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: Elvis Has Left the Building

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (2015): It wouldn’t have been difficult to tell this specific tale as an utter freakshow. It is, after all, the of story a horse breeder with musical ambition and a voice naturally a lot like that of Elvis Presley who got roped into the role of “Orion” – a masked singer heavily insinuated to be Elvis returned shortly after his death, somewhat bigger, buffer, and younger, and built to make Sun Records (the Nashville version, so no bad thoughts about Sam Phillips necessary) a whole lot of money, at least for a time.

Director Jeanie Finlay doesn’t at all, but instead creates a sympathetic portrayal of a guy who had a dream he finds fulfilled in a way that’s making him painfully unhappy, and the curious cultural impact of Elvis on the more peculiar parts of American culture. It’s a lovely thing, and that most pleasant of surprises – a documentary about a curiosity that turns out to be a film about people.

Bored Hatamoto: Island of No Return (1960): In this outing of the jidai geki pulp detective series, the Bored Hatamoto (as always embodied quite wonderfully by Utaemon Ichikawa) makes his way to the shadowed streets and the foreigners’ quarter of Nagasaki, where he finds a lot of moody filmmaking by Yasushi Sasaki, who makes much of the sets, those exotic foreigners (like the same two red-headed Western guys wandering through the background of many a scene, or the Japanese guys in blackface wearing turbans), yet another plan to dispose of the shogun (this time via the drug trade), musical numbers, running sword battles and my very favourite trope in this sort of movie – the Japanese actors very badly pretending to be dastardly (sigh) Chinese who turn out to indeed be meant to be Japanese villains pretending to be Japanese.

This is particularly rollicking good fun, with everyone involved in top form. There’s really something to be said for industrialized studio filmmaking, at least when it comes to Toei films from this era (and the next two).

Crimson Bat, the Blind Swordswoman (1969): Apparently, every studio in Japan wanted a slice of the blind swordsperson cake after the success of the Zatoichi films. Shochiku gave us this comparatively short-lived – four entries are next to nothing for a Japanese movie series – entry in the canon, following the adventures of blind swordswoman Oichi (Yoko Matsuyama), in this first film directed by veteran director Sadatsugu Matsuda.

The film’s pacing suffers a bit from too much flashback backstory, but whenever the pretty delightful Yoko Matsuyama stops crying (about her run-away mum, having been blinded by lightning, and years later a murdered gramps) and goes to business with her red sword cane, Matsuda does direct like a young man instead of one right at the end of his career, with some pretty fancy choreography, excellent bad guys (among them eternal villain Bin Amatsu as a gent named “Devil” Denzo), and frame compositions to die (be killed by blind swordswoman?) for.

Roningai no kaoyaku (1963)

aka A Brave Ronin

aka Street of Wandering Men

The freshly minted ronin Tsugumi (Utaemon Ichikawa) has just arrived in Edo and is already following his perfectly developed sense of being a good guy into trouble. He helps hide a Geisha named Somekichi from a group of yakuza who are trying to catch her. It seems Somekichi has learned a bit too much about the plans of the Hanya yakuza during her professional duties, but what exactly it is she knows the audience will learn only much later.

Both Tsugumo and Somekichi need a cheap and inconspicuous place to stay, and become neighbours in a low-rent boarding house frequented by down-on-their-luck ronin. Obviously, it will not be the samurai's only run-in with the Hanya. Even when - after some altercations with the yakuza - Somekichi is seemingly safe, Tsugumi still manages to get into the gangsters' way.

Without knowing of a connection to the gang, he helps another ronin, the sad alcoholic Fujimura, to get his sister back from the clutches of corrupt, lecherous officials. Fujimura has basically sold his virginal sister to the morally deviant ones, but has an awakening of conscience before anything truly bad can happen to her. Unfortunately, the sad little man lacks the imposing character needed to get her back. Tsugumi has that type of character in spades, and has no problems bringing the girl back home. Ironically, this again disturbs the plan of his least favourite yakuza clan, for they had wanted to use Fujimura's sister as a very special bribe. At least, everyone not a yakuza is happy.

Most people not Tsugumi or his new-found group of friends would probably flee the area and move into the turf of a different yakuza group, but Tsugumi is not going to go the easy way.

Formally, Rojingai no kaoyaku is quite a conservative film and must already have looked a bit old-fashioned to eyes witnessing the explosion in creativity that had just begun to drive the various sub-genres of the samurai film into fascinating visual and political directions, an explosion that wouldn't stop until the beginning of the 80s (the most dreadful decade in Japanese genre film, if you ask me). Compared with the films of this beginning new wave, Rojingai isn't much too look at - director Yasushi Sasaki tries his best to not let his set-bound film look too stagey, but even though the camera is moving, there's a stiffness and staticness to the film's look that lets it feel older than it actually is. Sasaki still manages to stage quite a dramatic climax, although the absence of cutting sound effects and visible blood looks a bit quaint to eyes used to the bloodier and louder side of the samurai film.

