Which Is Stronger, Karate Or The Tiger (1976)

Original title: Butoken: Moko gekisatsu!

A domino-masked karateka going by the nom de plum of Iron Dragon (Yasuaki Kurata) is beating up the dreams of karate world domination of evil Kiramoto (Masashi Ishibashi), and in the ring.

As it turns out, our hero has good reason to wear a mask – he is actually one Tetsuji Ryuzaki, and Kiramoto and his equally evil brother once murdered Ryuazki’s father for a chest full of gold.

While getting in the way of Kiramoto’s dream of karate tournament domination isn’t terribly difficult, taking actual, bloody vengeance on the man turns out to be a somewhat different proposition. For the villain makes his home in a castle filled with gimmick-loving martial artists, traps, his very own torture dungeon, as well as the promised tiger, and while our hero is great at karate, he isn’t exactly the most subtle of men, so any mission of infiltration quickly turns into a frontal assault for him.

Apparently, Sonny Chiba couldn’t star in all of Toei’s karate exploitationers, so this one, directed by hand-held camera lover Kazuhiko Yamaguchi (also responsible for Sister Streetfighter and various Delinquent Girl Bosses), instead has to get by with Yasuaki Kurata, at this point of Fight! Dragon fame, later on more recognizable for his work in Hongkong, at least to an audience outside of his native Japan.

Even without Sonny, this is still an archetypal Toei karate exploitation movie, with all the stylistic flourishes and some moments of outright craziness you’d expect, but Kurata’s persona is somewhat different to Chiba’s vile, charismatic badasses. Sure, he’s beating villains to death with his bare hands and does rather unpleasant things to skulls when riled, but he’s more straightforwardly heroic than your typical Chiba character. At least, he’s never seen raping a woman, or selling somebody into sex slavery.

Hell, he’s even putting a young fighter he beat in the ring straight again. To be fair, he does so by beating him up during one of these particularly dramatic – and very blue - rain storms beloved of Japanese martial arts cinema, and doesn’t exactly prolong the guy’s life by getting him involved in his problems, but hey, Chiba’ would probably have ripped the kid’s voice box out and sold his female relatives.

So, befitting the comparative niceness of our protagonist, the Karate or the Tiger as a whole isn’t quite as bloody and sleazy as Chiba’s more extreme outings for Toei – even the torture scenes are more on the aesthetically cool than the unpleasant side, and the only bit of actual sexual violence here is a stolen kiss and one sentence about a rape, which is rather uncommon for a Japanese film of this era and genre; not unpleasantly so, obviously.

The violence is still fun and filmed with style and excitement, it’s simply not quite as extreme as it could be. Yamaguchi really loves hand-held shots and decidedly non-naturalistic lighting in the theatrical tradition that runs through much of Japanese studio exploitation, so there’s always at least something of interest to look at here, some emotion that’s visually heightened in interesting ways, and an sense of energy and excitement throughout.

As to the titular question, it is, indeed, karate.

Passenger (2026)

When Budding van lifer Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and his supportive but clearly long-suffering partner Maddie (Lou Llobell) come upon what looks like an accident by the side of the road, they take with them something worse than bad memories. A supernatural (the film goes with the yawn-inducing “demonic” as a descriptor) entity known as The Passenger (who rides and rides) latches onto them and starts playing increasingly deadly games with its endless, random powers.

I tend to be much happier with the films of André Øvredal than your average horror film fan (ask me about Last Voyage of the Demeter), yet this road movie didn’t do very much for me. In part, because Øvredal’s usually impeccable timing of shocks, jump scares, and suspense seems completely off here, with little of these basic building blocks of horror hitting as well as they should, the evil entity feeling more like a collection of tropes than something as specific as a highway-centric demon (sigh).

Attempts attempts at using good old hobo signs as part of the thing’s mythology lead nowhere interesting. In general, there’s a curious lack of specifity to a monster haunting such a specific liminal space as the US highway system. Most of the jump scares here could be in a movie about a haunted house, a haunted bus, or a haunted beach shanty.

Our main couple isn’t terribly unlikeable, yet here, too, the film never puts much effort into turning them into specific persons beyond “main couple in a horror movie with one character trait each”.

Øvredal does still have technical chops, of course, so this is never descending into the realm of the truly terrible, and instead dwells where the truly generic drive in eternal circles.

