Case of Umon: One-Eyed Wolf (1959)

Five men are found hanging from a particularly creepily picturesque tree. While an older comic relief colleague – who comes with his own comic relief sidekick – are convinced this was some kind of group suicide of unidentified merchants, young magistrate Umon (Ryutaro Otomo) begs to differ. These men clearly were experienced swordsmen and therefore samurai – and they were murdered.

Together with his comic relief sidekick (Shunji Sakai, as if you didn’t know), and the various friends he has in low places, Umon follows the case to (a surprise if you’ve never seen a jidaigeki detective movie before) a conspiracy to not just kill but blow up the shogun himself.

Even though it suffers from a surplus of comic relief characters – at the point where comic relief characters have their own comic relief characters, things have gone too far – this first film in the Umon series is a particularly fine entry into the realm of somewhat pulpy (to enable swordfights and grand villainous plans) jidaigeki detective tales. I have developed a great fondness for the genre, particularly the various series Toei produced before things became bloodier and rather more cynical in the jidaigeki realm, and nobody’d try to protect the ruling dictator anymore.

Director Tadashi Sawashima must have been in a particularly creative mood when this was made, for this is atypically dynamically filmed for a late 50s jidaigeki of this type. We start with the wonderfully creepy and atmospheric discovery of the five corpses – some shots here do rather look like the kind of painting I’d put on my walls if I had any room for them –, find the director experiment with nearly expressionist framing and rather exciting camera movement during the big fight scenes, and also see him experiment with some excellently melodramatic suspense, like Hitchcock on speed, when Umon has to fight the climactic fight while also making sure the shogun can make his temple visit not just unexploded but on time. It ain’t easy working for the Man.

One-Eyed Wolf is also rather exciting, lovely to look at and genuinely suspenseful if you’re able to roll with the importance of the shogun not being late, and keeping unexploded.

Human Vapor Season 01 (2026)

Tokyo gets into a bit of tizzy when a scientist rises into the air and explodes during a live TV interview with reporter Kyoko Kono (Yu Aoi). The case is more than a little weird, so the police reactivate Kenji Okamoto (Shun Oguri).

Okamoto had been suspended because he was taken to be responsible for leaks about a date-raping yakuza turned CEO reaching a journalist, and the concurrent suicide of said yakuza turned CEO. The journalist was, of course, Kyoko, who was in a relationship with Okamoto at the time, and betrayed him to get the info.

Obviously, there are complicated feelings between these two now, which will not become less complicated when both of them start investigating the murder. Not that Kyoko has much of a choice, for the killer, someone (something?) calling himself the Human Vapor (Uta), wants her – specifically - to interview him about his further plans.

Apparently, he uses practically supernatural powers in a quest for vengeance on a mysterious, influential group in the habit of using the weakest members of society as “human fuel”.

This Japanese/Korean co-production directed by Shinzo Katayama and written by Yeong Sang-ho (of Train to Busan fame) and Ryu Yong-jae does a very convincing job of adapting the Ishiro Honda classic to modern times and the demands of the streaming show form. Though, curiously enough, the filmmakers seem to do this through the lens and style of mangaka Naoki Urasawa, who has nothing whatsoever to do with the show, unless his way of storytelling fitting the streaming show form pretty perfectly.

Yet still, the structural approach, the use of flashbacks, even of classic Japanese rock, the character types used, even the show’s moments of very Japanese and genuinely endearing goofiness (let’s just say “bowling” so as not to spoil things), are so in tune with how the creator of 20th Century Boys and so on operates, one can’t help but wonder how and why this exact approach was chosen. Hell, the show even shares Urasawa’s tendency for cheap plot twist trick tactics based on first showing the audience only half of what actually happened in a scene. Which is okay when used with care, but does get a bit old when it happens in nearly every single episode.

On the plus side, the plot runs like clockwork, and many elements that seem like pointless asides to get the series to length – curse of streaming - will eventually turn out to be actually meaningful and important not just structurally but also thematically.

Speaking of themes, the show is driven by a genuine sense of righteous fury about the abuses and uses, possibly even existence, of power in ways tiny and huge. Men – and it’s invariably men – with power are all portrayed as grotesques, mostly having left their actual humanity behind when they started to convince themselves people without power are only there to be used at their whim, if they ever cared at all. Even the small fry bad guys are fucking weirdoes.

