Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.
Near the beginning of Ryûichi Takamori’s manga-based action thriller, protagonist Naoto Kiba (Sonny Chiba) calls a press conference, having just single-handedly taken out a group of terrorist hijackers on a plane. On stage, he requests a branded drink, and slices it in half with his bare hand.
If this is product placement and ‘PR’, Kiba himself is the brand, exploiting his newfound celebrity to advertise his services as a bodyguard, and through that, to rehabilitate the Tesshin School of Karate that has fallen out of favour for its brutality. As Chiba’s first martial arts film, this was also PR for the badass actor, who one year later, as he promises in the closing line, would be “going global” with his first international hit, Shigehiro Ozawa’s The Street Fighter.
Kiba’s first job is to protect the mysterious Reiko Miwa (Mari Atsumi), who has pilfered the last drug shipment of her lover, a recently murdered New York mafioso, and is now being targeted by the ‘Yellow Mafia’, Japanese black marketeers, moonlighting American servicemen and various other freelance criminals. Bones will be broken and limbs severed in the ensuing chaos. Three years later, an expanded version called The Bodyguard (also included in this set), was released in America, and its intro would be quoted in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
Bodyguard Kiba is available on Blu-ray in a two-disc double package with Bodyguard Kiba 2 from 18 March via Eureka!
Joseph Kuo’s Taiwan-set wuxia is a film of coincidences and clashes. When Tsai Ying-jie (Tien Peng) takes out a bullying martial arts master and his gang, he may contingently be helping defend a street performer and his daughter, but his only real motive is revenge against the master who, together with four others, had murdered Tsai’s parents 18 years earlier. Tsai even has a hit list of the five names inscribed on wooden tablets, with their leader Yun Chun-chung (Tsao Tsien) saved for last. Meanwhile, the swordsman Black Dragon (Nan Chiang) pursues a duel with Tsai not because he is Yun’s son and continuing this family feud, but merely because he wishes to prove himself the world’s finest swordsman.
“A true man repays kindness when helped, and gets revenge when wronged,” says Tsai — and yet both these principles will coincide and clash as Tsai struggles to reconcile his debt to Yun’s daughter Flying Swallow (Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng) for saving his life, and his vendetta against wise old Yun. Accordingly, this is a martial arts film of a rather philosophical bent, constantly calling into question the meaning and value of the very conflicts that constitute its genre.
The Swordsman of All Swordsmen is available for the first time ever in the UK on Limited Edition Blu-ray (including Kuo’s The Mystery of Chess Boxing, 1979, on a bonus disc) from 18 March via Eureka!
Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Spike Lee always get cited as cinema’s great chroniclers of New York, but one should never forget Abel Ferrara, who thrives at the Scorsese end of the city’s mean streets but goes down sleazier alleyways for his art.
“Nobody’s clean,” says Detective Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams), investigating a sordid subculture in pursuit of a slasher (John Foster) mutilating and murdering his way through the stripper population. At first it looks like someone enacting a grudge against boxer turned ‘talent agent’ Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger) and his partner Nicky Parzeno (Jack Scalia), who provide dancers for the (mostly mob-owned) strip clubs, and whose women have been targeted — but as other agencies’ strippers fall prey to the ‘New York knifer’, it becomes clear that a Travis Bickle-like vigilante with a penchant for exotic blades has decided to clean up the streets himself, one ‘whore’ at a time. This triggers Matt — who once killed a man in the ring — to turn bruiser once more, heroically or otherwise.
Falling somewhere between Taxi Driver, Maniac and neon-lit neo-noir, Ferrari’s tawdry feature anatomises Manhattan vice in much the way that the killer carves up his victims.
Fear City is available on Limited Edition Blu-ray on 4 March via 101 Films
“There are only two possibilities,” says Sandra (Janet Agren) in the first entry of Lucio Fulci’s ‘Gates of Hell’ trilogy. “Either I’m going out of my mind or something very, very strange is happening.”
Viewers may well feel similarly. The plot seems simple enough: following the suicide of a local priest, a village with a decidedly Lovecraftian name has become a portal to the dead which must be reclosed by All Saint’s Day to avoid a global apocalypse. Yet this is muddied variously by a séance; a premature burial; references to The Book of Enoch and the Salem witch trials; intestine vomiting; a wind-borne plague of maggots; super-leaping, brain-clawing sort-of zombies with trademark Fulcian hideousness; an American county whose residents are mostly played by Italians; and a panicky freeze-frame ending that defies all interpretation.
A woman with second sight (Catriona MacColl), a journalist (Christopher George) and a psychiatrist (Carlo De Mejo) attempt together to impose order and reason on all the sinisterly surreal goings-on, but like the fog that constantly shrouds Dunwich, there is something obscure and impenetrable about Fulci’s horror, creating its own uncanny vibe of hermetic irrationality. It’s both strange and maddening.
City of the Living Dead is available on 4K UHD from 25 March via Arrow
The title refers not to an economic élite but a fighting one, namely action actor Takuma Toshiro (Tak Sakaguchi) who has honed his ‘Assassination-jutsu’, ‘Zero Range Combat’ and bullet-dodging ‘Wave technique’ far beyond what is required on a movie set, and who longs to make a ‘100% Pure Action Film’ where his assailants come at him with real intent.
Ten years after his career has washed up, Takuma’s dream comes true — for while location scouting in an abandoned island factory, he comes under attack from yakuza, an assassination squad, and a kickass sensei, all looking for a large cocaine stash. Spotting an opportunity both to test his abilities for real, and to raise buzz for his next film project, Takuma instructs his young assistant Akira (Sho Aoyagi), “Film the whole thing.”
What follows is a paradoxical play on realism, as the closer this intense action star comes to the rôles he typically plays, the more absurdly postmodern the exercise becomes, with an array of cartoonish villains and impossible fights to prove that, as one hack director puts it, “You don’t get the reality, films are fiction, make-believe.” This fight club even brings a psychological twist to pin down its own fantasy.
Given how much this exploits Sakaguchi’s own image and identity, one should note that the actor is currently facing serious sexual assault allegations in Japan.
One Percenter is available on Blu-ray/digital from 11 March via Third Window
It opens with an image of abandonment, as nobody comes to pick little Yoshimi up from her preschool. Now, many decades later, Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki) is a mother herself, moving into apartment 305 in a brutalist old building with her own beloved preschool daughter Ikuko (Rio Kanno) while undergoing divorce mediation and a bitter custody battle.
Even as anxious, overwhelmed Yoshimi finds herself repeating the past and failing to pick up Ikuko on time, a different kind of history reechoes. For a damp, dark spot on their apartment ceiling keeps leaking water everywhere, a young girl’s red handbag keeps rematerialising every time it is discarded, and little Mitsuko (Mirei Oguchi), who vanished two years earlier, makes her haunting presence ever more felt, heard and seen by both mother and daughter. With Yoshimi unravelling, a legacy of abandonment, part psychological, part supernatural, is passed on once more to the next generation.
Director Hideo Nakata will always be best known for the impact and influence of his 1998 J-horror Ring, but this is the better film — a ghost story of maternity and madness that is, beyond all its dripping atmosphere and uncanny creepiness, awash with moving waves of melancholy and loss.
Dark Water is available on 4K UHD from 18 Mar via Arrow
Published 13 Mar 2024
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