Tanjobi Jo

We're back from Tokyo, tired and attempting to readjust to U.S. time. There are many stories to tell from the trip, however, and watch for updates to this page over the next week or so, including photos. Suffice to say that we managed to cram a lot of activities into less than three weeks, including a good deal of DVD work. More of that on the horizon, too, I'm happy to say.

But in the meantime, you'd do yourself a favor to surf on over to Bay Area blogger Kimberly Lindberg's terrific site, Cinebeats, for a look at her birthday wishes to Nikkatsu veteran Shishido Jo.

I was lucky enough to actually have lunch with Ace no Jo last Tuesday, just before heading to the airport to come back to NYC. I met him previously two years ago at the Udine Far East Film Festival, and he still appears to be in excellent health, even insisting that I join him in a beer at 11:30 in the morning. (Of course, I complied - you don't say no to Jo!) We're currently in talks with Jo about involving him more closely in the ongoing Nikkatsu screening series in the U.S., and things are looking promising about that. Let's just say that some American fans might get an opportunity to meet him sometime next year.

But lunch itself was a real treat, with Jo sharing drinking stories about Zatoichi star Katsu Shintaro, tales of his visit to Mexico to film the 1962 Nikkatsu action pic Mexico mushuku (he managed to bring two pistols back to Japan, bypassing all the customs and airline guards!), and updating us on his latest activities. He recently wrapped a new film in Shanghai with director Hayashi Kaizo, the man behind the "Maiku Hama" series, several films of which Jo co-stars in as a character not unlike himself. It's in post production now, and due out sometime in 2008. Jo even showed off some amazing 1960s Japanese fan magazines produced by Nikkatsu at the height of his career. One was devoted to him and late Nikkatsu icon Akagi Keiichiro, and another was old enough to features photos of Jo in his pre-cheek surgery days! All were immaculately maintained, and it was all I could do not to slip them into my flight bag and take them home with me.

So let me join Kimberly and others in wishing Jo-san a happy 74th, and many more to come.

More Poisonous reviews

Additional reviews of Synapse Films' three-disc Legends of the Poisonous Seductress discs have been popping up online. Here's an updated list.

Cinema Retro's overview of the whole series
Digitally Obsessed's look at the first film
DVD Active review of the trilogy
DVD Beaver review of Female Demon Ohyaku
Japanese film scholar Stuart Galbraith's DVD Talk reviews of the first film and second film
10,000 Bullets review
DVD Maniacs reviews of the first film, second film and third film

Enjoy!

A peek at our next project

Oh, yeah.

Stars and Sukeban

All the cats are officially out of the bag, so I can finally talk about my next few projects.

During the past week in Tokyo, we did a series of interviews with famed Toei sexploitation director Norifumi Suzuki. This is the man responsible for the Sukeban girl-gang series of films (he started the series and directed the first four entries), the astonishing School of the Holy Beast, and the mind-bending Hiroyuki Sanada - Sonny Chiba - Abdullah the Butcher mash-up Roaring Fire. The man is a virtual genre unto himself, and his resume reads like a "best of" from the world of Japanese genre cinema. Take a peek:

— writer of numerous ninkyo yakuza films and chanbara from the golden age at Toei, including works by Tai Kato, Kosaku Yamashita and Eiichi Kudo

— directed and/or wrote most of the entries in the Sukeban / Girl Boss and Terrifying Girls' High School series

— directed the second Red Peony Gambler film

— brought the French sex film actress Sandra Julien to Japan for two films, Tokugawa Sex Ban: Lustful Lord, and Modern Porno Tale

— also brought Swedish sex film actress Christina Lindberg to Japan for the amazing Sex and Fury

— directed all of the entries in the long-running, Bunta Sugawara, low comedy series Truck Yaro

— made Sonny Chiba's The Killing Machine and Shogun's Ninja

— creative force behind many, many other great films still awaiting discovery in the West

Suzuki-kantoku was kind enough to join us on successive Sundays at the amazing Laputa Cinema in Asagaya, on the west side of Tokyo, and spent several hours with our camera crew discussing his career and films. The interviews will appear on two DVDs due out next year, the initial one being the fourth Sukeban film, to be released by Media Blasters in February under the title Girl Boss: Revenge. Later in the spring, Discotek Media will release Suzuki's jaw-dropping, solitary entry into the Roman Porno genre, Star of David: Beauty Hunting. If you're unfamiliar with that particular film, here's a taste:

Additionally, French documentary filmmaker Yves Montmayeur assisted at the shoot and conducted his own interview with Suzuki about his early career working with some of the great yakuza filmmakers at Toei. This will appear in a future project Yves is working on for French television.