Three Films Make A Post: This is not a love story.

Mother Mary (2026): Sometimes, I really like the films of David Lowery; this one, I really don’t. It’s the kind of film where everything’s a metaphor, but never a metaphor for anything that’s actually complex (or, frankly, interesting) enough to warrant being talked about exclusively metaphorically. The kind of film where every single line of dialogue – mostly uttered by Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel in exalted stage psychodrama mode – is spoken portentously, full of pregnant (with metaphor, obviously!) pauses.

The kind of film that makes many gesture about being deep, but misses depth in its incessant efforts of performing depth. Much like the kind of pop star Hathaway portrays, come to think of it…

Twisted (2026): Darren Lynn Bousman, for his part, apparently never left the early 2000, and still directs exactly like he did 20 years ago. So expect the shitty colour scheme of his Saw movies, the would-be Tony Scott editing tics of his Saw movies, the random attacks of blur of his Saw movies, the score made by someone apparently tone deaf of his Saw movies. One might notice a tendency there.

Because our director really, really like to keep to his old standards, this also has the dumb-pretending-to-be-clever plotting of the Saw movies, and the tendency to waste a perfectly fine cast (in this particular case especially Djimon Hounsou and Lauren LaVera).

Santo vs. the Strangler aka Santo vs el estrangulador (1965): Tonight, even El Santo let me down, or rather, René Cardona did by couching some perfectly fine Santo vs the Phantom of the Variety Theatre business in so many musical numbers, re-titling this into Santo vs the Musical Number seems not just fair but simply more honest.

The sad thing about this is: whenever this lucha movie actually concerns the adventures of the Idol of the Masses, it’s genuinely good fun. Alas, the next musical number is as inevitable as metaphor overload in a David Lowery movie.

Ghost Board (2026)

Apparently (the movies wouldn’t lie to us!) detention in Thailand means having to spend a day doing chores for a Buddhist temple out in the sticks for the terrible crime of board gaming during school hours. On their way back, the three male board gaming kids and the girl who had to join them for different reasons (trauma to be explained later on), stumble upon a ruin, wherein they find an ancient boardgame. Boardgames, say the rules, need to be played. Alas, this is a horror movie, so the thing turns out to be a cursed example of its kind.

Now, the kids have to fight off various crappy looking CGI versions of monsters from Thai folklore, as well as the deadite-style possessed sister (Panisara Rikulsurakan) of one of their own, to win the game and survive the night.

I had quite a bit of fun with Chanathip Wongpoltree’s Ghost Board. In fact, given that I’m probably not its core audience, rather more than I expected. Going by the general tone, this is certainly horror meant for kids, but clearly, made with rather different assumptions of what kids are officially allowed to see and enjoy in their exciting monster movies. So this one starts off with a little boy hanged by supernatural forces pissing himself during his death, and features rather more explicit trauma than media made specifically for Western monster kids are generally allowed to show. Though, having been a Western monster kid myself once, and watched and read things very much not made for my age group pretty early on, I think this approach is simply more honest.

Anyway, even with its pieces of past trauma the kids have to conquer besides the monsters to survive, this is simply a very fun monster movie, certainly influenced by Evil Dead and to a degree by Stranger Things, yet filtered through tropes and monsters of Thai folklore. The pacing is speedy without becoming hysterical, the characters and their plights simply drawn but not bland, and there’s a sense of fun running even through the trauma-solving bits.

Sure, the CGI is mostly a bit crap, but when it comes to children (and policemen) being threatened by a headless dude with two swords using the head of one of his victims as a kind of seeing-eye lantern, I care more about the spirit of the thing than about how well it is done on paper. So, I really had a blast with this one.

Daikanyama Wonderland Horror (1986)

Three budding idols in some kind of idol training establishment – aerobics are clearly a particularly important part of this – are offered the chance to level up to actual idol status by the not at all suspicious boss of their school.

Soon, the three are stumbling through dark, dry ice fogged streets and are hunted by a gutmunching hardcore band, Halloween masked versions of Freddy and Jason(!), and a full-grown man who can somehow disguise himself as a baby in a baby cart, and doesn’t who doesn’t need Tomisaburo Wakayama to do some damage. Also appearing is some kind of clown troupe and various wearers of lesser monster rubber masks.

In the end, the idol industry literally eats its children.

