Letterboxd-Review:
A superb proto-jitsuroku type yakuza film by Junya Sato. Fumio Watanabe (in probably his best role) is a wonderfully cast against type as a crime boss who actually cares for his men and is the first one to barge into fight when rivals come knocking on the door. Powerful political figure Eijiro Yanagi becomes his consultant, after which short tempered rival boss Ryohei Uchida starts feeling the fire under his arse. Things get even more heated after Watanabe takes a Ginza gambling joint from the Chicago mafia with the assistance of machine gun happy lone wolf Noboru Ando. Tetsuro Tamba, Hideo Murota and Rinichi Yamamoto are a detective squad in a desperate battle against red tape while trying to bring the gangs down. The story is fictional, but the film feels like a jitsuroku movie. Sato draws an entire underworld map with cops, gangsters and political players all placed on the same chess table. The film is talkative, but never boring, feels extremely matter of fact, and comes with a fabulous musical score by Masaru Sato.

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 29 min
Size: 	4.68 GiB
Video
Codec: 	MPEG-2
Resolution: 	1440x1080 ~> 1920x1080
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	7 324 kb/s
BPP: 	0.196
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 141 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/F938C3317560704/Zoku_soshiki_boryoku_1967_1080i_HDTV_AAC_MPEG2_JPTVclub.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/ACAB412B82260A4/Organized-Crime-2-English.srt

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Jun’ya Sato – Zoku soshiki boryoku AKA Organized Violence II (1967) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis (from Letterboxed):
Aiba is a gang boss who has just got out of jail, and finds everything has changed. His old gang has broken up, and only a few people still respect him. So he becomes a consultant to another gang who are about to be clobbered by a much larger gang moving in from out of town. Aiba proves a crafty tactician, and does very well at playing gangs off against each other in order to save the smaller gang. His advice is not always taken by those he tries to help, but he is generally proved right.

Bakuto.kirikomi-tai.1971.1080p.U-NEXT.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-LA.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 37 min
Size: 	2.81 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	4 020 kb/s
BPP: 	0.081
Audio
#1:  	Japanese 2.0ch AAC LC @ 125 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/65792C842A68457/Bakuto.kirikomi-tai.1971.1080p.U-NEXT.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-LA.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/35FD658466113CD/Gambler…-English.srt

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Jun’ya Satô – Bakuto kirikomi-tai AKA Gambler’s Counterattack (1971) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Summary:
In a Japanese women’s prison, the female prisoner Matsu, nicknamed Scorpion, is treated with extraordinary cruelty and sadism by the warden Goba. While being transferred, she is able to affect an escape along with six other women. Leading them across the wastelands, all the while pursued by Goba, they take their revenge on the men who seek to abuse them.

Female.Prisoner.Scorpion.Jailhouse.41.1972.576p.BluRay.FLAC.1.0.x264-CepHeuS.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 28 min
Size: 	2.63 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x424 
Aspect ratio:  	2.40:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 867 kb/s
BPP: 	0.372
Audio
#1:  	Japanese 1.0ch FLAC @ 370 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/0E546C86C7A87F3/Female.Prisoner.Scorpion.Jailhouse.41.1972.576p.BluRay.FLAC.1.0.x264-CepHeuS.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Shun’ya Itô – Joshuu sasori: Dai-41 zakkyo-bô AKA Female Convict Scorpion Jailhouse 41 (1972) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
The Joy of Torture is an anthology that is made up of three separate stories that all intersect: The first segment is about Shinza who was hurt while working when a log hit him on the head, and now sister Mitsu is forced to give herself to her brother’s boss Mr. Mino in order to help pay for Shinza’s doctor bills. The second segment is about the arrival of mother Reiho and her servant Rintoku at the Jukuin monastery. The monastery is located near a temple inhabited by priests and one day when one of them named Shunkei runs by Reiho he arouses something inside of her. The final segment is about a tattoo artist named Horicho who has just given Kimicho his greatest tattoo to date. While showing his work off to a group of people, a man named Lord Nambera walks by mocking the tattoo and its lack of realism. (imdb)

Teruo Ishii - Tokugawa onna keibatsu-shi aka The Joy of Torture (1968) BDRip.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 36 min
Size: 	2.63 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x428 
Aspect ratio:  	2.40:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 200 kb/s
BPP: 	0.305
Audio
#1:  	Japanese 1.0ch AC-3 @ 384 kb/s
#2:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 320 kb/s (Commentary by Tom Mes)

https://nitro.download/view/39B74E8EA49B717/Teruo_Ishii_-_Tokugawa_onna_keibatsu-shi_aka_The_Joy_of_Torture_(1968)_BDRip.mkv

Language(s):Japanese, English commentary
Subtitles:English

The post Teruo Ishii – Tokugawa onna keibatsu-shi AKA Shogun’s Joy of Torture (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Nagisa Oshima’s first feature film, A STREET OF LOVE AND HOPE paints a biting portrait of poverty and class difference through the life of a young boy who sells pigeons on the street. The radical and unflinching politics that would become Oshima’s hallmark are here on display in his earliest work.

