Three Films Make A Post: A Scream is a Wish Your Heart Makes

Screamboat (2025): In the realm of the PublicDomainsploitation slasher, something like Steven LaMorte’s murderous Mickey Mouse effort is basically a masterpiece. That’s not saying terribly much given a sub-genre that usually makes 90 SOV slashers look brilliant in comparison. So outside of its particular little pond, it’s a basically competent by the numbers slasher with pop culture jokes. Which is to say, it’s a little dull.

Unlike with many a film of its kind, those pop culture jokes are actually standing in dialogue with the thing it has been inspired by – the next step would be to make this dialogue actually interesting, or more of the jokes funny. But I’m optimistic that some day, one of these movies will actually do more than drop jokes and have children’s characters do the slasher thing. This one’s half way there, after all.

Rape of the Sword (1967): Even in 1967, Griffin Yueh Feng’s vengeance-based wuxia must have felt a bit old-fashioned. The film featuring two female heroines in form of Li Ching and Li Lihua as its lead right at the end of this cycle of the domination of female-led wuxia (despite what some writers say, swordswomen leading never went completely away before the next big revival) is the kind of old-fashioned I like, obviously. Yueh’s filmmaking as well as the choreography are a bit dusty as well, though never in a way that lacks in charm when seen from half a century away, while the narrative is very standard and trope-heavy. Again, not unpleasantly so, if one enjoys the genre – I certainly do again, these days.

Burning Dog (1991): This early V-cinema movie directed by Yoichi Sai doesn’t go as heavy on the sleaze and the insanity as one might expect when one has mostly seen more extreme examples of the form. Instead, this is basically a 70s heist movie, starring Seiji Matano trying to look like a badly aged Yusaku Matsuda, and other middle-aged guys of some experience.

The pacing is slow and careful, the action, once it comes, feels rather too methodically staged, but there’s also an unhurried calmness to Sai’s approach to the crime movie which makes it worth watching. Again, as with Rape of the Sword, there’s a lot of joy to be found in somewhat middling genre entries for me.

In short: Someday, Someone Will Be Killed (1984)

Original title: いつか誰かが殺される

Made in the same year as Fine, With Occasional Murders, and again starring Noriko Watanabe, this one makes an educational contrast with its contemporary film. Someday, directed by Yoichi Sai who would go on to have a pretty interesting career in Japanese and South Korean cinema, is also one of Kadokawa’s cross-media ready films, it’s just much more like you’d expect this sort of thing to actually turn out than Fine, With was.

Structurally and plot-wise, this tale of a young woman (Watanabe) stepping into an espionage conspiracy her father is involved in, is strictly a mess. It is full of pointless scenes like the double musical number consisting of first a pretty dubious piece of Japanese reggae, that is then followed by Watanabe doing things to poor old “Summertime” so horrible, I felt myself waiting for the film playing it as a joke (it didn’t) clearly only in there to hawk other Kadokawa product in the worst possible way. Character arcs never really go anywhere, the plot isn’t really resolved in a dramatic way so much as that it just slowly crawls to a halt, and all the going back and forth by our protagonists is really rather pointless in regards to anything that happens in the plot. On the plus side, the people helping our heroine out are a motley gang of international trademark law offenders, so at least Someday puts a bit of effort into establishing its anti-establishment credentials.

Some parts of the film are clearly meant as something of a bittersweet coming-of-age story for Watanabe’s character, but the script as well as the actress underplay this in a way that robs it of all dramatic and emotional impact; the film’s leaden pacing is no help here, either.


Tonally, this is theoretically more consistent than Fine’s general goofiness (with occasional murders, as promised), alas that tone is so bland this turns out to be a weakness instead of a strength.