The cast is obviously pretty great. Aoi and Oguri of course so, the rest of the cast sometimes to my surprise. Everyone sells even the plot’s less plausible parts with conviction, and appears to do their outmost not to be made subservient to the plot twists, and instead make these twists actual parts of their characters and performances.

Ikenie Man (2019) & Harawata Man (2019)

These two short – fifty-two and forty-six minutes respectively – horror comedies by Yu Nakamoto belong together, despite the second film being far superior to the first one. Even though I’m not going to go too deeply into the plots, some spoilers are inevitable here, especially for the second film.

A university film club goes into a pretty creepy forest to film a simple slasher. The final girl doesn’t actually like horror films, the director is a total horror nerd, and soon squabbling ensues that causes her to wander off while the rest of the crew stumble upon a camping site populated by the kind of social mixture of young people you only find in horror movies and videogame casts.

Because they are lacking a lead actress, the filmmaking idiots decide to film a nightly attack on the camp site; problems ensue, though not exactly those you’d have expected.

Ikenie Man. the first of these two films is not just a comedy, it is that most horrifying of things, a full on horror parody. Which, unfortunately, means much of its first half consists of the same jokes every single one of these films make, just less sharply written (and in my case also hindered by somewhat bad subtitles), and not always well timed.

The finale, in which the director channels all of his horror knowledge in an actually hilarious and very gory way to get everyone out of the situation is rather better, though, as a scene during which  a guy uses guts as a nunchaku is bound to be. Otherwise, Ikenie Man is about what you’d expect from a microbudget Japanese horror parody.

Harawata Man is of quite a different calibre, however. We follow members of the same film club, minus the first film’s director plus some memorable new members as they meet, greet and eventually go on shooting yet another horror film.

This time around, they plan on a guerrilla shot in that other mainstay of no budget movie production, the empty industrial building. As it turns out, there’s another crew – directed by a character played by no less than Shigeo Osako! - already shooting their own movie there. It’s not, as our rather loveable idiot protagonists at first think, a porn shoot, but a snuff film production, so again, bloody violence ensues. You really shouldn’t mess with university film clubs, or underestimate the powers of donning a slasher mask sack (sack mask?), though.

This time around, Nakamoto swerves from parody to a proper horror comedy that still has more than enough genre knowledge but whose humour is predominately character based, with a bit of splatstick to keeps things loose. Which leads to a much funnier film, particularly since, where Ikenie Man’s character work was rather perfunctory, this one deftly draws fun character relations, and presents everyone as a loveable goofball I found impossible not to root for. Also, the jokes simply are better, as well as better timed.

There’s real heart here, so much of it the film can even finish on one of those wistfully melancholic scenes of old friends meeting years later Japanese cinema of any budget level loves so well, and make it work.

Which is quite an improvement between two films that came out in the same year.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Ura Horror (2008)

I have been pretty vocal about my love for the works of the contemporary king of POV horror Koji Shiraishi, as well as my general love for the horror anthologies of purportedly real footage that got churned out for the local Japanese home video market for a time. So much so, finding a new fansubbed movie of the sort provides me with a genuine moment of happiness.

Ura Horror, an anthology of shorts that tend to be around the five minutes mark, brings these good things together, with Shiraishi co-directing together with Yohei Fukuda (who also spent some time in the realm of cursed footage and tapes banned from broadcast on his own). Quality and depth of the pieces wavers between what amounts to short jokes and their set-ups, to tales that suggest a larger world of the supernatural lurking right at the upper right corner of a fuzzy video.

For the Shiraishi maniac, some moments here feel like suggestions and sketches of what is to come later: yes, digital worms are indeed in here, and AV actress turned general purpose idol and Noroi stalwart Maria Takagi is featured (and getting cursed) as well in a segment that also features the great Takashi Shimizu playing himself. Shiraishi’s love for the low-rent parts and aspects of Japanese popular culture is already in full effect.

This is, of course, all pretty lightweight in the sense that none of the tales here is an actual story with a traditional beginning, middle, and end, or features an explanation for the weirdness we have just witnessed, and no deep characterisation is going to be forthcoming. One could, of course, argue this to be exactly the point: these are films about the lack of explanation, about weirdness only briefly encountered, caught on camera, and then locked away by the survivors.

