Hana is the 2006 effort from director Hirokazu Kore-Eda, who garnered critical success with previous efforts like Maborosi , After Life , Distance , and Nobody Knows (among others, he scored the Best Director award at both the Venice Film Festival and the Blue Ribbon …Read more »
As far as I can tell, everybody that has reviewed the 1995 Keita Amemiya-directed film Mechanical Violator Hakaider has given it a collective thumbs-down. You could attribute this to the fact that most of the reviewers out there aren't tokusatsu fans and didn't find it …Read more »
Shinobi: Heart Under Blade , is a tale of two warring ninja clans, Iga and Kouga, forced to choose five of their best ninja each to square off against one another. The result of this grand ninja clash will decide who will serve as heir …Read more »
There's only one meat treat that the dreaded candiru likes to eat, and only Japan would have the temerity to strap a vagina dentata to the end of a naughty tentacle. All this and more can be discovered through the highly educational sexploitation horror/comedy Sexual …Read more »
(If you're slick you'll have figured out by now that the title for this bit is a reference to the famed song from m-flo by the same name. Either case, it shows that I'm such a sucker for nostalgia.) It was sometime after I finished …Read more »
Sex & Fury (1973) is a wonderfully eclectic and insanely violent Japanese sexploitation flick directed by Norifumi Suzuki, the father of the sukeban subgenre and the same madman responsible for the later School of the Holy Beast (1976). His best- known film in the West …Read more »
Kinji Fukasaku's original Graveyard of Honor (1975) is my favorite Japanese yakuza film ever made. Just as Fukasaku was, to me, Japan's own Martin Scorsese, Graveyard of Honor is basically the Japanese equivalent of Raging Bull . Both are tragic and powerful films about a …Read more »
Overworked and underappreciated, the Nightmare Detective has one hell of a dirty job. With the ability to enter people's dreams, he can analyze them and discover the root of their issues, an ability that tends to leave him unstable and suicidal himself. When detective Keiko …Read more »
[Excerpted from the December 2007 issue of Otaku USA magazine Ryuhei Kitamura is a giant among Japanese film directors. The only catch is, he's not in Japan anymore. A newly minted Los Angelino, Kitamura is currently prepping his US film debut with Midnight Meat Train, …Read more »
Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster is the original Toho monster team-up, in which Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra pool their resources to defeat the invasion of King Ghidorah, an evil extraterrestrial determined to destroy the Earth. Ghidorah arrives on Earth in a meteorite-actually a space egg-that periodically …Read more »
[Interview excerpted from the December 2007 issue of Otaku USA Magazine. William Tsutusi and David Cox are real smart guys. William is an associate professor of history at the University of Kansas. David teaches multimedia at San Francisco City College. Both are rabid Godzilla fans, …Read more »
Stop me if you've heard this one: At the close of World War II, in a desperate attempt to create the ultimate super-soldier, a Nazi submarine absconds from Germany with the heart of Frankenstein's Monster in tow. The submarine transports the still-beating heart to Hiroshima, …Read more »
Plant yourself, if you will, inside the soft, roped footings of a ninja sneaking about Japan in the 1500s. Your clan has been scattered and politics have become a precarious position with which you need to intertwine yourself discreetly if you want your group to …Read more »
Butterflies are the bane of humankind. They may be pretty and they may pollinate beautiful flowers that bring us joy, but butterflies also do everything in their power to unleash hordes of dinosaurs upon our cities. Don't believe me? It happened in Ray Bradbury's A …Read more »
Joseph Luster
Mike Dent
Paul Thomas Chapman
J.L. Carrozza
Patrick Macias