If you know director Teruyoshi Ishii predominantly as the director of POV horror V-cinema hidden gem Jaganrei (made a couple of years after this one), you’re going to be in for a surprise, for where the later film is really rather clever and formally inventive, Daikanyama is gloriously dumb and silly. Though, to be fair, both films show a healthy scepticism about what the idol industry does with/to very young women.

For its first third, this is a pure time capsule of 80s Tokyo, obviously shot guerrilla style, that culminates in the epic aerobics sequence other 80s films have only dreamed of. Once the plot gets started, Ishii throws all of his favourite things at you: punk, guts, and rubber masks of famous film monsters, adds rather a lot of gloriously improbable – and therefore awesome - home-made gore, and more dry-ice fog than any 80s music video you care to name.

Since its runs a mere forty-five minutes, there’s no time for this outbreak of youthful enthusiasm to get boring, or really, to ever slow down once we’re through the aerobics bit. I found myself hit by a true cinematic (videographic?) sugar rush – and what else could I ask of a movie?

Three Films Make A Post: Please state the theme of your movie clearly, sir!

Hive (2026): In the treatment of its truly weird monster, Felipe Vargas’s Hive is absolutely wonderful. It creates something strange, creepy and alienated/alienating out of a playground and the kind of home-made material a Tubi Original can afford, and then uses it in the creepiest way it can possibly imagine. That’s how low budget filmmaking is supposed to work for my taste.

Problems arise whenever it feels the need to make very, very sure its audience understands its thematic concerns about race and class in America, and puts its ideas into the stiffest, cheesiest monologues I’ve heard in quite awhile. It’s particularly irritating since the actors actually have the film’s back and have already expressed it all through gestures, glances and body language – particularly Xochitl Gomez is excellent – one would be wilfully ignorant not to understand. And yes, I know, the times and US educational standards seem to demand this sort of thing, but stating your theme like a little child never makes anything better, certainly not your movie.

Leaving D.C. (2012): A guy with obsessive compulsive disorder (writer/director/producer) Josh Criss moves from Washington, D.C. to the wilds of rural West Virginia. There, he encounters the kind of strangeness a man of his character and type of neurodivergence can’t simply keep away from, to unpleasant results.

This is a minor gem in the POV horror crown, mostly thanks to Criss’s impeccable sense of handling escalation in a slow movie, mixed with a willingness to portray a character who becomes increasingly difficult to like (in a believable manner), and a threat that’s just unexplained and undefined enough to be truly creepy.

For the POV connoisseur like me, there are some pleasantly imaginative uses of a supposedly securely installed camera, and surprisingly engaging playing around with audio software.

The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan (2018): An attempt at making a documentary as a school project about a town legend in her former home town leads Leah Sullivan (Anna Stromberg, who also co-wrote and produced with her co-lead and director Burt Grinstead) to her doom.

Like a lot of the better POV horror films, this works particularly well because it is very good at emulating the form of what it is supposed to be – unedited raw material for an amateur documentary – and taking on the flaws this sort of thing would reasonably have. Stromberg is a great screen presence as well.

The plot is a little on the slow side, but the climactic creeping through an supposedly abandoned murder house is very cleverly staged, repeatedly making excellent use of a certain entity standing behind the characters only for the audience to see.

Pathaan (2023)

In a needlessly flashback-heavy plot, Indian super spy Pathaan (Shar Rukh Khan) has to thwart the fiendish and just as needlessly byzantine plans of super mercenary and ex Indian super spy Jim (John Abraham, presence-wise completely outplayed by everyone else on screen) to loosen a genetically modified small pox virus on, ahem, “Mother India”. Because this is a YRF Spy Universe film, Pathaan also falls for Pakistani super spy Rubai (Deepika Padukone), who may or may not be on his side.

This is much easier to stomach than Siddarth Anand’s earlier entry into the YRF spy universe franchise, the so jingoistic it took all of the joy out of the silly action War. It’s still plenty jingoistic, mind you, but it’s mild for the standards of what comes out of India these days, and keeps to the general tenets of the international action movies. It even manages to do something nearly unheard of these days in Bollywood – its hero is an adopted Muslim, and that’s a good thing, which only Shah Rukh Khan can get away with now. And come to think of it, Rubai is probably Muslim as well, though clearly not a very conservative one, given her fashion style, which leaves us with a contemporary Bollywood movie whose heroes are both Muslims.