The Summit of Mount Fuji (1970)

Original title: Fuji sanchô

After some years of failed attempts at convincing the government, the Japan Meteorological Agency manages to secure a mandate to install a weather radar device on the summit of Mount Fuji. This is predominantly going to be used to forecast dangerous typhoons much earlier than possible up to this point.

It’s not an easy project though: the weather affords only about forty working days per year, with a very slim two year window to finish it at all provided by the budget. There’s also the little problem of hard physical labour having to take place in very thin air, as well as the logistical and practical nightmare of masses of production materials having to be hauled by horse and higher up on foot.

And that’s before the kinds of troubles arise a project of this kind can’t avoid: backroom squabbling, worse weather than expected, and so on.

When you see the “Nikkatsu” logo on a film, you generally expect something more pop or more nude than a somewhat dry two hour movie about an ambitious construction project, but, with the assistance of the JMA and Mitsubishi Motors (the company who built the actual weather radar on Mount Fuji), this is indeed what we get here.

Surprisingly enough, I found myself often riveted by Tetsutaro Murano’s film. There’s something to be said about a film concerning a bunch of serious, professional people – all of them men, because that’s the times unfortunately – doing serious, professional work under difficult circumstances to build something of actual use to their society. Especially when watched in a time when the thing to admire in the real world are incompetent fools trying to destroy as much of our societies in many of the countries of the West in as short a time as possible to get rich on the backs of everybody else.

Murano tells the story calmly, often emphatically without drama. Thus, he can focus on the small triumphs when yet another difficult hurdle is surmounted by hard work and professionalism, and doesn’t exactly need too become too heavy-handed.

This isn’t much of a character movie. There are a lot of fine Japanese actors here – like eternal favourite Shintaro Katsu as the leader of the horse porter cooperation which will turn into the bulldozer porter cooperation – who provide screen presence to not let the film drift off into the inhuman. Yet this isn’t a film about personal problems but one about the solving of impersonal problems through competence, stubbornness and a bit of luck.

Visually, there are some exciting shots of Mount Fuji – particularly the daring helicopter transport of the radome is impressive –, of heavy machinery crawling up a mountain while a group of pilgrims goes down the mountain, and rather a lot of bad weather, made with enough heft to convince anyone they are indeed witnessing the building of a radar station on a mountain summit.

Which, it turns out, was exactly the kind of thing I needed to see today.

Three Films Make A Post: MIGHTY MAX!

The Solar Thread (1963): The mere existence of this short film is something of a Fortean encounter. Commissioned to make a PR film for a large producer of artificial textiles, Kazuo Kuroki turned out this portrayal of capitalism as an abstract nightmare of empty factories filled with machines voided of human input, bathed in an atonal score by Toshi Ichiyanagi. Possibly one of the great dystopian yet beautiful movies I’ve seen. Somehow, a large company’s PR arm signed off on this, and a gentleperson on the internet fansubbed it and put it on the Internet Archive.

Speed Demon (2026): I seem to be one of the few people alive who actually enjoyed this “nun exorcist Katie Cassidy on a train” movie, but Jon Keeyes’s film is so joyfully cheesy without winking at its audience, and carries itself with such a sense of fun, I’m not going to complain about the bizarre characterisations, the improbable dialogue, and the, ahem, variable acting. All these so-called flaws really only add to my enjoyment, as does a final sequel set-up in which an undercover Pope first tells our heroine that he doesn’t like her methods but approves of her results and then leads in to promise us the exorcism of the President of the United States (who really could need one) in the sequel. How could I resist?

Bored Hatamoto: The Daimonji Conspiracy (1959): Unlike the other films in the long-running jidaigeki mystery series I’ve seen, this entry, directed by Yasushi Sasaki, does involve a somewhat more down to earth plot about a corrupt official’s attempt to rope an honourable but ill-used clan into a rebellion against the Shogun. There’s an emphasis on palace intrigue, plots and counterplots, and comparatively few of the pulpier elements of other Bored Hatamoto films. Though Utaemon Ichikawa does get an opportunity to make one of this patented grand surprise entrances in the finale, and still gets to stare down and kill a lot of mooks.

I have to admit, the film’s general quality notwithstanding,m I found myself missing the magical curses and, ninjas and vampire bats of other entries into the series a little.

