Three Films Make A Post: Revenge has never been sweeter.

You’ll Never Find Me (2023): There’s a lot to admire in Indianna Bell’s and Josiah Allen’s thriller about a stormy night in an Australian trailer park home, a nightly visitor, and a lot – and I mean a lot – of meaningful stares and portentous dialogue: the sound design is fantastic, the performances are focussed, and it has some genuinely interesting things to say about the violence some men love to inflict of women. However, for me, there’s not enough material here for anything longer than a forty minute short film, so at full length, things feel rather repetitive and drawn out, and everything seems to be restated thrice until the film can lumber to its excellently realized if obvious conclusion.

Thelma (2024): I am genuinely disappointed I didn’t enjoy Josh Margolin’s comedic variation on action movie themes and old age as much as everybody else appears to. It’s not that this is a bad movie, but it is (again!) also a very obvious one: its insights about old age, while played wonderfully by June Squibb and Richard Roundtree, are not exactly incisive – and do tend to the treacly – and the play with action movie tropes stays just as surface level. The humour, as well, never is all that involving.

Taken on the surface level the film actually operates on, it is a fun time and genuinely well done, just don’t go in expecting something that has ambitions beyond making you feel good about your own future of slow decay and dissolution, and everybody you know and love dying (which the film actually tries to make a joke of, because old age loneliness is funny, apparently).

Bad City (2022): Whereas Kensuke Sonomura’s violent cop movie holds more than the homage to classic Japanese V-cinema I was promised. In fact, for being that other movie, it’s not quite violent and crazy enough, and much too interested in character work.

Don’t get me wrong – the action is plenty violent (though, alas, rather MMA-based), pleasantly chaotic and balancing right on the edge of cartoonish fun and brutality appropriate for the material. But this is a film deeply interested in also giving characters proper motivations and relationships it then uses to drive the plot that in its turn is the engine that drives the action sequences. During this, it uses clichés and tropes, and discards them or revels in them as it finds most fitting. It thus actually manages to achieve – between funny-bad jokes and a bit of carnage – a series of emotional beats that actually work. Hell, I found myself caring for the characters as characters, and how often can you say that about an action movie?

Score (1995)

The be-mulleted Japanese American robber Chance (Hitoshi Ozawa) would like to retire from life on the wrong side of the law, but his boss, the "Colonel" (Takashi Ukaji), violently insists on him committing a last crime. Chance is to rob a jewellery store together with an all-star Japanese American gangster trio consisting of the dependable Tequila (Shu Ehara), the whiny Flight (or Right, in any case played by Ryushi Mizukami) and the dubious and untrustworthy Duck (Masahiro Yamashita). The Colonel makes it quite clear that Chance is the only one of the four who will survive the moment of payment for their work, leaving the robber with a bad taste in his mouth but not much to do about it.

Although everyone dons an awesome suit for the assault on the jewellery store, the whole thing doesn't go that well. The men get their loot, but Flight is shot in the shoulder and will from now on be even whinier than before. The wounded gangster has something of a hysterical fit during the drive to the abandoned factory where the group is planning to hole up and meet the Colonel and manages to attract the (yes, Japanese) serial killer couple of Doc Holiday fan TJ (Kazuyoshi Ozawa) and Sara (Miyuki Tanako), who cop to our "heroes" being in the possession of quite a bit of jewellery.

As if two serial killers and the coming betrayal by their boss wasn't enough, the gangsters decide to do a little backstabbing among themselves too.

One of the open secrets of Japanese direct to video/DVD action films of the 90s is that a lot of these films aren't any good and often do not contain as much action as the term "action film" would suggest.

In fact, many of them are just slow and boring and contain less action than the average love poem.

Fortunately, you can't complain about a lack of people hurting each other in interesting ways in the films of Atsushi Muroga, at least not those I have been able to see. Muroga's Score seems to be very typical for the director's output. The movie takes place in a somewhat silly pretend US nearly exclusively populated by people from Asia (apart from one gangster moll, one cop and one henchman), yet never feels a need to excuse or explain this or other of its implausibilities. Instead of making excuses, the film likes to rip off and/or nod in the direction of dozens of other films, starting with the obvious inspirations (City on Fire and Tarantino's re-imagining Reservoir Dogs for the gangster and action side of the film, Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers for the serial killer couple) and continuing to more obscure references hidden away in character names and (bad) one-liners.

The tone throughout is never completely serious but never crosses over into the realm of the merely ironic.

And who'd have time for being ironic or being too serious when he has to show people jumping, shooting, bleeding and jump-shooting again and again and again, everybody losing litres of blood, anyway? Happily, the film's characters (except for poor, whimpering Flight) all have the constitution of cartoon characters and usually need to be killed three or four times until it takes. That's five times the shoot-outs for the price of one! They shoot! They bleed! They mutter "there's only two kinds of people" variations, and I, for one, can't resist.

Other things Score doesn't have time for are: authentic human emotion, a memorable score, boredom, dialogue sequences that don't end in violence or at least wild screaming after about thirty seconds, the sad facts of human physiology, viewers who take this sort of film too seriously.

I can't help but compare Muroga's way of making a cheap, exciting movie to the Takashi Miike style of filmmaking. While I haven't seen anything by Muroga that is as bizarre or subtextually rich as Miike at his best, Muroga's films do seem to have a comparable ethos. They have the look and feel of films made by a director and actors just trying to have a bit of fun on camera while also trying to make their audience complicit in their fun without needing to be all clever all the time, yet also without being as stupid as they sometimes pretend to be. The difference between Muroga and Miike seems to be that the former is always willing to keep his films inside the framework of conventional genre film, while the latter very obviously doesn't care what he's supposed to do. There's something to be said for both ways of going about it.

 

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