"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Tatsuya Nakadai’

The Wicked City (1992)

Wednesday, March 26th, 2025

THE WICKED CITY (1992) is the Hong Kong version of WICKED CITY. I’m honestly not sure if it’s meant to be based on the anime or on the novels that the anime is based on, because it’s pretty different. It’s written and produced by the great Tsui Hark in a prolific year; 1992 saw the release of three movies he wrote, produced and directed (TWIN DRAGONS, ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA II and THE MASTER) and two others that he wrote and produced (SWORDSMAN II and NEW DRAGON GATE INN). Jeez, man, slow down.

As usual, there are claims that Tsui directed some of this himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if he second unit-ed some of the crazy action shit, but let’s not POLTERGEIST the actual director, who is Mak Tai Kit, a.k.a. Peter Mak (THE LOSER, THE HERO).

It opens in Japan (city unspecified in English subtitles of the DVD I watched), with a pared down remix of the anime’s opening. It skips the hero picking up the woman in a bar, replacing that character with a demon disguised as a prostitute named Perrier (Reiko Hayama, FEMALE NINJA MAGIC CHRONICLES), who does the kissing-while-going-up-an-elevator shot. In this version the john (Leon Lai from Ronny Yu’s SHOGUN & LITTLE KITCHEN) already knows what she is, goes into the bathroom and loads a gun before she sprouts claws and long legs – it’s genuinely very cool monster FX, though they’re unable to move her around enough to be nearly as creepy as in the animated version. Also there’s no venus flytrap snatch snapping at him. The same mistake most movies make. (read the rest of this shit…)

High and Low

Tuesday, May 12th, 2020

Before going into seclusion to plot my revenge on the coronavirus I rented a bunch of Akira Kurosawa movies. Didn’t even really know what they were about. Luckily one of them was HIGH AND LOW, because that’s what more than one of you recommended after I reviewed STRAY DOG. Another contemporary police procedural one. No samurais in it at all.

One thing I did not expect: themes of shoe industry integrity. It opens with our initial protagonist Mr. Gondo (Toshiro Mifune in a white cardigan) meeting at his house with his fellow board members for the National Shoe company. They’re each in charge of one specific part of the company (one guy conveniently lists them all off for us), and Gondo’s is the factory. All of them agree that “the old man,” (the president of the shoe company, not Dan Inosanto’s character from REDBELT) is out of touch with what modern women want. They call his pumps “combat boots.” But they’ve come up with a plan that by teaming together they represent a majority of shareholders and can replace the old man and begin making shoes that are more current and cheaper to manufacture. (read the rest of this shit…)

Goyokin

Tuesday, March 17th, 2015

tn_goyokinGOYOKIN is the seventh movie from Hideo Gosha, the director who started with THREE OUTLAW SAMURAI and SWORD OF THE BEAST. So he’d been around a bit by that point. It was 1969, the hippie era over here, but questioning authority was part of the samurai movie tradition anyway. The heroes follow a strict code and usually have to deal with some government asshole trying to pervert it. They struggle when there’s a discrepancy between following the rules and doing the right thing. And they always have differing interpretations of what those two things are. But this one seems particularly fitting for a couple summers after the summer of love, because it’s about one man who feels he must stand up against the power structure to stop an atrocity.

It starts with a mysterious incident. A girl returns home to her village to find that everyone has disappeared. Nobody there but her and the crows. They blame it on a curse called the Kamikakushi, but in fact it was a government sanctioned massacre. Some Waco shit. The Saido province feels they have to steal a shipment of gold in order to pay their taxes and survive, and they kill the local fishermen so there aren’t any witnesses. They feel it’s a necessary sacrifice for the greater good.

Three years later the ronin Magobei (Tatsuya Nakadai, YOJIMBO, THE SWORD OF DOOM, RAN) still regrets not trying to stop the slaughter. His brother-in-law Tatewaki (Tetsuro Tanba, THREE OUTLAW SAMURAI, RIKI-OH), the guy in charge, vowed to never do it again. But when assassins come to kill Magobei (they fail) he finds out it’s a precursor to another one. Clearly this stolen gold economics is not very sustainable in my opinion.

Magobei’s not gonna make the same mistake he made last time. He’s gotta stop this massacre or die trying. So he puts on his cool hat and starts walking. (read the rest of this shit…)