Finally, Suzuki sat with Japanese film critic and cult film writer Kiichiro Yanashita for a full-length audio commentary for Star of David, to be included on the Discotek disc. Not only is this the first time Suzuki has done a commentary, we believe it's the first time a Roman Porno director has done a commentary for one of his films! Of course, the commentary was conducted in Japanese and will be presented on the disc with English subtitles. Fans of Suzuki and of the Roman Porno genre in general should be very pleased.

Alas, I came to Japan with my digital camera but without the connecting cable needed to upload photos from it onto my laptop, so those will have to wait until early December, when I return to the States. But in the meantime, Kiichiro has posted a photo of Suzuki in front of our Sukeban backdrop on his blog, which talks about the event. And I can't end this blog entry without also expressing the deepest thanks to friend and bizarre cinema expert Yoshiki Hayashi, who set it all up and put us in contact with Suzuki in the first place. He's also one of the best people I know of to conduct movie poster-hunting expeditions in Tokyo and beyond.

Finally, there's one more project potentially happening later this week, for yet another Japanese exploitation DVD due out in 2008. But that one's not going to get written about until after it happens. Check back soon for more information.

Off to Tokyo

Two big things happen this week, for us at least.

One is that the Legends of the Poisonous Seductress discs finally hit the streets. So far, only a couple of reviews have cropped up online, but they're positive ones and we're hoping some additional ones will surface soon.

10,000 Bullets review
DVD Maniacs review of the first film, second film and third film

Let us know what you think of the discs!

The other big piece of news is that I'm off to Tokyo for a couple of weeks, and will be working on some exciting projects while I'm there. It's too early to name names or reveal titles, but the news is already out there on the web for two of them, if you hunt around for it long enough. More details when I return, hopefully including some photos.

毒婦伝

In less than one month, Synapse Films will release the next three entries in the "Pinky Violence Collection" originally begun by Panik House Entertainment. The three films are part of an unrelated trilogy, starring the same lead actress as similar, but distinctive characters, and feature many familiar Toei stock company faces among the supporting cast. They're collectively known as the Yoen dokufu-den, or Legends of the Poisonous Seductress series, and have never had any video release in the US, nor a DVD release yet in Japan.

The first film, Female Demon Ohyaku, was directed by Yoshihiro Ishikawa, a man better known as an assistant director on many of Nobuo Nakagawa's Shintoho films from the 1950s, including his great version of Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan, still unreleased on DVD in the US but owned by Janus Films and Criterion (write them and ask for a release date!). Ishikawa also directed a few films of his own, the most notable being 1960's Ghost Cat of Otama Pond, a color kaidan eiga that's fun and features some great imagery.

In Female Demon, Junko Miyazono stars as an actress and con artist named Ohyaku who becomes an unfortunate object of attraction to Sengoku, a salacious and cruel magistrate. Sengoku is also behind a scheme to defraud the Shogunate of a shipment of gold, pinning the blame on a group of bandits whose number includes Ohyaku's lover, Shinsuke. After Shinsuke is executed and Ohyaku sent to a prison island, she swears revenge and begins killing anyone who stands between her and Sengoku. What results is a truly astonishing film for its time (1968), a torture-filled, bloody saga of revenge that had my jaw on the floor when I first watched it. Given Ishikawa's history of working on traditional costume stories and ghost films, I little expected the level of carnage and sexuality on display in the film. Of course, there's no overt nudity but viewers will be surprised by how close things get sometimes. Still, there's no hiding the violence - beheadings, eye-gougings, throat-slashings, and more - and Ishikawa revels in its, steeping the story in cruelty and torture. It's really surprising, and not something I would have expected from Toei at this point in its history. Fans of the swordplay and Pinky Violence genres are in for a pleasant surprise once they see this film.

