The Executioner

Koga, a practitioner of ancient ninja techniques, is recruited to help take down the Mafia, who are smuggling drugs into Japan. With martial arts films beginning to find a worldwide audience in 70s, the push was on to crown a successor to the late Bruce Lee. For a time, Sonny Chiba was Japan's potential heir to the throne. Following the stateside success of The Street Fighter, North American distributors began importing other Sonny Chiba films. The Executioner, much like The Street Fighter, has a lot of stylish and vicious action scenes, but Chiba's character Koga is much more likable than The Street Fighter's Terry Tsurugi. He's still an anti-hero but he murders far fewer innocent people and, unless I missed something, he never sells anyone into slavery.

Rating: 72%

(Image from IMDB)

The Street Fighter

Terry Tsurugi is one mean S.O.B. And when I say that, I'm not trying to suggest that Terry is cold or gruff like so many other action movie protagonists often are. Early on in The Street Fighter, when a brother and sister can't pay Terry the money they owe him, he kills the brother and sells the sister into slavery. That's Terry for you, our "hero." As the movie goes on, there are some attempts to humanize Terry, but he remains pretty vicious and unrepentant throughout. The crux of the plot finds Terry taking on the Mob and the Yakuza after they try to kidnap a young heiress. The Street Fighter is a particularly violent movie. When it was released in the US, an early success for New Line Cinema, it received an X rating. The fight scenes are well shot, with great uses of long takes and slow motion. Sonny Chiba gets the full Bruce Lee treatment in his portrayal of Terry, with many loving shots of him training and cruelly dispatching scores of bad guys.

Rating: 73%

(Image from Wikipedia)

Men Behind the Sun

This is another of those super extreme gore movies that I guess I felt I had to watch as a horror snob or whatever. It's not especially gorier than like, Day of the Dead or the Saw movies, but it's incredibly difficult to watch because it's based on an actual historical Japanese unit (731) who conducted lethal biological research on captive Chinese civilians during World War II, killing thousands of people. (As far as the filmmakers, they killed a bunch of rats for the movie and filmed a real child's autopsy so that's nowhere near as bad but still rough to watch.) Anyway, at least the people in charge of the real camp got tried for war crimes. Oh, wait, what's that? They were granted immunity by the United States in exchange for all their research? Well that's just super.

RATING: 74%

Kuroneko

A couple women are murdered and worse by some samurai so they turn into cat ghosts trying to get revenge on all samurai ever which goes pretty well until the older woman's kidnapped son/younger woman's kidnapped husband (same guy) shows up. It gets real sad!

RATING: 71%  

Onibaba

An old woman gets mad when her widowed daughter-in-law hooks up with some grifter because it means she might not help her murder travelers anymore. It doesn't get super creepy until the last half hour but it's all shot in a tall grass field that seems almost other worldly, so it gets a buncha points for style.

RATING: 68%

House (1977)

This Japanese haunted house movie from the 70s won't scare you, per se, but it is sincerely the most surreal piece of nightmare fuel I've ever come across, including Jodorowsky. The plot is your average high school girls on vacation to a house haunted by the ghost of a woman's loneliness who wants to eat them type fare. It is 40% surreal humor, as when a cat dances and meows a song, 40% surreal terror, as when a girls severed fingers play the piano that bit them off, and 1800% weird nonsense. Toho studios told the director, an art director known for nonlinear experimental films, that they were tired of losing money on comprehensible films, and asked him to make something incomprehensible. Success! I've got to recommend this movie with full marks, since you'll never see anything else like it in your entire life.

RATING: 81%

New Tale of Zatoichi

This is the third Zatoichi movie and the first one in color. Here our pudgy blind samurai friend returns home to find out his old mentor has turned into a bad guy! Zatoichi considers retiring with the woman he loves and having a nice life where he doesn't slice up evildoers but there are, like, twenty movies left in this series so I'll let you guess what he decides.

RATING: 76%

The Tale of Zatoichi Continues

This is one of those sequels that returns exactly to the scene of the first movie, like Back to the Future II (time travel) or Return of the Jedi (Death Star). Here Zatoichi returns to the place he was sort of forced to honor-kill the dying samurai in the first movie, but a buncha people are super pissed at him! Unlike the first movie, Zatoichi quickly and frequently fights large gangs of assassins because we don't have to wonder if it's a myth that he's so great (because why would they make 26 fucking movies about him being a good liar). It's not as good as the original but it's still fun to watch Zatoichi act like a loveable clumsy doofus until he's forced to kill approximately 100 people with his cane sword.

RATING: 66%

The Tale of Zatoichi

I just recently finished watching all twenty-whatever James Bond movies and wanted a new series to watch, so why not the Zatoichi samurai movies I asked myself, and I said ok, sure, just watch 'em. In this first film of the 26 film saga, Zatoichi, a blind masseuse, shows up to a gambling house. It turns out Zatoichi is basically the Japanese Daredevil (though, hm, it beat Daredevil's creation by a year so I suppose Daredevil is the American Zatoichi) - he may be blind, but he has enhanced other senses and swordsmanship to take over. Anyway, he's one of those swordspeople who realizes killing is bad, m'kay, so he doesn't want to get involved in a big gambling house war, even after he meets a dying samurai named Hirate who befriends him and begs him to fight him. I'll let you guess whether or not these two swordsmasters fight by the end of the film!

RATING: 76%

Adolescent Sex by Japan

This album by Japan, Adolescent Sex, is a pretty good post- punk record. Imagine New York Dolls with way more keyboards. As always here's some links to songs of theirs, but I'd like to point out that we'll now get the most unintentional search result hits since Laurie posted that review of a picture of preteen boys wearing tight pants. In conclusion, welcome, perverts!

RATING: 71%

Howl's Moving Castle

Howl's Moving Castle is an animated film by Hayao Miyazaki loosely based on a novel by Diana Wynne Jones. I'm not sure if I would classify it as "anime," exactly--the character style is distinctly Japanese, but the setting is European and the "physics of representation" are more consistent and realistic than in the mainstream manga-influenced anime you see on T.V. In any event, the characters and story are superb, the magic and fantasy elements are economical and wonderfully familiar-yet-strange, and the music is good too. It's nice to see a children's movie that contains no trace of Hollywood's signature media self-referentiality and movie star hype. Best of all, there's no Rascal fucking Flatts or Bare Naked Ladies in the soundtrack.

RATING: 90%

(Image from www.xjaymanx.com.)

Disgaea 3

Disgaea 3 is the third in the series of Disgaea games - which are Japanese turn-based strategy games for Playstation. The central conceit of the game is that there are several netherworlds, and...you know what, explaining the central conceit of a game like this just makes it seem sillier than it already is. Maybe I should try explaining that it's an extraordinarily simple game that you can drop hundreds and hundreds of hours into in order to try and level your characters up to level 9999 and defeat the difficult post-game enemies...nope, that's not any better.

How about this: the game's graphics are not good, the comedy is simple, but it's extremely engrossing and fun, and I've probably dumped 200 some-odd hours into the game over the last half-year. Looking back on it, I'm always a little regretful that I've spent so much time playing a tremendously goofy video game instead of doing something more productive, but really, what else would I have done?

RATING: 87% (which means that it's better than the poster for Rachel Getting Married, but worse than Action Moves)