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.

Kanto Street Peddlers: Clan Violent Loyalty (1970)

After having spent only a couple of years behind bars for his role in the climax of the first movie, Bunta Sugawara now roams Japan in this second movie of the street peddling focussed ninkyo eiga series to keep out of Tokyo trouble.

As will surprise nobody who ever watched a ninkyo eiga or two, Bunta soon falls in with group of deeply honourable street peddling yakuza who control an important festival site, but are beleaguered by the intrigues and occasional casual violence of a gang of proper baddy yakuza who want to get at that turf and its riches by any means necessary.

This sequel was again directed by Norifumi Suzuki, who spent a lot of his time in the ninkyo realm before he found his true calling in pinky violence and dubious comedy.

Here we find the director pulling his preferred comedy shenanigans back for much of the film beyond a couple of comical interludes. Instead he concentrates on melodrama and bad yakuza nastiness (even in the less extreme ninkyo eiga variant of the yakuza movie, things could get a bit unpleasant at this point in time, as long as only the villains were doing the really bad stuff). Despite some inelegant shuffling out of and into the movie of characters – some actors probably shot another movie for Toei in parallel, or ten – the film is rather more focussed than its predecessor. This provides Suzuki with opportunity to put more effort into creating more complex character relations and go deeper into the politics of the street peddler world. All this is then used to make the melodrama more intense once the shit hits the fan, until everything culminates in the expected beautiful bloodbath.

That climax isn’t quite as wonderfully done as the one in the first Kanto Street Peddlers, though Suzuki still puts a lot of effort into creating an energetic fight that doesn’t use the standard by the book camera set-ups or blocking of such scenes. In general, Suzuki appears very interested in using all kinds of tricks to make the genre standards Seiko Shimura’s script goes through visually memorable and through this emotionally involving. This works rather well for the movie, and also demonstrates a side of the directors that’s easy to overlook when he’s throwing naked female wrestlers and pratfalls at the camera: he’s genuinely good at the quiet emotional moments, and knows how to provide the Toei stable of thespians with openings to really strut their stuff. As it usually goes when a director does this, they repay him with giving a little extra.

Three Films Make A Post: Getting in is hard, getting out is hell.

Do Not Enter (2026): A group of YouTube Urban Explorers get in over their heads when they enter an old abandoned hotel where they’ll not only have to cope with a violent group of rivals led by an ex-colleague but also a mysterious murdering monster (Javier Botet doing his usual shtick).

Surprisingly enough, director Marc Klasfeld doesn’t stage this as a piece of POV horror – there’s only very little footage of the sort in here – but shoots it like a “proper movie”. Which seems like a curious decision, given the set-up, but then, this is not a film demonstrating too many sensible behind the camera decisions. All changes to the clockwork-tight David Morell novel this is based on are either superficial modernizations the movie then does nothing of use with, or feel made to slow things down and make them less interesting. The sets are pretty nice, and if you’re into heart-based gore, there’s something for your specific kink in here, but otherwise, this is such a generic piece of cinema, one might just as well not bother with it.

Kanto Street Peddlers aka Kantô Tekiya ikka (1969): At their height, even the more mediocre and generic outings of Japanese studios like this contemporary ninkyo eiga about battling street peddlers produced by Toei and directed by Norifumi Suzuki, were impossibly entertaining.

This does waver sometimes awkwardly between earnest, leftist, ninkyo and the kind of goofy nonsense comedy Suzuki loved so much to drag into every single one of his films, but also contains a bunch of Toei house actors – Bunta Sugwara is our hero, Minoru Oki is actually playing a good guy; Bin Amatsu at least is still evil – I can’t help but love to watch even in lesser material, and looks and feels so much of its time and place it is fascinating even when it isn’t exactly good and a bit slow. Plus, this ends on a fantastic climax that hits all the ninkyo clichés – our hero strutting manly through the rain to the final slaughter while he sings terribly on the soundtrack – which it presents with much verve, imagination – the POV shot start to the battle alone is worth the whole movie – and all the blood one could wish for.

Bored Hatamoto – The Mansion of Intrigue aka Riddle of the Snake Princess’ Mansion (1957): This is still the earliest (between the 22nd and the 25th, depending on source) in the long-running series of jidai-geki pulp detective films starring Utaemon Ichikawa as the titular hero with the moon-shaped scar you can find with English subtitles.

It’s not one of my particular favourites of the series – three comic relief characters plus a teen sidekick are a bit much for me even though we get a really good seppuku joke late in proceedings – but there’s still a lot to like here. Director Yasushi Sasaki stages some fine battles (we’re still in the bloodless and noiseless stage of screen fighting in Japan here), there are Japanese actors in whiteface pretending to be Dutch, and there’s a wonderful pulpy energy to proceedings, all dominated by Ichikawa’s commanding presence. Plus, as if this were a 70s Bollywood masala, our hero infiltrates the main villain’s lair by taking part in a sweet dance number.

Three Films Make A Post: The monkey that likes killing our family …it's back.

The Monkey (2025): It has finally happened – Oz Perkins made a movie I don’t adore. In fact, I’d go as far as calling this bit of monkey business based on a Stephen King short genuinely bad. It’s the kind of horror comedy that believes a handful of gore gags and watching a bunch of characters the film itself can’t seem to find any interest in do little of note somehow does a movie make; that making this thin bit of nothing look slick (Perkins certainly doesn’t suddenly stop being a technically accomplished director) and professional somehow helps things along; that watching a film torture characters it clearly loathes for laughs is somehow funny.