The second and third films in the series were directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, who made Snake Woman's Curse for Toei just before these films, and the great Jigoku nine years previous. The second film, Quick-Draw Okatsu, features the best swordplay of the trilogy, and no surprise, as Miyazono stars this time as the daughter of a swordmaster and dojo owner who is at odds with Shiozaki, an ambitious official who is terrorizing the local populace. When Okatsu's brother offends a gambling den owner who's in cahoots with Shiozaki, she and her father take the blame and are severely tortured in Shiozaki's dungeon (all the bad guys in these films seem to have medieval torture facilities close at hand). Once again, bad things happen and Okatsu swears vengeance against the evil man, cutting her way through rival dojos and a brothel straight out of a Norifumi Suzuki exploitation film before she reaches him. Along for the ride are Reiko Oshida as Rui, a miniskirt-clad young swordswoman, and Lone Wolf & Cub star Tomisaburo Wakayama as a bounty hunter on "Okatsu the Killer's" trail. (Wakayama also appears in Female Demon, in a smaller role as a kindly gang boss.)

The third film, Okatsu the Fugitive, follows closely in the pattern set by its predecessor, with a similar story of a samurai woman losing her family and going on a crusade of vengeance against the corrupt officials responsible for it. This time around, Okatsu is the daughter of a local official who has exposed a bribery scheme involving tobacco crops. When her parents are tortured (yes, again) and killed, she comes after Judayu, the powerful magistrate who was responsible for it. Mixing it up this time around are a group of orphans (including Reiko Oshida), watched over by a ronin and former swordmaster played by yakuza movie stalwart Tatsuo Umemiya. Another twist is the presence of Okatsu's fiancé, who begins the film on her side but swiftly slides in the direction of the corrupt Judayu, in order to further his own career.

All three films have been remastered in HD by Synapse, and look terrific. Each disc features trailers for the entire series, and Female Demon Ohyaku and Quick-Draw Okatsu both feature audio commentaries by writer and Japanese film expert Chris D. Extras may be a little light on these titles, compared with Horrors of Malformed Men and Snake Woman's Curse, but I hope that the availability of these hard-to-see films will make up for that.

Look for the discs in stores in less than a month and remember, your order or purchase will help support the release of more Japanese genre cinema classics. Only by supporting the companies that are willing to go to the effort and expense of licensing these films can you expect to see more of them come out in remastered, legal editions. And if you like them, send Synapse an email and let them know what you thought!

And for those who've read this far, here's a treat: the original trailers for all three films, with English subtitles. Enjoy!

More Nikkatsu series coverage

You'll be free of Nikkatsu Action series news, at least for a while, as we go into a brief hiatus for the rest of the year. Any new screenings won't happen until January 2008 at the earliest, although there are some behind-the-scenes things happening now that could become very exciting. You'll hear it here first, of course.

In the meantime, here are some photos from the Austin and New York events, plus some additional coverage of the Japan Society screening.

Nikkatsu's Hideo Iwamoto and Kenneth Kurokawa strike a gangster-like pose at the Alamo.

The Drafthouse's Lars Nilsen and Mark Schilling do the Q&A thing on the Alamo stage.

Harvey Fenton from FAB Press, Mark & Lars hawk the brand-new No Borders, No Limits.

Last Friday's NY launch of the series went better than anyone had dared to hope, with nearly 200 people in the audience despite rain, closed streets and increased police presence due to the nearby UN being in session, the New York Film Festival opening night screening and party, and an almost complete absence of proper press listings for the event, due to an incompetent press person at JS (more concerned JS staffers are doing their best to remedy the situation).

We were prepared for the worst, and were overjoyed to see the happy faces exiting the theatre after the screening of A Colt is My Passport, which was treated to cheers and loud applause at the end. Mark Schilling's book even sold out during the after-film signing, and many people pledged to come to future screenings. (The next one is November 9th's The Warped Ones.)

Press coverage for the event has been sparse, but the few articles I've come across are all extremely positive and heavy-hitting. My previous post told you about Grady Hendrix's shrieks of joy in the NY Sun. Let me also point you to a nice write-up in the "Week Ahead" section of the 9/23 NY Times. In case it's gone or requires registration or payment, here's the text:

Film
Mike Hale

The history of Nikkatsu, Japan's oldest film studio, has its highs (Mizoguchi, Imamura) and its lows (a period in the 1970s and '80s when it specialized in soft-core pornography; bankruptcy in the '90s). One of its more entertaining chapters will be on view at Japan Society beginning on Friday in "NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS: 1960s NIKKATSU ACTION CINEMA."