The Convenience Store (2026)

A couple of cops are trying to piece together the strange occurrences that took place one night at a rural convenience store. There’s rather a lot of strangeness, as well as a dead, eyeless manager in the basement to consider.

The case’s main witness is student Tazuru (Kotona Minami). She had been working the night shift of the store that night, as she does six nights a week to earn money for college and to take care of her mother. During the interviews, she, and eventually other characters, reveals some of the peculiar and horrific things that happened at the store during the last few nights.

Because what the girl has to tell is very strange indeed, seeing as it concerns ghosts, apparitions and a doom-saying homeless man, it is lucky she can offer some memory cards with videos to prove at least some of her supernatural experiences. Surely, watching those videos can’t connect anyone watching them to a curse, right?

Director Jiro Nagae has been doing cheap Japanese horror for the home viewing market for quite a few years, and he does by now clearly have a good grip on how to make a very basic horror film. Thus, I mostly found this videogame adaptation a pleasant enough time, featuring as it does some somewhat effective scares and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

The film carries its affection for the superior classics of the J-horror boom on its sleeves: the investigative structure is mostly an excuse to tell the story out of order like a Ju-on story, there’s a little boy ghost also more than a little reminiscent of those classics, and the eventual cursed object is so Ringu, I’m a bit surprised nobody got sued.

Of course, being quite so derivative, there are few surprises here – if you have seen any Japanese horror made post 1995 at all, you’ll know what the big final reveal is going to be very early on, and if you’re bored by J-horror style ghosts, this isn’t going to be the movie to show you how wrong you are (even though you are).

As an unapologetic part of its tradition, The Convenience Store is a pleasant enough experience.

The Adventures of Kosuke Kindaichi (1979)

Original title: Kindaichi Kosuke no boken

In the world of the film, famous detective Kosuke Kindaichi (Ikko Furuya) is also a famous mystery novel character, and a famous film character. For his newest case, he teams up with Inspector Todoroki (Kunie Tanaka). Todoroki is mostly interested in a series of art thefts committed by a gang of roller-skating young people who like mime and/or David Bowie make-up, whereas Kindaichi is waiting for a murder to happen, for there are always murders in his cases, as well as tainted blood, generational guilt, and complicated murder methods, because that sort of thing is at the core of the Japanese experience as he sees it.

Which is about as sensible as I can make the great Nobuhiko Obayashi’s mystery comedy’s plot sound. There is a properly Kindaichi-like murder mystery happening here, mind you, but it is nearly drowned out by Obayashi at his most exhaustingly unleashed: there’s not a single shot here without any sight gags going on in the background, hardly a line said that doesn’t hint at broader pop culture, Japanese golden age style mysteries, movies, books, music, or ads that have nothing to do with the supposed plot. Some of it is completely inexplicable from my distance of time, geography and language to its point of creation, some I could parse thanks to the amount of Japanese movies, books and manga I’ve consumed during the course of my life, some should be clear to everyone. In any case, it can all become a bit overwhelming, particularly combined with the breakneck speed with which Obayashi goes from scene to scene here.

Of course, this being an Obayashi movie, it also looks absolutely beautiful, and shifts from visual style to visual style with an off-handed surety that must have intimidate any lesser director; also of course, this does not make The Adventures any less overwhelming.

All of this reads like a commentary on the kind of art a Kosuke Kindaichi film must be to me, something referential to a torrent of other media in its own series, as well as the torrent of popular media surrounding it, as well as the torrent of different popular media that surrounded the other versions of the same character, a hall of mirrors that goes on and on until it becomes difficult to find the substance of whatever the adventures of Kosuke Kindaichi actually mean. Or once meant, or will mean, and so on and so forth, until one is overwhelmed enough by the whole thing one has to make Kindaichi himself the killer to return to any kind of sense at all.

Three Films Make A Post: When Billions Get Stolen, Meet the Pros Who Steal It Back

In the Grey (2026): Once can’t blame Guy Ritchie’s newest caper/thriller/action attempt for a lack of honesty in its title. This does indeed embody all of the blandness mainstream entertainment cinema can be capable of, and manages to be a film that’s too technically proficiently made to be downright bad, but feels much worse than an actually bad movie would do because it even lacks the spark of energy of a failure.

