making sure the actors look cool while shooting zombies. From about the ten-minute mark until the credits roll after two hours, the movie  is one long melee, with a few pauses to catch its breath.

    Because the dead pop right back up as zombies here in the “resurrection forest,” there’s seldom a lack of victims; if the script temporarily runs short of bodies, it just brings in another platoon of yakuza or cops from off-screen and the killing starts again. The cast is so large that you lose track of who’s killed who, and how many times. Sometimes it only takes one bullet to take down a zombie; sometimes twenty are needed. For variety’s sake there’s ample kickboxing, knife fights, some kind of combination machine gun/bazooka, and samurai swords pulled out for the final showdown. The violence is often played for grossout laughs—Evil Dead II is a big influence here—with heart-eating, a bad guy who can punch straight through heads, and eyeballs stuck on the ends of fingers. More conventional comic relief comes in a cowardly yakuza, and there’s also a tiresome running gag where the hero keeps knocking the heroine unconscious. The mythology motivating the massacre is serviceable, the leads look good, and the action is sold in bulk. And that’s about it.

    In hindsight, Versus is not an incredibly weird film, although the mix of samurai, yakuza, zombies, and nonstop gore was novel at the time. The movie was significant as a proto- film, however. Not only did it launch the career of cult action star and subgenre icon Tak Sakaguchi, but it’s also the first screenwriting credit for , who would go on to mix the absurd violence found here with -style body horror in Meatball Machine (2005) to launch the line of bioweapondry-obsessed B-movies that grew increasingly ridiculous throughout the early 21 century.

    Arrow Video’s 2021 “Limited Edition” Blu-ray is another Criterion-quality set from the specialty releaser, with numerous extras and a second disc housing the “Ultimate Edition” of Versus. This 131-minute cut provides an additional 11 minutes of fighting footage that was newly shot in 2003. If you’re surprised that they went back to the forest to film even more fight scenes, rather than some extra exposition or character development, then you’re probably not in the target audience for Ultimate Versus.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “Kitamura’s gonzo flick is overstuffed to the point of nausea, its barrage of gory outrageousness becoming wearisome after the first fifty fatal mutilations…”–Nick Schager, Lessons of Darkness (DVD)

    (This movie was nominated for review by “Martin,” who described it as a “Japanese gangster, zombie, martial arts, apocalypse movie. Mind blowing.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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    CAPSULE: THE MACHINE GIRL (2008)

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    Kataude Mashin Gâru

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Minase Yashiro, , Honoka, Nobuhiro Nishihara,  Kentaro Shimazu

    PLOT: Yakuza kill a schoolgirl’s brother and lop off her arm, but a friendly mechanic affixes a Gatling gun to her stump and she goes on a bloodbath of revenge.

    Still from The Machine Girl (2008)

    COMMENTS: The term “,” as used on this site, refers to a subgenre of Japanese horror movies, beginning with Meatball Machine in 2005, that were equally influenced by the mechanical body horror of Tetsuo: The Iron Man and the over-the-top comic violence of The Gore Gore Girls-era . Few movies could be more exemplary of this mix than ‘s junkyard bloodletter about a schoolgirl with a machine-gun arm hunting down the brutal ninja-yakuza gang that killed her brother.

    The plot is vengeance-standard boilerplate; the movie really only cares about its gore set pieces (to an extent, it also cares about its action set pieces, but mainly because they set up big gory finishes). Iguchi is nothing if not creative in coming up with new ways to mutilate the human body: Machine Girl gives you finger sushi, a tempura arm, people halved from head to crotch, a pair of guys who swap half their faces, and for a finale, a sadistic yakuza matron who warns Machine Girl, “I’m wearing a special bra…”

    Even in service of the absurd, the practical effects here are good to excellent; the blood spurts may be watery and improbably voluminous, but the prosthetic heads and other body parts can be surprisingly realistic. The computer aided effects, on the other hand, are deployed too casually: the use of green screen is sometimes obvious, some effects look pixelated, and the bullet flashes are overdone and silly-looking. There are also frequent blood spatters on the camera lens, which is a fourth-wall-breaking pet peeve of mine.

    It’s noteworthy that most of the main characters—both heroes and the final boss—are females who drive the action and triumph over the males. (All those schoolgirl upskirt fetish shots take away from the feminist vibe a bit, though). The three main actresses all do well, considering the low bar. In her film debut, gravure idol Minase Yashiro shows decent athleticism that makes her a plausible action lead. Honoka, an actress with mostly adult credits, has wicked fun playing a bad girl who keeps her bra on for a change. Most impressive of all is Asami, previously known mostly for her pink films, who, when not kicking ninja ass, forgets that she’s in a trashy B-movie and gives her emotional all grieving for her slain son (who must be about eight years younger than her). The extra effort is appreciated. The one knock against the two heroines is that they enjoy torturing a captured thug way too much, surrendering their moral authority. (This may seem like a stupid complaint in a movie about a girl with a machine gun arm, but it’s still a narrative slip-up, since Machine Girl had previously been depicted as a righteous avenger).

    The makeup and effects here were done by , who appears in the promotional material on almost equal billing with Iguchi. He would go on to surpass Iguchi as a director, and in fact has proven the most talented of all the directors associated with Japan’s splatterpunks.

