Bullet Terror (恐怖の弾痕) (1957)
A young judo expert (Akira Takarada) assumes a white collar job in a night club company that is being harassed by the yakuza and their sword for hire bodyguard (Jun Tazaki), whose father was once upon a time killed by the judo guy’s good-for-nothing father (talk about coincidences) – an incident that has stained the decent son’s life and career ever since. The new employer soon turns out to be no better – their real business is revealed to be narcotics. Mildly entertaining b-action film with a couple of judo vs. sword duels. The storyline and characterization are purely programmer stuff, though, and some scenes are badly dated (e.g. long episode featuring a time bomb ticking in the clueless hero’s car while he’s chasing the bad guy).
Small scale, widescreen Toho thriller about a detective (Ryo Ikebe) whose wife is being targeted by an escaped prisoner (Makoto Sato). The detective decides to go with it and use his wife as a decoy. Although slightly hampered by the usual hostage clichés (the ladies in peril bungle up every escape attempt), it’s a solid film and the second half is quite good with Sato invading the neighbor’s house, taking them as hostage and stalking his target from distance. Ikebe makes a good old school lead, a bit too handsome for the role but the unshaven beard compensates.
This was the first of the two live action films based on Kazumasa Hirai’s Wolfguy manga franchise. There were two Wolfguy mangas being published simultaneously: “Wolfguy” and “Adult Wolfguy”, aimed at youth and adult readers respectively. This movie, produced by Toho, was based on the former, which followed its werewolf hero as a bullied high school boy. It’s a quite an imaginative and often atmospheric, if sometimes cheesy story that suffers from a couple of slow patches despite the wonderfully short 77 minute running time. Young Yusaku Matsuda does his feature film debut as a villain.
This a bit of a slow burner for nothing much happens in the film. However, you’ll be surprised by how it grows on you. The film is about two semi-slackers (Kenichi Hasegawa and Kunie Tanaka) with an ultra-intimate friendship (wait for the scene where sick Tanaka pees in his pants, and Hasegawa then dries him with a towel) working, slacking and drinking in a freezing Hokkaido town. For a modern comparison point, imagine an early 2000s Nobuhiro Yamashita film with less humour and more 70s grit. Cinematography by Shinsaku Himeda is solid, and the film’s minimal score is quite lovely. The film was a Toho production, one of the many mainstream films by Roman Porno master Tatsumi Kumashiro. His other mainstream film, Failed Youth (1974), is often considered one of the best Japanese films of all time.
Tai Kato’s early 20th century set yakuza epic about an ordinary merchant girl (Yoko Maki) who crosses paths with an assassin (Tetsuya Watari). The encounter sends her to jail as a suspected accomplice. Years later she marries a yakuza boss, whose gang is affiliated with working class people. The boss is wounded by the same assassin, who however has a change of heart when his own boss (Bin Amatsu) turns out a rotten bastard, and he falls in love with the woman.
There are some slow patches and unnecessary humour during the first half – the film was released in two halves with an intermission – but the second half is tremendous. Although Kato is more interested in characters and revealing the oppression of common people than filming stylised yakuza mayhem, he ends the film with a fight scene featuring one of the most striking image compositions in recent memory, with fatally wounded Watari and Amatsu fighting for their lives in the background while another dying man is crawling right towards the camera and spitting blood.
Sketches of Cinema 