The eight films in the series (which will screen one per month, through next spring) were released from 1960 to 1969, during the studio's postwar heyday as a producer of popular genre movies: yakuza thrillers, urban youth dramas, Japanese "westerns." Some of this output, particularly the more experimental gangster dramas of Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter), has seeped into the American consciousness. But despite these films' likability — their closest reference points include film noir, spaghetti westerns and James Bond — this major subdivision of Japanese cinema is still overshadowed by the old masters on the one hand and the new practitioners of stylish horror on the other. None of the selections at Japan Society, selected by the film critic Mark Schilling, has been seen in the United States before.

Judging from Friday's opening feature, Takashi Nomura's "Koruto wa Ore no Pasupoto" ("A Colt Is My Passport"), it's our loss. Both hard-boiled and jazzy, this tale of a pair of hit men fleeing the mob (two mobs actually) stars the stoic Japanese action hero Jo Shishido, with his surgically enhanced cheeks, and features the Morricone-like music of the frequent Nikkatsu composer Harumi Ibe. It takes us to the freeways of Tokyo, the docks of Yokohama and a seedy truckers' motel straight out of an American noir, and sends us home with a fantastic gun-and-dynamite battle. The Tarantino remake should be announced any day now.

The nearly sold-out Japan Society audience for A Colt is My Passport.

Mark Schilling chatted with fans and signed books for nearly an hour after the screening.

FAB Press founder Harvey Fenton enjoys a drink with Mrs. Outcast Cinema.

Another exciting piece was published in the 9/30 edition of NY University's Washington Square News, where writer Simon Abrams calls Colt "a great way to get genre fans hooked." Those were my thoughts exactly when I put together this series, Simon, and thanks for the support.

Nikkatsu rolls along

Time for an update on the Nikkatsu screening series, I think.

We just returned from Austin, Texas, where the utterly amazing Fantastic Fest presented three of our films, which had a great response from the audience. More details and hopefully some photos later, but here is some coverage from the festival blog:

A Colt is My Passport
The Warped Ones
Like a Shooting Star

Tonight is the opening night of the series at New York's Japan Society, and Kaiju Shakedown writer Grady Hendrix has published a terrific overview of the series in today's New York Sun, which I encourage you to read. My only quibble is that he neglects to mention the imminent publication of Mark Schilling's companion book by FAB Press. Harvey Fenton of FAB was in Austin and premiered the new publication there, with Mark Schilling providing a finishing signature. It's a nice little book, kind of a chapbook rather than a larger-sized shelf monster. It's thankfully filled with photos and posters from the films, and is honestly the only English-language reference guide on the genre right now. Most Japanese film histories don't even admit the existence of these films, so Mark's guide should be a particular treasure for Japanese film fans, and I encourage everybody to pick it up at Amazon or elsewhere, where it's available for under $11.

Todd Brown's Twitch Film has also been providing Fantastic Fest coverage, and there's some Nikkatsu talk in there amongst all the other films. They called Velvet Hustler (aka Like a Shooting Star) an "undiscovered masterpiece," proclaim that The Warped Ones is "anarchic, fresh, and original," and said that A Colt is My Passport was "so good that about halfway through I was thinking how much I wanted to see it again." If that doesn't sell the series, I don't know what will!

We're still plugging away at programming the films into other venues, and things are looking good for about a half-dozen events in other cities around March of next year. Keep your fingers crossed and guns loaded.

Nikkatsu series poster

Designed by Outcast friend & series co-sponsor Harvey Fenton of FAB Press. Hopefully coming soon to a theatre near you!

日活

Even if you don't read Japanese, those two kanji characters in this blog post's title should be familiar to you, if you're a fan of '60s and '70s Japanese cinema. They appeared on the opening logo for films produced by Nikkatsu Studios, the oldest of the major studios, and the one that arguably produced the greatest number of the country's most popular cinema stars.

A project we've been working on for most of 2007 is finally coming to fruition: an eight-film retrospective of Nikkatsu Action films produced in the studio's fruitful period between the late 1950s and 1971, when the entire output of the company was shifted to Roman Porno, in a response to declining box office.

This series, entitled No Borders, No Limits: 1960s Nikkatsu Action Films, launches later this month with a pair of events. The first, chronologically, will occur at Fantastic Fest, a neat genre film festival now in its third year, and held at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in downtown Austin, Texas. Their mini-series, entitled "Violent Nikkatsu," will present three films from the series.

