Multimedia Movie Review: Samurai Zombie/鎧 サムライゾンビ

If you can read this, you're lucky. I nearly gave up blogging.

My last entry, which I thought was kind of funny, went virtually without comment.

Well, f@#$ you too.But I forgive you.

Because I'm lonely like that.

And because this entry is special:

It's multimedia!!Samurai Zombie/鎧 サムライゾンビI'm not generally a fan of shot-on-video Japanese movies full of blood and weirdness, but thanks to a few people in my life, I am learning to be.

The most credit goes to Kevin ' Golden Rock' Ma, who has helped me take my first tentative steps into this niche cinema that is, by and large, a cultural anomaly: It's made in Japan, by (and with) Japanese people, but it's intended audience is Western Otaku.

These films are made to appeal (pander) to and be viewed by a non-Japanese audience. So in some ways, the film serve to reinforce the worst stereotypes about Japanese cinema in particular and Japanese people in general.

In other ways, it's wildly entertaining for mostly prurient reasons.

Like mutilationand titillation.

Mutitillation? Titimulation?

Imagine films so violent they become comical.

Imagine humans filled with enough blood under enough pressure that they look like Satan's fireplug when their heads are inevitably cut/torn/blown off.Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl was so incredibly violent that I found myself laughing hysterically. It was the greatest thing about the film.

Well, one of the greatest.

The lead actress couldn't act her way out of a paper bag. But it didn't really matter. She wasn't hired for her acting. She was hired to titillate. Which should be easy, seeing as how she was already undulating so much that they were much more likely to be early than late:If I ever woke up to this situation, it could only mean she had a penis. I mean her own, not mine.But never mind these pendulous, swollen digressions that hang like...

What the f@#$???

Japanese video horror is, for at least two obvious reasons (though one may be slightlylarger than the other), a lot of fun and an almost totally guilty pleasure.At the same time, these films are possessed of a rather decent (if relative) bottom line in terms of production; they could look a lot worse than they do. They are occasionally quite pleasing on an aesthetic cinematography level.

And they have a certain twisted humor that, perhaps unsurprisingly, appeals to me.

Samurai Zombie/鎧 サムライゾンビis a story about a family who drive into the country for a vacation and are accosted by a gangster couple locked into an unexplained conflict with an apparently immortal rival. The father of the family is sent to sacrifice himself over a grave, whose occupant, the titular character of the film, rises to raise havoc among the (temporarily still-) living.

The film is fairly well acted, has decent FX for its budget, and features some entertaining humor, action, and violence.

The ending is also, while trite, rather interesting, if only for its unexpectedness.

Japanese funny manKyôsuke Yabe turns in a typically funny role, making jokes both verbally and physically. He was one of the comic-relief characters in Crows Zero 2.But let me not deceive you any longer.

The onlyreason I bought this DVD on eBay in America and had it shipped across the Pacific to me is because one of the gangsters is someone I met once.

Nana Natsume is the one person wholly responsible for me buying and watching this movie.Do you blame me?I try to support her (clothed) acting career. She acted in a Hong Kong film I edited the English subtitles for. She's a very nice person, and in person she's so cute its nearly unbearable.

But frankly, that hair sold me as soon as I saw it. Yes ma'am, I'll do that for you right this instant...She plays the love interest of a gangster with a pompadour who never quite notices that bullets only slow the samurai zombies, not kill them.

Nana managed to convince me fairly enough that she was mean, scared, caring, and confused, and generally acquitted herself well.She may never win any acting awards, but I can say this: she is certainly a better mainstream actress than Maria Ozawa. She even managed some comedy that was worth a laugh.

The bottom line, of course, is that this isn't Kurosawa by any stretch, but she made a visible effort, and that's really all I ask.

So all in all, I must g iveSamurai Zombie/鎧 サムライゾンビa ringing endorsement, if for no other reason than the two Magic Moments the film provided me.

I tried to get screen captures with subtitles, but couldn't manage it. So, dear reader, because I care so much about you, I have gone to the trouble of creating a short video to illustrate why this film rates as high as it does for someone who is becoming more and more well-known for his critique:  Thanks for entertaining me, Nana-san.