Deepika, as it turns out, like quite a lot of her contemporary female peers in Bollywood is also a pretty convincing action heroine and appears to have genuine fun strutting more than just bikinis and opening her tear ducts. That SRK is still a well of off-handed charisma, who makes even machismo look not all that unpleasant should be taken as a given.

For most of the time, Pathaan gives up on all pretences at even a sort-of realism, or even just mild believability, and turns into a full-on live action cartoon, with impossibly beautiful people strutting through insane (that’s a compliment) action set pieces with terrible (but who cares) CGI, making goofy (but likeable) jokes, and demonstrating a cheerful hatred for that boring reality business. Imagine a Tom Cruise Mission Impossible with a sense of humour, and a lead whose ego doesn’t get in the way of letting the other actors on screen shine, too. Which also allows for an incredibly silly and fun Salman Khan cameo as his own YRF hero Tiger, making dad jokes while helping SRK out in an impossible/awesome fight on top of a train.

Until the film suddenly remembers that all of its main characters have torture and dead parents in their past and goes all gritty for five minutes. Fortunately, it will proceed to get distracted by yet another explosion in few minutes, so all is well in the YRF Spy Universe.

Three Films Make A Post: It all started when he met a woman.

The Tourist (2010): On paper, I’m all in for the ridiculously named Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s attempt to make a film about the Hollywood idea of an everyman stumbling into a spy-ish romantic adventure in the light mood of Hitchcock circa North By Northwest. The problem, well, one of the problems, is, von Donnersmarck sure ain’t Hitchcock. The script by the director himself, Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellowes lacks tension, pace and charm, so there’s really little of the joyfulness this sort of film needs to breathe.

Putting paid to the film’s romantic aspect is the simple fact that Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie have no chemistry, and are both not exactly at the best stages in their respective career: Depp seems mostly completely checked out, going through the motions – I blame the alcohol; Jolie is at the stage of being so perfectly together, made up and beautiful, she’s totally lifeless.

So what’s to like here?

Chum (2026): I already didn’t like the shark and serial killer movie Dangerous Animals Jonathan Zuck’s film seems rather enthusiastically, ahem, “inspired” by. Having seen Chum, I believe I was much too hard on that film, seeing as that one offered competent editing, dialogue that didn’t make me cringe in pain, and also didn’t take the lazy hack’s way out of using hefty amounts of AI for the shark footage. But then, of course a filmmaker who shows no talent in directing actors, action, or shooting a simple fucking establishing shot would do that.

The Blackwell Ghost (2017): The first of a by now 8-part series of POV horror films is a thing of small yet real pleasures: filmmaking one man band Turner Clay (accompanied by his long-suffering wife Terri Czapleski) spends an hour checking out a supposedly haunted house. Pixel hunts and minor attacks of creepiness ensue; a wife wields the power of sarcasm. All this is presented with a sense of naturalism, featuring two characters that feel likeable and real, and performed without any pretence. While everything here is really very minor, it’s also done well, pacy for the kind of film it is, and appears to know where it wants to go and how to get there without falling into the classic pitfall of unlikeable characters spending hours of your lifetime farting around.

It’s just a likeable project, done well inside of limited means.

Three Films Make A Post: From Oblivion to Oblivion!

My Dearest Assassin aka Lueat Rak Nakkha (2026): Taweewat Wantha’s action movie about the vagaries of having a rare blood type reminds rather effectively of how great action in Thai movies can be – there are great stunt performances, choreography that isn’t obsessed with grappling but actually features punching and kicking, gun fu, as well as a director who knows when to get out of the way of his performers, and when he can make things more intense or interesting.

I was rather reminded of Hongkong’s heroic bloodshed movies by the way the film mixes heavy melodrama with its awesome violence, while it ignores boring facts like how anaemia or blood transfusions work to squeeze more tears out of the audience. And with this kind of movie, blood and tears truly belong to each other.

Pater Noster and the Mission of Light (2024): With Christopher Bickel’s movie, we are entering the world of really indie indie horror, but the kind of ultra-indie project that puts all possible effort and energy in. So here, when a young record collector (Adara Starr, who is one of the most enthusiastic screen presences I’ve encountered in quite some time) and her friends stumble into the world of a cult of the elderly people that was once also a Ya Ho Wha 13-style cult band, we get a full-on Mission of Light album beyond what’s needed for the soundtrack.