It wastes two usually capable leads (and Henry Cavill) on nothing roles with no character traits to speak of, goes through its heist plot with a perfunctory shrug of its shoulders, and contains not an ounce of genuine fun – or thought, but that’s not expected from Ritchie anyway. It just exists, without even at attempt at creating tension, or suspense, or silly little things like even the most simple character arc.

Chuck Chuck Baby (2023): It’s an unfair comparison (for the Ritchie film), but next up is a film that’s all soul, fun, sadness and genuine cinematic invention. Janis Pugh’s film pairs the dourness of the British kitchen sink drama with the heightened emotion and joy of the musical, to turn out a paean to love – of all types - between women that’s honest about all the crap of working class life yet also dares to see joy and hope, and the cracks where indeed light comes in, without devolving into kitsch or empty optimism.

The Girl Who Sees aka Mieruko-chan (2025): Yoshihiro Nakamura has made some very individual and personality-filled movies, like the utterly brilliant Fish Story, in his time, but he’s also perfectly capable of making a film like this manga adaptation about a schoolgirl (Nanoko Hara) who sees ghosts, and quickly learns it’s best to ignore them. Until, of course, circumstances conspire against this plan. The film hits all the marks it is supposed to hit, without showing much of the personality or imagination Nakamura is capable of as a filmmaker.

But then, unlike me, most of the audience going into this will come for the manga, and not for Nakamura, so getting out of the way of the material does make perfect sense from this perspective. And from that angle, this is a perfectly pleasant and light bit of fantasy/horror comedy, with the mandatory charming lead. It’s just a movie any competent director could have directed in exactly the same way as Nakamura does here.

Midnight Diner (2014) & Midnight Diner 2 (2016)

A man known to his customers only as Master (Kaoru Kobayashi) runs a small diner in Tokyo that’s open between Midnight and 7AM, catering to a crowd of regular night people and the occasional guest star. Apart from a tiny menu, Master offers whatever meal a guest asks for, if he can provide it. Apart from a pretty great cook, Master is also a kind, quiet and thoughtful problem solver and a mighty good listener who clearly can’t help himself when it comes to helping people, sometimes assisted by his small community of regulars. So the films see Master help out people like young, homeless Michiru (Mikako Tabe), who at first eats and runs but then becomes his assistant for a time, mends a broken heart or two, and helps take care of an elderly woman brought to Tokyo through a telephone scam.

Based on a manga that also spawned a popular streaming show, the two Midnight Diner movies belong to the kind of quiet, compassionate and unhurried feel good affairs certain Japanese directors have an astonishing ability to create. Joji Matsuoka’s Midnight Diner films are excellent examples of this form, with their calm, quiet and undemonstrative compassion, their belief in the power of community – as well as in the basic goodwill of communities – and carried by an idea that helping people also means meeting and understanding them on their own terms and at their own pace.

Where this sort of thing could easily drift off in the direction of kitschy teachable moments and schmaltz – some of the plotlines here could certainly play out rather melodramatically and trite – the Midnight Diners are simply too calm and collected for going there; they also feel absolutely genuine in their ideas of how compassion and human dignity interconnect. Also, these films never shy away from acknowledging that life can simply be hard, that the ones you love might not love you back, people die, and catastrophe’s hit – they go about the question of how to go on quietly and calmly afterwards.

Plus, they are really, really Japanese about food, and whose stomach would disagree?

On a filmmaking level, there are no spectacular flourishes here – Matsuoka creates a place, populates it, and then only lends small pieces of emphasis to the work of a fine cast of working actors – for whom Kobayashi provides an impressively calm and kind centre – and script.

Structurally, you can feel the manga source in both films – their structures are episodic but always satisfyingly connected through the material’s clear world view, and their philosophy of unfussy kindness.

Express Train (1967)

Aoki (Kiyoshi Atsumi) is the proud, veteran conductor of an express sleeper train. At the time, this didn’t mean he’d just be checking tickets, but is actually commanding the small army of personnel on the train and shooting all kinds of trouble.

Aoki does so with a mixture of warmth, sternness, and the everyman awkwardness Atsumi is so good at portraying. He’s too self-serious not to be always at least a little ridiculous but he’s also kind and compassionate to a fault, so it’s impossible not to be kindly disposed towards him even if he’s being silly or mildly embarrassing.

