imdb:
Dear Kaita Ablaze brings together a young woman Azami obsessed with Murayama’s painting, a young man Saku, who can hear unusual frequencies and claims to be Murayama or his spiritual imprint and a quartet of young performers with psychic abilities. They bond over Murayama’s work which they recreate in performative dance while driving to a mysterious cave called Agartha.Read More »
Part One of the Maiku Hama Private Eye Trilogy
Detective Maiku “Mike” Hama (Masatoshi Nagase; Mystery Train) navigates the Yokohama underworld with razor sharp threads, Belmondo cool and two-fisted street savvy. But when he comes to the aid of a Taiwanese waiter at a local mah-jongg parlor, the unflappable Hama has no idea what he’s in for. Though seemingly a luckless immigrant teetering on the threshold of Yokohama’s gutter, Hama’s Taiwanese client holds the secret to a ferocious gangland revenge triangle that soon has bullets, fists and severed fingers flying. Hama’s plunge into a dizzyingly escalating, brutally violent multiethnic gang war ultimately snares him in a web of revenge and deceit that spans continents and severs bloodlines.Read More »
The third entry in the unrelated series which began with Shiryo No Wana, Toshiharu Ikeda’s bloody horror film deals with a policewoman (Megumi Yokoyama) investigating the apparent suicide of a college coed. The prime suspects include the girl’s professor, who may have been having an affair with her, and the professor’s wife, who frequents lesbian bars. Gruesome axe murders and mutilations ensue, leading Yokoyama to a shocking discovery. Less grisly than its predecessors, this installment is perhaps the best-scripted of the three.Read More »
A female projectionist suddenly comes to the self-realization that she just in fact may be a serial killer responsible for brutally murdering everyone around her.Read More »
Synopsis by AMG:
After a 14-year-absence, Teruo Ishii returned to the director’s chair with this anthology film based on the works of manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge. The main character in all four segments is a fledgling cartoonist named Tsube (Shiro Sano). In the first segment, Tsube encounters a dotty old man named Ri (Akio Yokoyama) after renting a tumble-down cottage in the country. The following day, Ri, his equally weird wife (Chika Nakagami), and his two squalid children move into his house. Soon the wife is stealing the cucumbers in his garden while the two kids devour all the food in the house.Read More »
Cult director Koji Wakamatsu (famous abroad for titles such as “Go, Go Second Time Virgin”) returns to helm the sixth in this perversely entertaining series. A Kabukicho gigolo with a gambling debt Mikio Osawa agrees to bump off a rich wife’s husband for a bundle of cash, but botches the hit. On the run in the snow-covered hills of northern Japan, he holes up in a shuttered, deserted house. But the house is not empty: a timid, traumatized girl Mika Ito lives there, in the thrall of a sick, hot-tempered trucker Shiro Sano who has kept her there since she was a tiny girl. Osawa tries hard but looks out of his depth here, as veteran Sano and 23-year-old ingenue Ito build an all-too-believable, monstrous relationship as sadistic paternal pervert and terrified tremulous child. File under guilty pleasure.Read More »