The predominant acting style is similarly old-fashioned, again a bit stagey, a bit stiff, yet working perfectly nice if one is able to accept the rules it works by. Naturalism certainly isn't the only effect acting can be trying to achieve.

Ichikawa is undeniably charismatic, and his Tsugumi is likeable and surprisingly understanding of other people's weaknesses for one not prone to being openly weak himself. Films with morally upright main characters often tend to overlook how annoying - and, frankly, inhuman - preachy heroes who look down on everyone who isn't as perfect as they are can become, so it is nice to find a film that understands that it is helpful to make one's superhuman hero still feel human. Tsugumi doesn't help people because he feels superior to them, but because he can (and is driven to out of a sense of duty more interested in serving a community than a lord he doesn't have anymore). It seems like quite a humanist view for a film that looks this old-fashioned, but I haven't seen enough chambara or jidai geki films made before 1962 to tell if this humanism is based on a connection to more progressive ways of thinking particular to the film, or its director or star, or if it is typical for the state of the genre. If someone more knowledgeable could enlighten me regarding this point, I would be more than thankful.

Watching the film, I at times had the feeling of witnessing a less bourgeois Japanese Frank Capra movie with sword fights. The film is full of the belief that a group of the poor, the weak, and the disenfranchised can stand up to the mighty and corrupt and win against them through the virtue of the goodness of their hearts, which mirrors the basic goodness of the universe. On one level, this is of course incredibly naive and baselessly optimistic, yet I for one am not going to criticize a film for having a positive outlook on the possibility of change from below, even if it can show us this change only through a heroic figure standing out from and inspiring the masses with the quality of his character. I'd love to compare the film's world view to the one of the novel it is based on, or to that of the half a dozen other movie adaptations of it, but, again, I'm coming up empty by virtue of not having a clue (and don't just want to copy stuff I read on the 'net and pretend to know what I'm talking about).

So, while Roningai no kaoyaku is not too much to look at, it still is a very enjoyable film; a feelgood chambara.

 

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Bored Hatamoto - Acrobats of Death (1959)

It's 1690, the period of Japan's Tokugawa Shogunate, and trouble is brewing in Edo. The successful completion of the Yushima shrine calls for celebration, and has even attracted a troupe of Chinese acrobats. During the celebrations, a close advisor of the Shogun is mysteriously assassinated. The magistrate Sakai is very fast in blaming the deed on the secret Christian sect of Edo.

Soon, a series of arsons, robberies, abductions and further murders perpetrated by masked men who leave crosses in the houses they plunder and loudly declare themselves to be Christian crusaders seems to prove the magistrate right. But there is another, more subtle string of murders that does not fit Sakai's theory at all - some of the hidden Christians of Edo are killed in the same ways as the Shogun's advisor, pointing to a conspiracy against the Shogunate itself that uses the Christians as its scapegoat.

Fortunately for the Tokugawa, Saotome Mondonosuke (Utaemon Ichikawa), a direct retainer of the Shogun who has been declared "to stand above the law", takes an interest in the situation, and uses a combination of his skills as a detective, his masterful swordsmanship, and his sympathy with the less fortunate tiers of Japanese society to save the day.

Acrobats of Death is chambara in a style that would very soon start to look quite old-fashioned compared to the wonders and atrocities the genre would reach for in the 60s. This doesn't make it a bad movie, quite the opposite, it's excellent fun when you keep in mind that this provides what samurai films of its style and time were supposed to provide - a rollicking good time for a matinee audience, comparable to a fine Hollywood swashbuckler.

Sure, the film is sometimes a little stiff, a wee bit too melodramatic, Yashushi Sasaki's direction isn't all that inspired, but the plot moves along at an excellent pace and the film has a highly likeable and charismatic hero in Ichikawa's Saotome. The latter shouldn't come as a surprise, since the "Bored Hatamoto" was Ichikawa's signature role, much like Zatoichi would become Shintaro Katsu's or Nemuri Kyoshiro Raizo Ichikawa's (no relation with Utaemon, by the way). Unfortunately, there's not much information about actor/producer Ichikawa or the Bored Hatamoto films to be found online in any language I speak, so I can't even say how many films the series had or what place Acrobats of Death has in it.

While the film's plot is quite obvious, the script has some surprising flourishes one wouldn't necessarily expect. The Chinese acrobats at first look and act like the sort of racist stereotypes that wouldn't be out of place next to Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu, but the film provides a perfectly natural and ironic explanation for this that I can't bring myself to reveal.

Then there's a strangely democratic subtext for a film about a man who stands above the law and defends the Tokugawa Shogunate. The film (and its hero) very firmly believe in the rule of law and in the right of the poor and disenfranchised of a society to be treated fairly. It's not very subtly done, and not unproblematic in its context, but still commendable.

So, Acrobats of Death seems to me invaluable as a look into the chambara before the genre got all mad and weird and bloodthirsty. Even better - it's a fun and clever film.

 

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