PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 944

A Boy And His Samurai 2010 Based on Fushigi no Kuni no Yasubei by Gen Araki, screenplay and direction by Yoshihiro Nakamura. Yoshihiro is the director of Fish Story. That's the only other movie of his I've seen.

This movie is a fish out of water comedy, a samurai from late 1800s Edo is transported to modern day Toyko. Kijima's there for a few months and he learns a different life style. A lady named Yusa takes Kijima in and her son Tomoya bonds with him.

Kijima learns to bake delicious desserts and he gets a job after winning a contest. He becomes too attentive to his job and neglects the family. Things go bad before they get better.

It's a charming movie. It's a bit slow going but I was entertained. It's got a few laughs and some jeopardy. Things end on a good note. You can see a nice copy over on Dailymotion.

The Hyperions 2020 Story, screenplay (with additional material by Mike Timm) and direction by Jon McDonald.

There's way too much dysfunctional family in the story. In 1960 Professor Ruckus Mandulbaum invented a badge that gives the wearer a superpower. He chose two orphan children and a slightly older woman to be his super hero team. Vista didn't adjust well and she ran off after using her power to control people's minds to force the Professor to give up a pile of cash and a special device. She left the Professor her badge.

The Professor got rid of Ansel, taking his badge away, and found more youngsters to replace them. That was in 1965, fourteen years later Vista and Ansel are trying to steal the badges from the Hyperion museum. Vista needs them to recover her daughter from another ex-Hyperion who wants his badge back. The baddie was on the second team, they got tossed aside after a few years and the Professor is hunting for a new team.

Everybody's got daddy issues and they are all in a bit of a mess. The movie is a bit of a mess. There's some jokes but they are a bit few and far between. It's rather slow and the characters are annoying at times. It reminds me how good The Specials is and I should watch it again sometime soon. I'd watch that before I'd get around to The Hyperions again.

Legends Of Dinosaurs And Monster Birds 1977

Legend Of Dinosaurs And Monster Birds 1977 Screenplay by Masaru Igami, Isao Matsumoto and Ichirô Ôtsu, directed by Junji Kurata.

 

Made by Toei Company, the studio was inspired by Jaws, the film did poorly in the Japanese theaters but was a block buster in the Soviet Union. It was known in the US as The Legend Of Dinosaurs and it was used in the last episode of the first season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 which was produced by KTMA. That version was chopped up a good bit, the original movie got a US DVD release in 2007 from Media Blasters and that's what I watched.

A woman falls into a cavern, in the Aokigahara region near Mount Fuji, she awakes to find fossilized eggs, one of which hatches. She runs off and scares a construction crew with her hysterics. A geologist called Takashi goes to take a look, while hiking around Mount Fuji he's knocked out and wakes up in the cabin of a family friend. Takashi continues his hunt for the eggs, on the way he meets an old girlfriend Akiko. She's there with her friend Junko, a scuba diver, who wants to dive in the lake where a couple in a small boat went missing.

A diver is injured in the lake, livestock have gone missing, wild theories of living dinosaurs are tossed out to the dubious public. Well, turns out it wasn't a dinosaur, it was two, one of them a plesiosaurus and the other a rhamporhynchus. The pair battle it out and the volcano erupts killing both dinos. It's a bad day on Mount Fuji and the movie ends on a cliffhanger.

I was much more entertained by the movie than on MST3K. It was like seeing a whole different movie, the MST3K version had so much trimmed out of it. It's a more adult film than I thought, there's a bit of gore, mild by today's standards and a brief bit of nudity. I'd watch it again.

I'm not sure why it did so poorly in the Japanese box office. It was Toei's biggest budget, $2.8 million and it didn't even get a third of that back in receipts. It never got released theatrically in the US but it was released to TV in 1987.

Friday Night Movies 942

Punk Samurai Slash Down 2018 Based on the novel Panku-zamurai, kirarete sôrô, screenplay by Kankurô Kudô, directed by Gakuryû Ishii.

A ronin gets involved with the court squabbles of a small lord and a lot of people and monkeys die. There's a fair bit of action and plenty of comedy, as the movie progresses it gets weirder and weirder. You can get a bit of an idea from the trailer link in the title above.

I enjoyed most of the film but I doubt I would buy a copy of the Blu-ray. I might not get back to it.

The Amusement Park 1975 Screenplay by Wally Cook, directed by George A Romero.