    This review is based on Tokyo Shock’s two-disc “The Machine Girl: Jacked! The Definitive Decade One Deluxe Edition.” The title makes it sound like an impressive release, until you realize it’s a DVD-on-demand[efn_note]A release of the same name comes on one Blu-ray, but the one available consumer review of that disc suggests that the Blu, while more expensive, does not include the special features found on disc 2 of the DVD set. The same reviewer claims that the visual quality of the Blu is noticeably better than previous Tokyo Shock releases, an improvement that does not come through on the DVD-R. Buyer beware.[/efn_note], and the sometimes fuzzy presentation is nothing like a remastered print. This edition also fails to include the spin-off short “Shyness Machine Girl,” which had been included in previous releases; its absence makes it hard to call this a truly “definitive” release. What the set does deliver are two behind-the-scenes featurettes, one running ten minutes and the other twenty (with some of the footage overlapping between the two); a twelve minute segment devoted to the effects; action scene rehearsals; an older group interview (in which Nishimura discusses his then yet-to-be-released Tokyo Gore Police); and several often amusing sets of footage from screenings and Q&As with cast and crew (including one where Iguchi and Nishimura introduce the film together wearing sumo loincloths). Altogether, the supplements run almost as long as the movie itself. The release also sports an English dubbed track. Altogether, it’s an heavily hyped package that promises more than it delivers—much like the movie itself.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “The story is absolutely ridiculous, of course… There’s always some bit of extra craziness going on in the corners…”–Jay Seaver, Efilm Critic (contemporaneous)

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    CAPSULE: SHE’S JUST A SHADOW (2019)

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    DIRECTED BY: Adam Sherman

    FEATURING: Tao Okamoto, Kihiro, Kentez Asaka, Marcus Johnson

    PLOT: The matriarch of a prostitution empire, married to a violent pimp, leads her gang against a rival band of yakuza while a serial killer preys on her girls and one of her lackeys is caught in a love triangle.

    Still from She's Just a Shadow (2019)

    WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This super-stylized, candy colored exploitationer with a couple of precognitive hallucination scenes feels like a budget version of Kill Bill insistent on earning an NC-17 rating. It’s well off the beaten path, but still only on the outskirts of the truly weird.

    COMMENTS: A movie that opens with a serial killer binding and tying his nude victim to train tracks and then pleasuring himself as the locomotive approaches is a movie that knows the audience it’s after. She’s Just a Shadow gives you all the perverted thrills you could ask for—sushi served off naked hookers, constant coke-sniffing, an infirmary full of shot-up whores —all wrapped up in a slick, arty package with professional lighting, elaborate costuming, and acres of nudes.

    Shot mostly in the neon-lit night or carefully controlled interiors, Shadow is a great-looking film, but unfortunately loses points due to acting that is not up to the professionalism of the cinematography. Former Ralph Lauren model Tao Okamoto has had major roles in Hollywood superhero movies I haven’t seen, so I can’t say she’s an amateur, but she could have fooled me with her performance here. Her line deliveries are almost completely drab and inflectionless; the lack of emoting reminds me of nothing more than Madeleine Reynal’s deliberately blank performance in Dr. Caligari. She smokes a lot, so her long drags off her thin black cigarette help explain the frequent pauses in her delivery. Making his acting debut as a flunky whose main duty in the syndicate seems to be drinking and sleeping with a pair of the girls 24/7, J-pop musician Kihiro is a little better, but not quite ready to be a leading man; his role requires him to be strung-out and exhausted most of the time, partly compensating for his lack of passion. With the two leads being so laid back, it’s left to a bodyguard named “Knockout” (Marcus Johnson) to bring the most energy, though only in a small role. Main bad guy Kentez Asaka can act, but not without a distracting accent sported by none of the rest of the cast (some of whom speak the Queen’s English despite playing Japanese gangsters).

    The screenplay, too, is not up to the standard set by the visuals. Shadow‘s characters can be insultingly dumb when it advances the plot. The dialogue treads a line between cliched and risible. Trite ideas are rendered in eyebrow-raising prose: “Both Jesus and the garbageman wanted a little more time when they were carrying their loads up their separate hills,” muses one character. Later he gives us the even cringier observation, “Women… no matter how human they seem, they’re not. They’re just shadows. But on the other hand, aren’t we all?” Lines like these give Shadow an extra layer of unintentional (?) camp, something that doesn’t work entirely against the film—and will likely be overlooked, anyway, by those looking for cheap thrills.

    Despite its handicaps, Shadow will slay many with its over-the-top grindhouse audacity. Director Adam Sherman has clearly absorbed a and flick or two, and while the acting is bland and the dialogue may elicit some chuckles, the wild and colorful visuals are up to his influences, and he goes all out to give the audience what they crave, with little filter on the stylish sleaze and depravity. If you’re a fan of modern yakuza exploitation flicks, you’ll probably dig this.

    She’s Just a Shadow opens in New York City (and possibly elsewhere) this Friday, July 19; it will probably find a more natural home on VOD soon after.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…exploitation bliss; unfiltered and pure and injected straight into your putrid pupils via a dirty needle.”–DanXIII, Horror Fuel (contemporaneous)