In this first of four Train movies with Atsumi produced by Toei, he has to take care of passengers like a child with a dangerous heart problem, a somewhat rowdy drunk ladies’ party, as well as a pregnant passenger who will of course give birth on board of the train.

He’s also going to fall in love again with a woman (Yoshiko Sakuma) he developed a crush on when she was just a late teenage passenger on another line – this being a Japanese move from the 60s, that’s not to be read as anything creepy in the world of the movie. Now very much grown up, her marriage is on the skids, and Aoki’s own marriage isn’t terribly satisfying. Of course, she’s also completely unreachable as a realistic romantic prospect for Aoki.

And if all of this sounds rather a lot like a train-based predecessor to the long, long, very long-running Tora-san/It’s Hard to be a Man series Atsumi would star in for Shochiku starting some years later, apparently every single person watching this – including me – agrees. This is the absolute blueprint of the sort of thing Atsumi would go on to play and be on screen in the future. There are of course some differences here – despite being a bit of a fool sometimes, Aoki is actually pretty good at his job, and feels at least more grown up than Tora will do. He also doesn’t have episodes of lashing out at everyone around him.

Masaharu Segawa directs with an appropriate sense of gentleness – the tone is gentle, the humour is gentle, and there’s an air of day-to-day kindness here that does smile at human folly more than damn it, using the train and its conductor as a model of a late 60s Japan that never quite was but that looks like a place I’d rather like to live.

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.

Yokohama BJ Blues (1981)

Apparently, you can’t make a living by being a singer of mediocre Japanese blues rock alone in early 80s Yokohama, so singer BJ (Yusaku Matsuda), also works as a private detective. Well, maybe it’s the other way round.

Be that as it may, a long-time friend of BJ’s, and also married to BJ’s former flame Tamiko (Mari Henmi), is making his own living as a corrupt cop, taking payments from a criminal organization known as “The Family”. He wants out, though, and is just about to tell all to the non-corrupt parts of the police. Alas, while he’s explaining all this to BJ during a semi-clandestine meeting, he is shot with a high calibre bullet.

For reasons quite divorced from facts and evidence, the dead cop’s partner hold BJ responsible for the killing – he just can’t prove it (mostly because it’s not true, one supposes) – so it behoves our protagonist to find out who really killed his friend not only for reasons of revenge but also of self-preservation.

His investigation appears to mostly consist of a slow, drifting movement through Yokohama’s night and dawn life, where he encounters members of The Family, yakuza, a gay biker gang, a barely legal rent boy runaway he’ll have a gay frolicking montage with. Some of those less interesting in frolicking do rather want to murder BJ, as well.

I’ve mostly seen chambara and jidai-geki from Yokohama BJ Blues’ director Eiichi Kudo before, most of them rather energetically directed and fast-moving (at least as I remember them). This film is not like them at all. Rather, it is dominated by a sense of late night languidness, or really, the more specific late night languidness of people who have spent years drifting through nights and dawns.

The film projects a sense of a melancholia that has hardened to the glass jar feeling of clinical depression, so that every movement its characters make seems aimless, joyless, and generally slow and effusive. Human relationships for the most part appear vague, unfocussed, dominated by loss and betrayal, but loss and betrayal whose emotional impact BJ holds at arms’ length. He’s just too tired and melancholic to even feel them, it appears.

It’s really only some of the musical performances and the scene where BJ – presented as clearly bisexual in the most wonderfully normalized manner possible – frolics with the male prostitute that break through the fog. Lifted fog can’t keep in the slow noir world of the film, of course.

This leads to a movie that’s so slow and loose, most of its dramatic gestures and its complicated plot seem mired in some kind of brain fog – there’s really little conventional tension here, and even what would be an action climax in other films is here very consciously turned abstract and distant by Kudo. For make no mistake, this isn’t an aging filmmaker having lost his touch, but one using the opportunity the ruins of the Japanese studio system of the time offer to stretch in interesting and different directions and speak in ways he couldn’t quite before.

Seen as a thriller or a straightforward crime movie, this is of course no success at all. As a film that’s ultra-focussed on turning the sense of ennui and alienation its protagonist, or the whole of Japanese society as it is portrayed here, suffers from, it is a rousing success, full of incandescently beautiful shots of the ugly parts of a slowly decaying Yokohama and a central performance by Matsuda that lets his natural cool curdle into a detachment beyond hopelessness.