The first, on September 24th, is the chilly, noir-inspired, widescreen black-and-white hitman saga A Colt is My Passport (1967), starring Jo Shishido and featuring many similarities to Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill, produced the same year. This movie is one of my personal favorites of the series (the other being Toshio Masuda's spectacular Gangster VIP, but you'll have to wait until 2008 to see that one), and I think it gives the better-known Suzuki film a run for its money. It's not nearly as stylish or crazy, but that's not its intention - it's simply a lean, mean, sparse story of survival boiled down to its essence: tough killer, sympathetic partner, cruel bad guys, and a difficult situation. There's the same kind of weapons fetishism presented in Branded, plus a good dose of the kind of Platonic homoerotic relationship we'd later see in gangster movies from John Woo, plus a mind-bending finale featuring an armored sedan, an open plain, and a time bomb.


The second film at Fantastic Fest (on September 26th) will be another one from 1967, director Toshio Masuda's freewheeling crime movie Like a Shooting Star, better-known in the U.S. under its alternate title, The Velvet Hustler. (Even though it's about guys in the mob, it's too light-hearted for me to call it a "gangster movie.") The film stars Tokyo Drifter Tetsuya Watari as Goro, a Tokyo gangster who flees to western Kobe to hide out after a hit. A year goes by, and he's bored and dying to return to the cosmopolitan, big city, but complications ensue in the form of a cop on his tail, a hitman out to get him, and a beautiful heiress who comes into his life but might be bad news. The plot devices are rote and cliched, but what sells this film is its hip style and likable characters - even the hitman (Shishido again!) gets a few good scenes and has a personality of his own. Masuda was the top director at Nikkatsu during the 1960s, and was chosen to helm many of the studio's biggest projects, including most of the films starring top studio draw Yujiro Ishihara. (He was also one of the two directors of the Japanese portions of the Pearl Harbor re-creation war film Tora! Tora! Tora!, the other director being Kinji Fukasaku!) Masuda certainly is at the top of his game here, but he's aided immeasurably by one of Suzuki's frequent collaborators: genius art director Takeo Kimura, who creates a jazzy world of colorful nightclubs, dark hideouts and lonesome streets. Again, it may not be as over-the-top as his work on Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter and other films, but such restraint allows the filmmakers (and the viewer) to concentrate more on the terrific performances of its charismatic cast.

The final film in Austin's mini-series screens on September 25th, and it's a doozy. Koreyoshi Kurahara's The Warped Ones is known by several alternate titles: its Japanese title literally translates to Season of Heat, and it was given a theatrical release in the U.S. in the 1960s (in English-dubbed form) by Radley Metzger's Audubon Films as The Weird Lovemakers (a title that would also grace a Something Weird Video VHS release of the film). When the movie came out in 1960 in Japan, it was part of a short-lived "movement" of films about rich youth living idly and acting out amongst a background of surf, sun and sand. Called "Sun Tribe" movies, these films created enough of an outrage among mainstream moviegoers and politicians that there was a call for them to be stopped. Yujiro Ishihara's star vehicle Crazed Fruit (directed by Ko Nakahira) is one of the more notable Sun Tribe movies, and was even graced with a Criterion Collection DVD release, at the behest of film critic Donald Richie. (Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth could be seen as inspired by the popularity of the Sun Tribe movies, too.) Anyway, The Warped Ones trumps them all, and in our opinion is a much better film than the more "important" Oshima movie. Tamio Kawachi stars as one of the most antisocial characters ever presented in a youth film, especially considering the time the film was made. While the youngsters in Crazed Fruit and Cruel Story pick a pocket or two and swap girlfriends, Kawachi and his gang rape and terrorize their way across a beach community in a manner that wouldn't be seen again until the 1970s with the rise of punk cinema. Fueled by a relentless jazz soundtrack and some amazing hand-held camerawork (widescreen, to boot), Warped Ones should be a real discovery for filmgoers who think that late 50s foreign cinema has to be slow and boring.

In conjunction with the launch of the film series, all the Austin screenings will be introduced by Tokyo-based film critic Mark Schilling, who originally programmed a larger version of the series for the Udine Far East Film Festival back in 2005, and who has written a book on the genre that will be published by FAB Press in early October. Early copies of the book will be available for sale at the Austin screenings, as well.

After our Texas adventure, the series moves to my current hometown of New York City, where we'll be screening Colt on Friday night, September 28th, at Japan Society on East 47th Street. As in Austin, Mark Schilling will be introducing the film, and the screening will be followed by a reception and book signing. The night also kicks off a new series at JS called "Monthly Classics," which will present ongoing screenings of films selected by film world personalities. Mark's picks are, of course, the eight Nikkatsu films, which will continue to screen from early November to May of 2008. The full Japan Society schedule is currently online.

