Japan during the Tokugawa Shogunate (don't worry, this will be the only sentence today related to any piece of history as we know it). The delightfully named Jigoku (Masahiro Takashira, sporting a most awesome 80s samurai hairdo) is Japan's most wanted criminal. Virtually hundreds of bounty hunters are on his trail, but nobody is able to catch him. What exactly it is that has made him so popular we're never told. He is the head of a small troupe of wandering entertainers - of course counting among their members a dwarf and a dwarfish latex elephant - who provide him with support in all the things he can't do for himself. So one of them has the useful ability to think (you bet he's wearing glasses), while others provide him with the suppressive fire of their portable cannons. Especially important is the man who carries Jigoku's nine swords in a kind of golf bag around with him. Our hero, you see, loves variety and is a true believer in the idea of having the right weapon for every enemy, even if that means he needs someone to throw his swords to him. Sometimes a man just needs his boomerang sword, or his dagger shooting sword, or the very special blade for killing Frenchmen.
Our hero may kill bounty hunters by the hundreds, but he's not cruel, he even entertains them with dancing, flute playing and ear wiggling before he kills them, as befits a good sportsman.
Alas a new and dangerous enemy has decided to try her aim on him - Yuri the Pistol (Narumi Yasuda), as efficient a bounty hunter as Jigoku is a...whatever he may be.
Fortunately, the flower of love blooms between Yuri and Jigoku as soon as the lay eyes on each other (in a "you're cute, baby!" kind of way), so their first meeting ends at an impasse.
Jigoku and his troupe now decide to go on a little treasure hunt, evading the usual death traps in a fashion certain American archeologists/grave robbers would approve of (which is to say: just barely), and acquiring a sword made of pure gold. As things like this go, the sword is even more popular than Jigoku's head.
The shogun himself (Chiyonosuke Azuma) wants it as the key to Zipang, the kingdom of gold he's read about in his edition of the diaries of Marco Polo. Seeing that he is the shogun and likes to laugh an especially evil laughter, he's not going to try to buy the sword (also, there wouldn't be a fight scene in it). Instead, he sends Hattori Hanzo (Yukio Yamato) and his portable ninja army to steal the sword.
The ensuing fight between Hanzo and his lots and lots of ninjas, Jigoku, Yuri and the nearly naked tattooed guy who jumped out of the place where Jigoku found the sword soon after our hero left, somehow activates the magic power of the sword.
Hanzo and Yuri are sucked into the sky in the best UFO fashion, while Nearly Naked Guy stands below and screams to be taken too, very much like a nearly naked, tattooed Japanese version of Fox Mulder.
While Nearly Naked guy starts a ritual that will help him and Jigoku follow to wherever Yuri went, the bounty hunter and Hanzo materialize in the Sunless Land, a place ruled by a king made entirely of gold, who likes to ask philosophical questions about the nature of love just as much as taking Yuri prisoner and sending his guard of stone armored weirdos against Hanzo.
And those guards are as tough as they are weird. Even Hanzo's bag of tricks that contains such ninja-typical weapons like a rocket launcher could possibly not be deep enough.
From here on, there are still a lot of fights to watch (personal favorite: the king's mecha-like armor), strange people and gods to meet, until we can finally learn an important lesson about the meaning of love. And that Jaws was popular in Japan, too.
The late 80s and early 90s were not a very good time for Japanese genre cinema. Most of its earlier proponents had fled into the financial security of TV or had to cope with the incredibly shrinking budgets the Direct-to-Video market allowed. I'm talking about the real dark ages of Japanese cinema here, the time before mad scientist directors like Takashi Miike invented themselves.
All the more wondrous is it to find a film like Zipang, that starts with an incredible concentration of weird shit per minute and doesn't let up during the whole of its running time. The throw-away fighting styles in the big bounty hunter fight alone would be enough to fuel half a dozen normal movies. Director Kaizo Hayashi just pulls the next bizarre situation out of his hat.
Even more surprising is the change of mood the film pulls off after the protagonists have entered the Sunless Land (whose occupants I suspect of being part of real Japanese mythology). The film shifts from a delightful piece of anything goes fun into the mood and storytelling style of a fairy tale - like a hyperactive Russian fairy tale film without losing its strange but existent internal logic - while still delivering the weird and wacky in unnatural doses.
This kind of film doesn't need acting as we usually know it, of course, but rather as much high-octane mugging and scenery chewing as possible. And by God, the actors deliver that in spades.
I could now proceed to chastise Zipang for some less than believable sets and some very unbelievable special effects, but a fairy tale does not need to be believable to be effective. I'd even say a fairy tale movie has some of its impact precisely because it knows very well that it does not show a version of reality, or another kind of reality, but something that is part of our imagination made visible.
To summarize: You owe yourself to watch this if you have even the smallest interest in things that are awesome.
Posts
2 comments:
I loved the beginning of the movie but I felt that it just didn't hold up. I'm glad you enjoyed it though, it's crazy enough that I think it would have more fans if more people knew about it.
It was the right film at the right moment for me, I must say.
I agree, it needs a little exposure to find some fans.
It reminded me of a The Magic Serpent without Kaiju...
Post a Comment