hazardes

the hardest thing about writing this post was coming up with a title

rather than dedicate a whole blog post to one film, i thought i'd try writing about all the films i watched this week, in a sort of anthology post, let's see!

two films from Kinji Fukasaku, and one from Teruo Ishii. i'm new to Ishii, Blind Woman's Curse (1970) is the first film of his i've seen, and i enjoyed it a lot. a young Meiko Kaji in her first starring role as the dragon-tattooed oyabun of a yakuza clan, facing off against a rival gang in a surreal mix of traditional period ninkyo eiga yakuza movie and weird grotesque ghost story. this is par for the course for Ishii apparently, some of the titles of his other films are definitely interesting! Horrors of Malformed Men sounds wonderful. Blind Woman's Curse is quite bloody in places, with lots of red paint spraying everywhere in that style common to the early '70s (Lady Snowblood is great for that) i really liked how Kaji's gang all had matching back tattoos that lined up when they stood in formation, with Kaji at one end with the head of the dragon on her back. she is such a badass

it's easy to see why Meiko Kaji went on to become a star. she just has this aura about her, that mesmerising quality that makes it hard to focus on anything else when she's on screen. if i was 20 years older i definitely would've had a poster of her on my teenage bedroom wall (tbf i'd put one up now if i could find one)

Hiroshima Death Match (dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1973) is the second film in the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series, and is a slight departure from the first in that it mainly focuses on one character, the tragic yakuza hitman Shoji Yamanaka (played by Kinya Kitaoji) also starring Meiko Kaji (notice a pattern here) and Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba who gives an incredible performance as the psychopathic Katsutoshi Otomo. stylistically it's exactly the same as the first, which is hardly surprising as they were filmed back to back (the entire five film series was released in the space of two years) and features the same frantic fight scenes and documentary style that leaves you breathless. you remember how i said that i didn't know which of the five films was my favourite? well it might be this one, mainly because of Kaji and Chiba as they are both excellent

based on true events, with only the time period changed slightly so it would continue from the events of the first film rather than being set concurrently (plus production happened so quickly they couldn't rebuild one of the sets in time) Bunta Sugawara takes a back seat in this one. the real life Yamanaka was still held in great reverence by the yakuza of Hiroshima so screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara had to be careful and not change his story too much

i really love this series, there's so much density to it, so much to read about and learn, and it's a tragedy that it took so long to get the recognition it deserves outside of Japan

finally, this week i also watched another Fukasaku movie, Wolves, Pigs, and Men (1964) which has recently been released on blu-ray by Eureka. shot in black and white, this is a brilliant tale of the fallout of a heist gone wrong, starring one of the golden boys of Japanese cinema of the time period, Ken Takakura, playing a character called Jiro, who is an absolute bastard. quite a hard watch in places, this film is packed with social commentary about the downtrodden people forced to live out their lives in the slums of Tokyo, and their efforts to escape to a better life. one film that i am pretty sure was influenced by this masterpiece is Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs as they are quite similar in places (including some nasty torture sequences)

one word i would use to describe this film is “bleak” as there are no happy endings here, when a heist goes wrong things quickly devolve into paranoia and infighting, and when the yakuza get involved, well...

Fukasaku is quickly becoming one of my favourite film makers, everything i've seen of his so far has been fantastic, and each time they announce a new release of one of his movies it jumps right to the top of my must watch list. Arrow have one coming up, “The Threat” which is another one of his black and white earlier films, and i am looking forward to it immensely