Three Films Make A Post: Do not overlook any anomalies.

Exit 8 (2025): A man (Kazunari Ninomiya) finds himself trapped on an ever-repeating subway station floor. He learns he has to identify anomalies in his surroundings to find his way out, and learns some valuable lessons along the way.

I’m just a few years too old to have ever gotten into the habit of watching other people play video games on the Internet, and never found enjoyable watching people doing something fun instead of doing it myself. Thus, Genki Kawamura’s videogame adaptation’s approach of being pretty much exactly that doesn’t work too well for me, especially with the highly repetitive set-up it uses.

Eventually, the film does some mildly more ambitious things than have a guy wander around the same corridor, forever, and it is certainly well shot for what it is, but the constraints it put itself under just don’t do much to this viewer. Additionally, the ham-fisted way it attempts to speak of alienation in the modern world is one of those cases where I agree with the thesis, but find the artistic execution lacking.

The Accountant (2016): If I were in a snarky mood, I’d congratulate director Gavin O’Connor for finding a way around Ben Affleck’s problems with being expressive by having him play a man whose form of autism sees him finding expressing feelings difficult, but really, that would be selling an action movie short that’s clever, inventive, fun, and uses its main character’s neuroatypicality and how it makes him relate to the world and the world to him in more nuanced and interesting ways than movies, and certainly genre movies, usually do. It is also still often joyful action movie nonsense, but the kind of nonsense carried by an actual heart and a brain for other things.

The Accountant 2 (2025): Whereas this belated sequel written and directed by the same people suggests that nobody involved in the first part actually had any clue about what made it work.

Here, we’re back with autism as a superpower and nothing but, and you can most certainly cut the clever, inventive and fun from the first movie’s description as well. For some reason, this is now also a comedy, just one of those comedies nobody bothered to actually make funny, or write any jokes for. That it’s also unpleasant, aggressively stupid and without any charm does not exactly help it in any way.

Murder on the Last Train (1955)

Original title: 終電車の死美人

A young women is found murdered on the last train to Mitaka, Tokyo. Tokyo’s Showa era murder squad springs into action.

The film follows the case’s investigation, the police slowly uncovering the victim’s identity, checking out witness statements and turning over every stone to uncover a rather messy situation.

Tsuneo Kobayashi’s film is usually treated as Japan’s first proper police procedural, and the film Toei’s successful and pretty long running Police Precinct series of films would model itself after, with an attempt to portray police procedure as it would be used in its time and place realistically. Of course, these are not films portraying or interested in the politics or ethics of policing, and they also don’t spend much time on the dozen or so coppers’ personalities. Today, you’d probably be tempted to call it copaganda, but given the temporal gap between the then and the now, you might also see this as a portrayal of how proper police work should be done by the standards of Showa era Japan.

Keeping this approach from becoming too abstract or clinical are three elements. First, there’s a script by Shin Morita that’s trying to be realistic towards the shoe leather aspects of policing but also knows what to cut – we aren’t shown the pointless witness interviews but only those that actually deliver some new facts or insights, and we are given to understand how much drudgery an investigation entails but don’t have to take part in it. When necessary, the film isn’t afraid to become dramatic either, so particularly once we move towards the climax, there are moments of tension here – this is still supposed to entertain an audience, after all.

Secondly, Kobayashi’s direction effortlessly moves between framing scenes in a semi-documentary style and expressionist flourishes that can turn even a simple witness interview dramatic and interesting to look at. While this idealized version of the police doesn’t do police brutality, the direction often suggests the threat of violence. Interviews with potential criminals are always shot with the cops crowding their victim and shot in angles that see them tower over it in a very Universal horror monster kind of manner.

Thirdly, while there’s no depth to the police roles, the ensemble – after the manner of Japanese studio cinema – do provide anchors of humanity that suggest people and not automatons, which is more than enough to make the material come to life.

And, if you’re like me, it’s genuinely interesting to witness an attempt at a realistic portrayal of Post-War Tokyo of the times made for a local audience. Murder presents a wealth of cultural details history books usually don’t provide, particularly because it focusses on the parts of society history books have historically ignored. It’s not a documentary, of course, but it’s of highest interest nonetheless.

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.