So what's next for the series? Well, we are currently in talks with a number of other cinematheques around the country and in Canada, and we hope to place the series (or a selection of its films) in several of these venues for screenings in the first half of 2008. Keep your fingers crossed, film fans, and if you're living in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, or Seattle, you might just have some Japanese Action coming your way!

Malformed hype

One of my favorite supplements on the Horrors of Malformed Men disc is the original trailer Toei created for the film back in 1969. Not only does it feature Tatsumi Hijikata doing his seaside butoh dance in a different outfit (a rehearsal, perhaps?), it's also a revealing example of just how deeply the studio execs at the time were confounded by Teruo Ishii's bizarre film.



They literally throw everything at the viewer over the course of the trailer, emphasizing the mystery, sex, violence, strangeness, Rampo, dance, art, and virtually everything short of offering a free toaster to anyone who buys a ticket.

The studio's desperation is particularly apparent in the continuous onscreen text, something I wanted to make sure was conveyed in the English subtitles. Such slogans and ballyhoo are common in Japanese trailers of the '60s and '70s, but the ones in the Malformed trailer are completely over-the-top. Unfortunately, the subtitling firm we had contracted with to translate the film only subtitled one or two of the onscreen text lines in their first pass, and it was a struggle to get them to subtitle everything. (I could write many pages on everything that we went through to get them to do their jobs correctly!) But with the assistance of Don May and Jerry Chandler of Synapse Films (who, of course, pay the bill for the subtitling company!), I stuck to my guns and I think it turned out great. I hope you do, too.

An illuminating sexual world!

Shakedown praise

Inbetween volunteering at local soup kitchens and shopping online for female hormones (long story), friend and NYAFF partner Grady Hendrix has posted a nice piece on his essential blog, Kaiju Shakedown, about the moderate success that the Horrors of Malformed Men disc has managed to achieve in the midst of the really depressing general state of classic Asian cinema on DVD in the U.S.

Here's hoping that its success and brief notoriety will convince some additional distributors to pick up some classic Japanese genre films. And if they're reading this blog, they should email me, since I have plenty of suggestions for them!

予告編

Synapse Films' new DVDs of Horrors of Malformed Men and Snake Woman's Curse have been out for a week now, and the good reviews keep coming in, yet I haven't read anywhere online about an inquisitive viewer stumbling upon a bunch of Easter Eggs I hid on the discs. Maybe those things are too 1998 for people these days?

Well, I'll give you a hint: look in the galleries. There are eight "Eggs" on Horrors, but just one on Snake.

Malformed Men will Rule!

Reviews have been popping up for Synapse Films' DVDs of Horrors of Malformed Men and Snake Woman's Curse faster than naked women in a Teruo Ishii film.

The biggest so far has been Dave Kehr's rave review of Malformed Men in the New York Times, which also includes some good words about Snake Woman. More review links are below, for hours of entertainment.

The photo above was snapped by friend and Malformed liner notes writer Patrick Macias, at the legendary Video Market in Shinjuku, undoubtedly the best import video store in Tokyo.

10,000 Bullets (Malformed)
10,000 Bullets (Snake)
Bloodtype Online (Malformed)
Bloodtype Online (Snake)
Bloody-Disgusting (Malformed)
Bloody-Disgusting (Snake)
Commercial Appeal
Dreamlogic (Malformed)
Dreamlogic (Snake)
DVD Active
DVD Drive-In (Malformed)
DVD Drive-In (Snake)
DVD in My Pants
DVD Maniacs (Malformed)DVD Maniacs (Snake)
DVD Savant
DVD Times (Malformed)
DVD Times (Snake)
DVD Verdict
Fangoria (Malformed)
Fangoria (Snake)
Mondo Digital
Sex Gore Mutants (Malformed)
Sex Gore Mutants (Snake)
Sleazegrinder

次

Just a taste of the next project we're working on. Expect a big update with a bunch of information on it sometime within the next week.

金子監督

I was flattered to learn that DEATH NOTE and 90s GAMERA trilogy director Shusuke Kaneko mentioned me on his blog recently, telling a story about our trip to Montreal after the NY Asian Film Festival (which I co-organized). He referred to me as a "Japanese movie maniac," a nickname I can't really argue with.

http://blog.livedoor.jp/kaneko_power009/

It's in Japanese, of course. Scroll down to the 7/25/2007 entry to see the specific post.