I'm not going to buy a copy of George's film either. The Wikipedia called it an American psychological horror film. Fancy description. It's an hour long short that George produced for the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania as an educational film about elder abuse. He shot it in 1973, It premiered at the American Film Festival in 1975 and wasn't released anymore. In 2020 it was restored and we watched the Blu-ray that came out of that work.

An old man wanders around an amusement park, he talks about the plight of the elderly and has plenty of age related issue examples. The park is noisy and filled with people aimlessly milling about, getting in his way. Why anyone would go there is beyond me.

If I saw this on YouTube and George wasn't directing, I doubt I'd sit through it to the end. I got the message loud and clear and it's pretty sad to see there's not been much improvement since. Glad to have seen it but I wouldn't need to see it again.

Friday Night Movies 938

Project Gutenberg 2018 Written and directed by Felix Chong.

Aaron Kwok is a counterfeiter who reveals his story to the police. Aaron says he was recruited by the mysterious man called the Painter. Big money is a good lure and Aaron creates a really good counterfeit $100 US bill. The Painter is a violent man who murders a lot of people while obtaining the materials he needs to print the bills. There's a lot of time devoted to Aaron's relationship with an artist called Yuen Man. It's hard to keep a relationship going when you're a criminal.

It's a 130 min movie that moves at a crawl. They spend a long time describing the counterfeiting process in minute detail. There's a complicated story that turns out to be partially a lie. It gets a bit like The Usual Suspects with a big lie on top of some facts. I liked it some but not enough to run out and buy a copy. An Asian DVD is about 20 bucks on eBay and the Blu-ray is $40 to $75. It's on Amazon Prime for free with membership. You can also see a good copy on YouTube, link above.

To Sleep So As T0 Dream 1986 Written and directed by Kaizô Hayashi. First movie by the writer director. I've not seen any of his other films. We watched the Blu-ray.

Two private eyes get hired to look for a woman. That's about the extent of normal in the film. It's complicated and fairly interesting but hard to describe without many words, that seems wrong for a mostly silent movie. You can see a copy on YouTube, it's a bit dark but you can figure what's going on fine. I might watch it again, at 1.5 speed, but I'm not going to buy the Blu-ray.

Oblivion Island - Karuka And The Magic Mirror 2009

Oblivion Island: Haruka And The Magic Mirror 2009 Written by Hirotaka Adachi and Shinsuke Sato, directed by Shinsuke Sato.

A young girl goes to a temple and wishes to find a mirror that he dead mother had given her. She gets transported to Oblivion Island via a pool or water. She finds an old stuffed animal that she had neglected. He helps her on her quest to find the mirror.

It was entertaining, there's a lot of weird creatures and odd things happening. I'd watch it again so I'm lucky to have been given a DVD. You can see it on YouTube, link above.

Friday Night Movies 918

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On 2022 Story by Dean Fleischer-Camp, Elisabeth Holm and Nick Paley, screenplay by Dean Fleischer-Camp and Nick Paley, directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp.

A guy finds he's got a talking shell called Marcel living in the house he's renting. He's a film maker and he decides to make a film about Marcel. It becomes a big hit on YouTube. Marcel is featured on 60 Minutes in a story that helps reunite him with his family.

It's humorous and silly. I got a few laughs but I thought I would get really tired of Marcel if I had to live with him. Not one I would need to see again.

Bloody Muscle Body Builder In Hell 1995 Written and directed by Shinichi Fukazawa. Filmed in 1995 but not released until 2012. Shinichi wanted to make an over the top ghost story like The Evil Dead but still keeping true to the Japanese ghost story.

A body builder invites his ex-girlfriend and a psychic over to look at his dead father's haunted house. His father had killed his lover and buried her body under the floor of the house. That dead lady lingers in the house, she's still murder mad, and the psychic is the first one to fall under her ire. The body builder tries to keep his ex alive but that doesn't work so well.

It's pretty low budget and the actors are pretty poor. It's fairly wacky and a bit over the top. It was alright but I wouldn't need to pick up a copy.

Friday Night Movies 912

Blade Runner 2049 2017 Based on characters from Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, story by Hampton Fancher, screenplay by Hampton Fancher, directed by Denis Villeneuve.