Also, rather a lot of increasingly freakish and wonderful gore, an eye for the hallucinatory, fountains of fake blood, and the sort of H.P. Lovecraft meets John Keel lore that’s like catnip to me. Bickel and his collaborators make a lot of limited means here.

Khitrovka. The Sign of Four aka Khitrovka. Znak chetyryokh (2023): Karen Shakhnazarov’s Russian adaptation of the other fully readable Holmes novel by Doyle has at least an interesting set-up. It puts the plot into a lovingly recreated Moscow of 1902, replaces Holmes and Watson with historical figures Konstantin Stanislavskiy (Konstantin Kryukov) – yes, the man with the Method – and crime reporter Vladimir Gilyarovskiy (Mikhail Porechenkov), adds other historical cameos (Chekhov knows a lot about India) and a sexy singer/thief (Anfisa Chernykh), and then proceeds to amble through the novel with little sense of tension.

Clearly, Shakhnazarov is more interested in showing off his talents at historical recreation, which leads to a film that is certainly interesting to experience but never really does much with the novel its working with. Hell, it doesn’t even try to reduce the weirdest bit of racism of the book nor does it understand how to have less than three endings.

Shinjuku’s Number One Drunk-Killer Tetsu (1977)

Original title: 新宿酔いどれ番地 人斬り鉄

After spending the usual ten years in prison for the brutal slaughter of an enemy gang boss, mad dog yakuza Tetsu (Bunta Sugwara) finds himself repelled by yakuza politics and a Tokyo he doesn’t quite understand anymore. People are now lieutenants he wouldn’t even spit on – and he likes spitting on people nearly as much as bashing their faces in – and there are clearly things going on his boss Eisaku Daimon (Mikio Narita) doesn’t want to tell him about. It doesn’t help Tetsu’s mental state that Harumi (Etsuko Ikuta), the woman who promised to wait for him hasn’t been seen for three years.

Cue various bouts of a drunk Tetsu getting into people’s faces, and lashing out. Not that Eisaku is actually surprised by this; he had clearly already decided to make use of the man’s nasty disposition before he ever stepped foot out of prison. So he sends Tetsu to Fussa, another part of Tokyo under control of a different yakuza clan to disturb the other clan’s business so forcefully, they’ll just have to allow Daimon’s people a foot in the door.

For that, Tetsu teams up with a hated corrupt cop, a former boxer and cell-mate, a former race car driver, a rocker-style delinquent, and his old buddy Fujiwara (Makoto Sato), one-armed and clearly having had enough of Tetsu’s shit, though Tetsu, not being the sensitive type, doesn’t quite manage to notice.

The group do manage to cause a lot of carnage, but once it’s time for the carnage to stop, a guy like Tetsu can become a bit of problem.

For once, a jitsuroku-style yakuza movie actually starts off declaring it is not based on any actual exploits of real brutal thugs. That’s pretty much the only actual surprise you’ll have with Yutaka Kohira’s movie if you have even the faintest knowledge of this genre. The rest of the film is all about checking all of the surface jitsuroku boxes: Tetsu’s little team of thugs is only somewhat better than their enemies in that they actually seem to believe in not murdering their co-workers – until the expected betrayal, of course –, while the heads of every clan are horrible and manipulative, society corrupt, and the camera nervous, often hand-held and always energetic.

There’s little depth or complexity to the plot or the characters here – most of Tetsu’s team members get their redeeming character traits a scene before they are dispatched (and after having committed yet another act of brutal violence), and the old romantic troubles between Tetsu and Harumi (who is in Fussa, because of course she is) are so undercooked, they might as well not be there. The same goes for the friendship between Tetsu and Fujiwara.

Having said that, I also have to say I had rather a great time with the movie. While this isn’t out to bring anything of complexity to its audience, as an explosion of late 70s yakuza violence this is an absolute blast, with some brilliantly edited action, some low-key fantastic car-stunts and a time-capsule quality to the filmmaking I found completely irresistible. While this is as far from reality as John Rambo’s adventures in Afghanistan, there’s something about the specific kind of grain, the shots of the ugly side of Tokyo, and the manic energy of the film that makes this feel more real than the reality of 1977 itself.

Speaking of fun, Bunta turns up his favourite mad dog persona until it crosses the border of the cartoonish, and everybody else plays their one note to the T, as well, apart from Sato, who appears to come in from a much more serious movie, which befits his plot function. Bunta also “sings” the title track, to prove not even he is perfect.