1.26GB | 1h 02mn | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/CA37171C233D147/Street.of.Love.and.Hope.1959.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264.KG.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English Hardcoded

The post Nagisa Ôshima – Ai to kibô no machi AKA A Street of Love and Hope (1959) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:

A clinically presented series of stark white, unembellished placards illustrates the sobering statistical data for the overwhelming public sentiment against the abolition of the death penalty as an off-screen narrator (Nagisa Oshima) provides a snide, but impassioned rebuttal to popular opinion by presenting a objective documentary of the austere and impersonal milieu associated with the methodical process of carrying out a state execution through the specific example of the appointed hanging of a convicted rapist and murderer known only as ‘R’ (Do-yun Yu): an empty, minimalist sitting room that provides an illusive, parting glimpse of a semblance of home for the condemned prisoner as he makes his way into the execution room, an assembly of unnamed official guests waiting in a segregated viewing room to witness the macabre ceremony, a procedural rehearsal of the chamber’s fail-safe sequence as the prisoner is blindfold and fitted with a noose, the actuation of trap door, the median measured time of 18 minutes before the heart completely stops and a staff physician (Rokko Toura) is able to record the official time of death. However, the seemingly predictable execution script fails to correlate as expected, as the doctor continues to detect R’s breathing for several minutes beyond the expected point of expiration. The unexpected development shifts the film’s tone from observant polemic to wry, dark comedy as the guards – eager to disavow any culpability that may have led to the malfunction – are thrown into helpless confusion on how to proceed with the seemingly half-dead hanged man in order to complete their assigned task. Imploring the doctor to promptly resuscitate R as an ironic humane gesture so that he can regain consciousness before being put to death again (and therefore, have an awareness of his guilt), the guards soon realize that the trauma of the failed execution has resulted in the prisoner’s amnesia. Acting on the advice of the education officer (Fumio Watanabe), the officials begin to re-enact episodes from the trial transcripts before an impassive and oblivious R in order to trigger his memory, revealing a more insidious and pervasive cultural malaise that cannot be set right by the empty gestures of inequitable justice.

Inspired by the notorious, real-life execution of a convicted murderer named Ri Chin’u who had killed two Japanese schoolgirls in 1958 (and subsequently courted publicity for his crimes through the newspapers and the police), Death by Hanging is an ingeniously conceived, subversive, provocative, and elegantly modulated tragicomedy on intolerance, assimilation, and capital punishment. Using recurring imagery of circles – in particular, the hangman’s noose, the Japanese flag (a motif similarly used in Oshima’s earlier film, The Sun’s Burial), and the upended, spinning bicycle wheel – that is further reflected in the film’s circular narrative structure, Nagisa Oshima illustrates the overarching public complicity that has perpetuated the cycle of dehumanization, racism, and violence and continues to provide the ideological bulwark for the nation’s codified, postwar social policies that foster mono-ethnicity and conformity at the expense of inclusion and diversity. Through repeated episodes of role-playing and transference, Nagisa Oshima further creates an analogy for the collective subconscious that exposes the underlying hypocrisy of its entrenched (and obsolete) ideology: the physician’s suppressed history of committed wartime atrocities (that broadly reflects the nation’s prewar militarism, isolationism, and imperialism); the vulgar stereotypes of ethnic Koreans employed by the guards in an attempt to re-instill R’s ethnic identity (note the use of a non-diegetic German language soundtrack as R is brought to the beach that further reinforces the historical legacy of racial intolerance); the awkward (and absurdly comical) re-enactments of the victims’ abduction and violation that reveal the participants’ own sexual neuroses and ambiguity over shifting traditional gender roles in modern society. In the end, the provocative and intrinsically incendiary issue of death penalty merely provides an integrally self-enclosed structural framework (and microcosm) for the film’s more contemporarily relevant examination of marginalization, guilt, and social justice – a reluctant, but necessary expurgation rooted in the collective conscience of an unreconciled cultural identity. (Strictly Film School)

3.04GB | 1 h 58 min | 1024×556 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/2A308704E6AD57C/Nagisa_Oshima_-_(1968)_Death_by_Hanging.mkv

Language:Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Nagisa Ôshima – Kôshikei AKA Death by Hanging (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.