Dark Nuns (2025): This takes place in the same nonsense version of exorcist South Korean Catholicism as The Priests. As such, I was hoping for a film with an equal amount of involuntary humour as that dubious bit of horror. Alas, Kwon Hyeok-jae’s spin-off doesn’t reach the heights of a movie whose dramatic climax is priests hunting for a possessed piglet; it is certainly as pompously self-serious as the original film, but never becomes quite weird enough with it to be interesting.

As a straightforward horror film, this suffers from the fact its – not completely uninteresting – attempt at mixing Shamanist and Catholic exorcism movie tropes only leads to double the amount of clichés, as much effort as poor Song Hye-kyo as a renegade exorcist nun puts into the whole thing.

International Gang of Kobe aka Kobe Kokusai Gang (1975): With Noboru Tanaka taking time out from his brilliant Roman Porn work for Nikkatsu to make a jitsuroku style yakuza film for Toei, and Ken Takakura and Bunta Sugawara in the leads, this should by all rights be a slam dunk. Despite appropriate amounts of sex and violence, it isn’t, alas. There’s a lack of focus and coherence, and while some scenes look and feel well enough, they never cohere into much of a whole. Even Takakura’s and Sugawara’s performances seem slightly distracted and off, as if the filmmakers couldn’t decide if they needed them to act or to take on their star personas, leaving them adrift somewhere in the limbo between these states.

The Bloody Sword of the 99th Virgin (1959)

Original title: Kyûjûkyû-honme no kimusume

Warning: I’ll spoil the hell out of this sixty decades old movie!

There is trouble afoot In a particularly remote part of the Iwate prefecture, a part of Japan that’s apparently seen as the most backwoodsy of places. The area the film is concerned with is dominated by a huge cultural gap between the people of a mountain village and their neighbours in a nearby valley town. Where the population of the latter is thoroughly modern and partially westernized, the mountain folk keep themselves separate, clinging to all kinds of traditional ideas, superstitions and rites, and perhaps worse. Right now, the young-ish new, and certainly not local, priest of a mountain temple is trying to change this and drag his flock into the 20th century. A first step in his campaign (he also seems to have saved the village from an epidemic, buying himself quite a bit of street cred with it) is his refusal to leave the mountain when the once a decade Fire Festival will start in a couple of days. Unlike in the rest of Japan where this is apparently a festival of communal joy and togetherness, these villagers lock themselves away from the spirits on this night, demanding all outsiders like the priest descend into the valley, so not to enrage whatever wanders the night.

There’s something worse than a relatively harmless superstition going on here, though. A hag (says the film) roams the countryside looking at people wrong; two young women from Tokyo disappear. Turns out, the villagers want all outsiders gone from their mountain because their version of the Fire Festival needs virgin sacrifices, the blood of the victims being used to coat a sword made in a tradition secretly kept alive for nearly a thousand years. This year’s sword is supposed to be the last one, a tradition of murder finally fulfilled, but the ladies from Tokyo happen not to fit the virgin part of the sacrifice, so the village needs to get ahold of some proper virgins stat – but only the blood of outsiders is allowed.

Eventually, after quite a bit of death and mystification, and with the assistance of an expert in traditional sword smithing techniques, the police (among them a very young looking Bunta Sugawara) begin figuring out what has been going on under the townies’ noses for centuries.

Apparently, the portrayal of the mountain folk in Morihei Magatani’s Bloody Sword did not go over well with various advocates at the time, and so it is one of those Japanese films that weren’t actually banned but were seldom or never shown out of self-censorship. From here in Germany, and after decades of backwoods horror and folk horror, the portrayal of the mountain populace is not terribly offensive. At the very least, every larger character from up top is portrayed with as much, sometimes more, actual characterisation and shows motives beyond “is crazy mountain person”, and they are treated as people even when they sacrifice women in creepy cult rituals. There may very well be some racial stuff going on here I don’t get from my comfy chair in Germany, of course.

On a metaphorical level, and very much keeping in the spirit of the body of works we now call folk horror, Bloody Sword is a film about the past and its traditions as something dangerous and poisonous that, having hidden itself for a time, comes back to the surface during the course of the film. Tradition here means a rejection of change, and an utter conviction that doing inhumane things and causing suffering is one’s duty when tradition demands it, instead of a reason to turn away from these traditions and change. Which is obviously a theme rather important in Japanese post-war cinema even outside of folk horror, though generally treated with rather more ambiguity. Of course, virgin sacrifices are not a terribly ambiguous thing, ethically speaking, last time I looked.

As is absolutely typical of Japanese commercial cinema of this era, the film contains a bunch of wonderfully shot and staged sequences. Magatani (a director with whom I am unfortunately completely unacquainted outside of this film) is an equally adept director of quietly poetic shots of people wandering down a mountain path as he is of the very effectively creepy cult rituals, going from scenes of dramatic dialogue to those of bloodied victims of murder with what feels like natural ease. The grand finale even contains some very adeptly done action, with bow-wielding cultists fighting a force of policemen who eventually pack out machine guns (just in case you haven’t gotten the “tradition vs modernity” memo by this point). Which is not the typical climax to a folk horror film. But then, the film then ends on the surviving policemen honouring the graves of the people they killed, while the surviving villagers look on sullenly and more than a little shell-shocked. The past clearly has added another thing that won’t stay buried to its arsenal, even if things are peaceful, for now, and the present has taken quite a toll as its own kind of sacrifice from these people.

The way on which we get to this point is moody and interesting, sometimes quietly creepy, with dramatic conflicts that always try to provide a bit more complexity to issues and characters than their standard trope treatment needs. A sense of disquiet, and perhaps guilt, subtly hangs over everything.