So, while it certainly isn’t any kind of artistic triumph, Shinjuku’s Number One Drunk-Killer Tetsu (also winner of the title of the week award), is an absolute blast of nihilistic energy.

Masters of the Universe (2026)

As a guy who had a somewhat intense He-Man phase in his childhood, I hardly know what to say about this sad attempt at nostalgia baiting by Travis Knight, the director of the only good live action Transformers film – Bumblebee.

Unfortunately, this ain’t no Bumblebee, kids. For a film that has less plot than many a short film, this somehow manages to be nearly two and a half hours (too) long. It’s so slow, we get our first He-Man transformation an hour into the non-proceedings. But then, how else to fit all of the “jokes” in, and that’s why we’re here, right?

And with jokes I mean the sort of winking, no actual jokes included awkward bullshit every movie that didn’t understand why the Guardians of the Galaxy movies worked now uses to undercut every single moment in a nerdcore movie an audience member might actually think is awesome (which really is what this should be all about, even Cannon knew this much about pulp filmmaking), and to destroy every single emotional beat this bloated monstrosity otherwise might have had. Hell, Masters of the Universe doesn’t even manage to utilize a needle drop of Queen’s “Princes of the Universe” properly, because it does of course need to make exactly the “joke” you’ll expect it to make at this point.

For a film that really wants to get my nostalgia money, the tone feels eternally (see what I did there, I’m just as funny as the script) embarrassed by the toy line and cartoons it is based off, always going for the easiest joke (Fisto, anyone?). Consequently, the whole film shows no actual appreciation of what could be fun about all of this.

The actors mostly show themselves equally unenthusiastic (in a way the now much belittled Marvel would never let anyone get away with in one of their films not directed by Waititi), apart from Idris Elba and Alison Brie, who make actual acting choices and have actual screen presence. Jared Leto’s Skeletor is even worse than his Exxxtreme Joker was (at least you could understand all of what he said there), and Nicholas Galitzine and Camila Mendes are less expressive than the action figures they portray.

Man, do I suddenly feel old and grumpy.

Three Films Make A Post: True love never dies.

The Crow  (2024): What a mess. There’s obviously nothing wrong with re-adapting Jamie O’Barr’s classic goth comic. Even though Alex Proyas’s film is basically perfect, there would certainly be ways to do something new and interesting with the material.

Unfortunately, this was directed by the guy that brought us the live action version of Ghost in the Shell and Snow White and the Huntsman, and is consequently the sort of remake that does make not a single good decision. The characters are insufferable – and cutting out the actual human emotional heart of the proceedings is a ridiculously bad choice –, the music choices often downright bizarre, and Rupert Sanders has no sense of style or flow as a director. I sort of dig Danny Huston chewing the scenery as the film’s Big Bad, but these are low hanging fruit.

Man of War (2026): While I can’t help but feel somewhat uncomfortable with an action movie that takes place in the early stages of the Russian attack on the Ukraine, it is difficult arguing against William Kaufman being the one director working the ever shrinking field of the direct to home viewing action industry whose particular talents are best suited to this sort of thing.

Much-feted – and rightly so - by the handful of people who care for his hyperrealistic approach to modern tactical gun combat scenes, Kaufman is also able to provide enough actual human grounding to the action for it to feel organic and in contact with those parts of the human experience that aren’t violence and/or cowering in fear. The characters are clichés for a movie of this type, but breathing ones, so there are actual emotional stakes here. That the action is pretty fantastic is to be expected of Kaufman anyhow.

Webmaster (1998): You probably won’t find many people who’d call this ultra-cheap looking cyberpunk movie from Denmark of all places an actually good movie, but it certainly is an entertaining one when one is interested in watching cheap cyberpunk movies from Europe (which I obviously am).

Its future consists exclusively of the most primitive computer animation standing in for cyberspace, grotty maintenance corridors, noir tropes and general horniness, filmed in ugly colours and with the most basic blocking.

Thomas Borch Nielsen’s film certainly has a very specific vibe; if you meet it there, it’s actually a fascinating little film of a future made out of discarded bits of the past.