Ryan Gosling is KD6-3.7, he's a blade runner for the LAPD, he's also a Nexus-9 replicant, nobody likes him. KD6-3.7 lives in the large LA sprawl and hunts rogue replicants, he retires them. It's a pretty crappy future, most everything is smog bound and it rains a lot. After KD6-3.7 retires a protein farmer a box is discovered on the property. It contains the remains of a replicant that died in childbirth. KD6-3.7's boss thinks this could be a bad thing to let the public know about, he wants the child found and destroyed.

Kd6-3.7 runs about getting into one scrap after another. People are dropping left and right. There are a number of factions interested in the child and the reproduction rights of replicants. The Wallace Corp is the main villain, the CEO has his pet psycho, a cold hearted murderin' lady. KD6-3.7 finds Rick Deckard in Las Vegas. No one goes there, it's all sand and radioactivity. There's a bunch of fighting when the psycho lady turns up, more people get killed, Deckard gets kidnapped and KD6-3.7 is left for dead. He's not. He sets off on a rescue mission.

It's quite a long movie, 164 mins, and there's a lot of slow moving stuff goin' on but it didn't drag too much. There's usually something to see but that future sure looks miserable. I mostly liked the movie but not as much as the first movie. I'd be curious to see a sequel. I see there's a TV show set 50 years in the future coming out from Amazon.

Massacre Gun 1967 Screenplay by Yasuharu Hasebe and Ryūzō Nakanishi, directed by Yasuharu Hasebe. Hasebe made a good number of films for Nikkatsu  including the Stray Cat Rock series.

Joe Shishido is Ryūichi Kuroda, a yakuza hitman and the eldest of three brothers. That's his brother Eiji on the right and Saburo on the left. Eiji is a yakuza and Saburo is an up and coming boxer. Boss Azakawa orders Ryūichi to kill his girlfriend. He goes home all miserable, Saburo tries to comfort him but fails. He's young and ignorant, he goes to Azakawa and confronts him. Saburo's going to quit boxing for him so Azakawa has both his hands broken. When the other two brothers find out things get out of hand and nearly everyone dies.

It's a familiar story, yakuza vs yakuza, high body count, little learned. The Arrow Blu-ray looks really nice. I'd certainly watch it again sometime but it's no Tokyo Drifter.

Blood For Blood 1971 Screenplay by Hideichi Nagahara, directed by Yasuharu Hasebe. Another Nikkatu gangster film by the same director as the film above.

Joe Shishido is a yakuza who gets out of prison after 5 years. He returns home to his old gang is being squeezed out by a couple of the local gangs and a gang from Tokyo. It's a blood bath as the rival gangs kill each other in vivid color.Hardly anyone gets out of this alive.

The film looks nice but the story is only about average. No matter, it's still one I'd watch again.

Sleepy Eyes Of Death: 8 Sword Of Villainy 1966

Sleepy Eyes Of Death: 8 Sword Of Villainy 1966 Original story by Renzaburo Shibata, screenplay by Diasuke Ito, directed by Kenji Misumi. Music by Akira Ifukube.

Raizô Ichikawa returns as Nemuri Kyoshiro. He's in Edo, when we meet him he's being told a story by a hairdresser, an oil dealer and his family were attacked in their home and tied up. When they get rescued they find nothing seems to be missing.

 

That's the thief, a man called Aizen, while going through the family papers he talked to the family's little girl, he promised to bring her a present. That stick is one many sticks he paints a bit later in the movie. He plans to give them to the little girl. It's one of his many plans.

His big plan is to get back at the government for killing his Master, a political reformer on the side of the poor. The Shogun had him killed and Aizen wants to burn Edo Castle to the ground with a whole bunch of ministers inside. He's going to set off bombs in a couple of oil dealer's warehouses near the castle. It will set fire to much of the city and the castle should be right in the path of the fire. So will the locals. They aren't important to him or his plans.

That's Osoyo on the right, she's a member of a lion dance troupe and she's got vengeance on her mind. She wants to kill a minister who used her to steal from the same man that Aizen followed. Aizen tells her to keep out of his way or he'll kill her. Nemuri helps her not get killed.

Aizen's plan goes forward, Nemuri attempts to stop him but he's tricked by a secret trapdoor in the floor. Aizen sets off his bombs and the fires start. The film ends with a battle between the pair. Nemuri watching the fires at the end of the movie.

 

Kenji Misumi is a good director, he keeps me interested. The fights are pretty good, especially the Nemuri and Aizen fight. Glad to have seen it. There's another 4 films in the series. Hopefully I'll get to those quicker than this one. I watched number 7 last January. For some reason I just can't seem to chain watch the series.

