"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Akira Shioji’

Legend of the Eight Samurai

Tuesday, April 1st, 2025

I knew right away that LEGEND OF THE EIGHT SAMURAI (1983) was gonna be interesting because the cosmic opening credits are backed by an English language rock song that would feel right at home in NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER. It’s called “White Light” and it was recorded specifically for the movie by John O’Banion, lead singer of Doc Severinsen’s band Today’s Children and winner on the pilot episode of Star Search.

The guitar solo starts over the director credit for Kinji Fukasaku (BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY), then abruptly fades out and we get this beautiful matte shot of an army, a castle and a red sky…

 

…with a big orchestra playing something more like you’d expect in a period samurai movie. The music is credited to six different people and veers between styles, mostly to my taste except when it resorts to keyboard horn sounds vaguely mimicking themes from STAR WARS, which seems pretty cheap. Mostly this is an extravagant affair, though, a lushly produced fantasy epic with colorful costumes, huge crowds of armored extras carrying spears and banners, atmospheric sets built on four giant soundstages, and a wicked queen to put the one from SNOW WHITE to shame. (read the rest of this shit…)

The Street Fighter’s Last Revenge

Thursday, September 26th, 2019

“I make the impossible possible. Takami Tsurugi. Remember that if you want to live long.”

The thrilling conclusion to Sonny Chiba’s STREET FIGHTER trilogy is called THE STREET FIGHTER’S LAST REVENGE, but it doesn’t really feel like a finale. It feels more like another in what should be an endless series of adventures. Though released in 1974, the same year as the other two, Chiba’s black-clad anti-hero-for-hire Tsurugi seems to have evolved his operation. After taking a recruitment call he rotates the phone attached to his wall, opening a secret door to a room full of uniforms, wigs and latex masks. He’s a fuckin master of disguise now!

His mission is to retrieve Go Owada (Akira Shioji, who played a different character in the first movie) from the midst of a violent worker strike at a chemical plant. Tsurugi impersonates a member of the riot squad and breaks ranks to bust through the window, go in and beat the shit out of everybody, steal a specified black mah jong case, arrest Owada, steal a police car and bring him to the mobsters who hired him.

But they pay him with a briefcase full of shredded newspaper, which was not the deal in my opinion, so he fights them and they’re enemies now. (read the rest of this shit…)