April Fish (1986)

Original title: Shigatsu no sakana

Director Shohei Nemoto (Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Yukihiro Takahashi) made a critically acclaimed, yet commercially unsuccessful film a decade or so ago, and has been floundering ever since, while declaring he’s an artiste to anyone who doesn’t want to hear it. Shohei did manage to marry the leading lady of his film, now slightly aging star Fujiko Kinugasa (Miyoko Akaza), however, and she’s been paying the bills whereas Shohei stays at home and indulges in his hobbies of cooking fine French cuisine and nibbling cheese.

Shohei did shoot a – never used, of course – commercial on a South Sea Island a couple of years ago and got friendly with one of the local chiefs, a second generation Japanese named Panapora Handa (Tetsuro Tanba). They got so friendly, the Chief lent Shohei his wife for a night, as is apparently local custom in this very special South Seas community. Now, Shohei didn’t actually do anything untoward even when provided the opportunity because he actually loves his wife very much indeed, but when Handa comes to Japan for a bit, our hero is very much afraid the Chief is going to want to have Shohei reciprocate with the wife sharing.

Even though he isn’t the type to cheat on his wife, Shohei also isn’t the kind of guy able to say no to that sort of idea, or admit any part of this bizarre business to Fujiko. Fortunately, a screenwriter friend of his has a brilliant idea: why not hire a young actress (Kyo Kanoko) who is very much into free love to pretend to be his wife for an evening? Surely, nothing at all can go wrong, there.

Nobuhiko Obayashi, rightly beloved for Hausu in cult movie circles, was a director of many more facets than I understood before I started to dive deeper into his filmography. What connects all of his films are immense technical abilities as a director, as well as the knowledge when and how to apply these abilities for any given project. Which may mean going hog-wild for two hours, or never moving one’s camera for three.

Visually, April Fish is a pretty calm film for Obayashi, but adding too many flourishes to this wild, often slapstick-heavy homage to screwball comedies and especially Billy Wilder would have made the film utterly insufferable. As it stands, Obayashi puts a heavy emphasis on catching the physicality of his actors, be it Takahashi’s nervy, neurotic qualities, or Kyo Kanoko’s silliness and sexuality.

This isn’t a movie that’s afraid of a pratfall or a thrown condiment, yet there’s also an emotional core here that speaks about a marriage in crisis, where everything that’s actually important between a couple is left unspoken, and where all necessary fights have been avoided for years. It just does so through the language of screwball comedy, an epic cooking scene, and Tetsuro Tanba chewing the scenery in new ways even for this experienced chewer.

One might look askance at some of the racial politics here – the sexual ones are actually much less regressive than the plot description would make one fear – but the film’s basic silliness really works as a shield here I see no point in even trying to push aside.

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

This is the Mad Max film I’ve returned to the least, so seldom indeed it must have last seen it in the late 90s. At that point in time, following the classic joyful childhood viewings when silly things like taste simply don’t get in one’s way, I really couldn’t roll with much of this at all. Miller’s decision to shift things to a PG-13 degree of violence and nastiness, Max’s evolution into a minor redeemer figure, and Tina Turner were all things that got me pretty worked up.

Rewatching it with less need to prove my good taste to myself – that train has not only gone but dive-bombed into a canyon with all passengers lost – I was first surprised by the heavy sense memory I was hit with during the first act, in an intensity I don’t get all that often. Apparently, the parts of the film until shortly after the Thunderdome sequence have been burned into my brain like Claremont X-Men comics, the original Star Wars trilogy, and Inframan. That went away once Peter Pan’s weird children appeared, but even as a child, I wasn’t too much into child protagonists, so that tracks quite well.

What I truly realized about the film this time around is how incredible Miller’s design sense is, how lived-in and strange Max’s world has become, and in turn, how Miller made his world stranger with every movie, the world breaking apart into further weirdness and strange delusions the longer it goes on after the apocalypse.

I don’t hate the children anymore as I once did, either. Or at least, I absolutely appreciate how Miller uses the Lost Boys to present an alternative to the capitalist hell of Bartertown, hope born from innocence and a lack of knowledge of the most destructive alternatives, but hope nonetheless. Emotionally, Max’s turn into a saviour figure still doesn’t quite work for me, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t want to watch the adventures of a guy who just lets a bunch of children run to their doom.

So this still is my least favourite Mad Max film, but now one I’ll occasionally rewatch and enjoy. Also, Tina Turner is a fantastic villain, what were you thinking, young Me!?