Friday Night Movies 887

Alien Private Eye 1989 Written and directed by Vik Rubenfeld, he was also the casting director and film editor. It's his only movie, the IMDb lists him as one of the creators of the TV show Early Edition, he's credited with writing one episode. I never watched that show more than a handful of times, so it's doubtful that I saw his episode. Up until right now the movie has only been available on VHS. You can see a poor copy on YouTube, see link above. The movie looks much better on the Severin Blu-ray.

The story revolves around the possession of a special disc that fell to Earth. A crook figured out it was a drug dispenser and he's been selling the highly addictive product in LA. An alien private eye is on Earth, he helps a woman being mistreated by some thugs and winds up in the middle of a mess. She's got one half the disc and the crooks have the other half.

There's plenty of chasing about with a few punch up and gun fights. Sadly they're so ludicrously staged. The car chase and subsequent crashes? Embarrassing. The whole movie is like that. Clumsy script and inept cast. Makes a combo for laughter. Sadly Vik's intended humor isn't cutting it. All in all a good film to have seen but one that wasn't as enjoyable as one might have hoped. Not going on my To Buy List.

Tokyo 10+01 2003 Written and directed by Higuchinsky. Another one that I won't be adding to my To Buy List. It's a comical sort of parody that people doing IMDb reviews think is of Battle Royale but it seems more like it's parodying The Running Man. The filmmakers make references to BR in the beginning of the film but that soon falls by the wayside as the contestants start running about. Was The Running Man released to long ago for the commenters to know about. Could be but who knows. Hopefully, I'll have forgotten about the film be tomorrow.

Eleven criminals are drugged and fitted with a poison timer bracelet. They wake up in a warehouse in a shitty part of town. They have 11 hours to get to the Baron's mansion. Then they'll be safe, they'll win a cash prize, get their record wiped clean and the poison dispensing tracker bracelet will be deactivated. A lot to play for.

Most of the contestants are pretty annoying and I didn't care much for them. In fact it was nice to see them get picked off one by one or in a small group. There's plenty of running about and yelling but not much else going on of interest. The poor DVD mastering didn't help either. Ultimately it was disappointing and not one I need to see again.

Friday Night Movies 886

The Knight Of Shadows: Between Yin And Yang 2019 Written by Liu Bohan and Jian Wen, directed by Vash.

Every couple of years I go out and look for Jackie Chan DVDs, there's usually something I haven't seen yet. In this action fantasy movie Jackie is a demon hunter who lives in a house on a pinnacle of rock. He shares the place with some fairly friendly demons. Jackie hunts bad demons and that's a good thing, the nearby town has a nasty but beautiful lady demon who's collecting 16 year old girls. They've been imprisoned in a tapestry until lady demon is ready to suck out their souls to prolong her life. The town's magistrate is upset because his daughter is the latest girl to disappear. Jackie soon figures out what's up but he's got a fight on his hands, that lady demon is a nasty piece of work.

There's plenty of action and running about during the movie, much of it augmented by CGI sets and characters. There's plenty of flying through the air, one of Jackie's demon pals can turn into a flying boat with Reed Richard arms. Good thing, what with living on the top of a pinnacle of rock and someone falling off the boat all the time.

I enjoyed the movie, especially the first half, the last half bogs down here and there with all the melodrama concerning the romance of two characters. It's colorful film with beautiful and stunning scenery. I liked the film's sense of humor. Glad to have picked up a copy, I'll want to watch it again sometime.

Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes 2020 Written by Makoto Ueda and directed by Junta Yamaguchi.

A guy discovers his TV is a portal to the future. Trouble is, it's only two minutes ahead. All the action takes place in a small apartment block. The man lives in an apartment above a restaurant, his TV is broadcasting an image from the restaurant below that two minutes in the future. Several people interact with themselves from two mins into the future. Odd complications start happening when they try to extend the time from 2 mins to 4 mins etc. It looks bad when some criminals come by but the time police will help sort that out.

It's all filmed in one long take with everyone moving about from place to place in the building. They do quite well on that. Not that I was trying to catch them out on the action, I was having enough to do to keep up with the story. I enjoyed it, it's more entertaining and clever than many of the recent Indy time travel films that I've seen. Many of those were tragically dull with story's that end tragically because the scientists were stupid. This film has a fun premise and a good sense of humor. The acting was alright and the characters believable. I doubt I'll get the DVD, I might never get around to it again.