Gakuryū Ishii made Burst City and if that were not enough of an attack on the senses, he made this film, the story of Dragon Eye Morrison (Tadanobu Asano, the incredible Kakihara from Ichi the Killer), who was given electroshock therapy as a child which now gives him the ability to conduct electricity, which he sometimes uses in his job as a reptile investigator and guitar player. But now, another man — Thunderbolt Buddha (Masatoshi Nagase, Mystery Train) — also has those powers but uses them to go after gangsters. Inevitably, the two must meet and battle one another.
Most amazingly, this movie is narrated by Masakatsu Funaki, who was the best native star of Pancrase, an early MMA legend and still an active pro wrestler.
A black and white film bursting with attitude, noise and chaos, this is what a comic book film should look like. You know how some movies seem cool? This is what being cool is all about.
June 1: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is ’80s action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
Words cannot express how important ninjas were in 1985. Every single day, American kids drew pictures of them during class, beat on one another with their weapons and watched their movies, which could nearly have an entire shelf of your local video store all to themselves.
Pray for Death is Sho Kosugi’s vehicle and he makes the most of it. You may remember him as the villainous Hasegawa who fought Franco Nero in Enter the Ninja, but here he’s graduated to become the hero. He plays salaryman Akira Saito, who has decides to follow his wife’s dream and immigrate from Japan to the United States along with their two sons Takeshi and Tomoya (Sho’s sons Kane and Shane).
What his family does not know is that Akira is a ninja and has kept the temple’s secrets, even killing his own brother Shoji as he tried to steal from their adopted father Koga (Robert Ito, Sam Fujiyama on Quincy, M.D.). His master tells him to leave Japan behind and erase the guilt he’s felt over what happened.
Purchasing an old store from a kindly man named Sam Green (Parley Baer, the mayor of Mayberry!) that will become Aiko’s Japanese Restaurant. But before they can see any success, two crooked cops hide a necklace inside the floorboards, leading to Akira’s children being attacked, Green being murdered and eventually, our hero’s wife being injured and then killed inside the hospital while she recovers.
This all means that Akira must return to the ways of the ninja and literally force a man to pray for death before impaling his hands and sawing him in half. Yes, this form of ninjitsu is not quiet in any way.
12-year-old me loved Judge Dredd perhaps more than I can convey in words. So you can imagine my excitement when they decided to make a Hollywood blockbuster out of it. What was once a property that existed only in 2000 AD and in songs by Anthrax suddenly had Mattel action figures and a pinball machine in arcades. And then, well, Judge Dredd came out and the only people who cared about it any longer were the ones like me that know what the Cursed Earth is (not to mention stuff like the ABC Warriors and Strontium Dog; I’m not bragging, trust me).
Dredd is everything that movie should have been.
Directed by Pete Travers (Vantage Point) and starring Karl Urban as a Dredd who never takes his helmet off or shows mercy — so he’s pretty much the Judge Dredd we know and love — the film takes place in Mega City One, which is pretty much the East Coast of what’s left of the United States. There, 800 million residents commit 17,000 crimes every single day and only the Judges can keep law and order.
Dredd and new recruit Cassandra Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) have come to the Peach Trees block, which is run by drug dealer Madeline “Ma-Ma” Madrigal (Lena Headey), the supplier of Slo-Mo, a drug that makes time move at a crawl for its users. She has rogue Judges on her payroll and an entire building in her employ, but Dredd is relentless in his pursuit of justice.
Written by Alex Garland (The Beach, the screenplays for 28 Days Later and Sunshine), this is a film that doesn’t just understand its subject matter, but completely gets how Dredd is less always meaning more. Dredd co-creator John Wagner also wrote a lot of the dialogue, so that definitely made this movie better.
While this has become a cult classic, it deserved so much better. Urban told Den of Geek that the issue was “zero audience awareness. Nobody knew the movie was being released. Dredd represents a failure in marketing, not filmmaking.”
So many of us hold out hope that a sequel or series will happen one day. Watch it and you’ll be one of us.
We just moved into a new house on October of last year. It’s a rough experience, as you go from the expected to the unknown and every step of the way, you feel like you’re on your own, as everyone takes advantage of you.
That’s the situation David Van Owen (Ford Austin, who is amazing in this) finds himself in when he buys a new home and can barely afford a contractor to fix the septic line. Handling it himself, he finds a box buried in his backyard with $3 million dollars and a corpse.
Except that corpse (Tom Fitzpatrick, The Bride in Black from Insidious 2 and 3) isn’t quite dead.
Writer/director/composer Michael P. Blevins has put together a pretty tight film which is basically about David slowly going insane as the home overwhelms him. He has great support from Richard Riehle (a familiar character actor face from movies like Office Space and Casino), Rachel Alig, Ken Hudson Campbell and Clint Jung.
My favorite part of this movie is the corpse, who looks suitably deranged and there’s an incredible scene where David faces off with the body, demanding that it come back to life because he’s certain that it’s not dead. It’s right on the center lane of horrifying and hilarious, which is not the easiest balance.
Digging to Death is available on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.
B&S About Movies 