A bi-weekly deep dive into the world of Japanese V-Cinema courtesy of Arrow Film’s comprehensive set
This week for my Bi-Weekly V-Cinema roundup courtesy of Arrow’s V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayals are two very different films that showcase both the depth and breadth of this Japanese sub-genre.
This week’s double features starts with a hybrid revenge-matic and yakuza thriller Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses (1991) directed by Teruo Ishii (Blind Woman’s Curse). Hitman follows ex-soldier Takanashi, who poses as a hitman starting a yakuza war to get revenge for his fiancée, Reiko. She was a helpless bystander, who was literally used as a human shield in a bloody shootout by rival factions, which now has Takanashi stoking the flames on both sides, by knocking yakuza off and one by one. This all transpires, while all but one of the detectives charged with stopping the violence, happily sits back and watches the carnage from the sidelines, since he has a feeling something else is behind this sudden all out war.
Hitman definitely has the most skin of any film on the set so far starting with the film’s sordid sexual assault trap set by Takanashi thanks to director Teruo Ishii’s background in soft-core pink films. That said, the film struggled at times with keeping the same kinetic pace of previous V-Cinema films and was a bit sluggish in the second and third act. The plotting is a bit muddy at times and Takanashi isn’t the most engaging of protagonists either, which made this the slowest film of the set for me. While I enjoyed some of the yakuza back and fourth, especially a young girlfriend of one of the bosses who is revealed to have a yakuza fetish, it definitely might test some.
Next up was my favorite of this week, Danger Point: The Road To Hell (1991). This brought back two stars from a previous film on the set, Jô Shishido and Shô Aikawa from Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet as a pair of Yakuza hitmen, who fall down a noirish rabbit-hole. On a routine hit, Shô Aikawa finds a photo of a beautiful nurse that has the pair trying to solve the reason for murder they were paid to commit – you heard that right. This opens up a Pandora’s box of a mystery involving 20 million dollars, which gives everyone a reason to become a killer.
While both Jô Shishido and Shô Aikawa just ooze charisma onscreen, it’s the mystery at the heart and it’s over 2 million reasons for temptation that really propels this film forward. There’s also an interesting dynamic between the pair with Shô Aikawa’s young reckless womanizer in clear contrast to Jô Shishido’s older more eccentric hitman, who definitely is about to exit the game. It’s how these two bounce back and forth between the film as they slowly unravel the mystery that makes this title stand out as much as it does even dipping its toe in heroic bloodshed. The ending honestly caught me off guard, but it made complete and total sense and had me just in awe of what I just watched.
