She befriends street hooker Yuki Watanabe , who runs foul of the locak Yakuza gang by turning tricks on their turn, while trying to care for her brain-damaged brother, whom she also services sexually, to stop him from raping women! Take a wild stab in the dark… Which, by coincidence is exactly what Katsu deserves. There are some angles to this I liked.
For instance, the way that Nami is taking revenge here, less for herself — really, she gets off pretty lightly, in comparison to the previous two installments — than for others. However, the positives are largely balanced out by Yuki, who is one of the more irritating and pointless creatures in cinematic history. This certainly delivers on the sleaze front [yet could be seen as pro-life, an interesting combo! Nami Kaji is about to get married, but her wedding day is rudely interrupted by the arrival of the cops, who arrest her.
On the way to prison and, unsurprisingly, death row, given the body count left behind in the previous three movies , she takes out the driver, causing a crash.
The injured Scorpion staggers away, and is rescued by Kudo Tamura , a former political radical who was brutalized by the police for his actions, and so has a massive load of resentment against them. The last of the series in which Kaji starred, it was also the only one of her four movies not directed by Ito.
His replacement, Hasebe, is competent enough, but only rarely brings the same sense of style to proceedings. Kaji is as worth watching as ever, but for too long, she seems like a supporting character in her own movie, with the focus more on Kudo. Chalk up another win for misleading advertising though, as Nami certainly does not use the long rifle with which she is pictured on the DVD sleeve right.
Batman or James Bond. For a mere three years after Meiko Kaji showed her sting as Nami, the studio reset the series, giving it a new director, new and much more talkative lead actress, and returning Nami Matsushima to a happy, criminal record-free young women, with a loving boyfriend. Except, of course, he turns out not to love her quite as much. Things start to collapse after her sister uncovers evidence of major government corruption, and passes it to Nami, shortly before being kidnapped.
After Nami uncovers the truth — her sister is killed and she is framed for the murder, with the help of her boyfriend, and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Initially an easy mark for the tough girls in her cell, Nami soon develops her mean streak. Not that Takigawa is a bad actress. It is just that Kaji made such a strong impression in the role, anyone else playing the character is almost bound to seem like a pale imitation in comparison.
But probably the most damning indictment, is that I watched the film, wrote most of the review, and then realized almost nothing about the second half had stuck in my mind at all.
The comparisons of Takigawa to Lazenby above proved appropriate in another way, both being canned after one entry playing the iconic title character, which is probably just as symptomatic of something.
The replacement here as Nami Matsushima is Natsuki, who seems to go back toward a more taciturn heroine, closer to the original. In this case, the heroine is a nurse, framed for her involvement in the hospital murder of a politician who was threatening to expose corrupt practices.
Of course, it ends with another vengeful confrontation for Nami — not for the first time, on a roof. The paucity of original ideas to be found here likely indicates why the series went into dormancy thereafter. While Natsuki still falls short of the intensity brought to the role by Kaji, she is an improvement on Takigawa, and this moves at a brisk enough pace to sustain interest, even in a viewer looking for less prurient aspects. But he is a bit of a Renaissance man, also working in animation, video games and illustration.
His work seems to have a common sense of imagination, to the extent that it can be a bit overwhelming. Oh, and the rest of it is almost impossible to destroy. However, trying to do exactly that is Iria Moriyama , an interstellar bounty hunter, who has laid a trap to take Zeiram into an alternate, uninhabited dimension, in order to deal with him in a way that will pose no threat to the local population.
Through an unfortunate series of events, they end up in the alternate dimension with Zeiram, while Iria is largely stuck in our world, trying to keep them alive until she can fix her portal and get in there to help them. The problems here are largely two-fold. And Teppei, There are few things less appealing than comic relief characters whose antics and mugging are supposed to be endearing or amusing, but fail miserably on both fronts. You get the sense being fed through a wood-chipper would only be a minor inconvenience.
She does have screen presence, however, and looks decent enough firing a gun. For instance, the section where Zeiram squeeze out goo onto the ground, which grows into a half-man that has a burbling conversation with Zeiram, before getting its head stomped on. Altogether, now: eh? Iria is seeking an ancient artifact called the Carmarite, and additionally, has a new assistant, but he turns out to be untrustworthy.
Blah blah irritating comic relief blah another dimension blak Iria unable to help this time because she gets herself locked in a room , etc. And this time, not even a cute dog which strays into proceedings is off the menu. It also helps that, this time around, Moriyama has a better handle on the action angle. Previously, it was very much a case of kick, pause, punch, pause, move, but she is a good deal more fluid here, and makes for a more credible heroine as a result.
At the time, she was an apprentice bounty-hunter, working alongside her brother Gren. They take a mission to rescue a VIP and recover the cargo from a stranded space-ship. The result leaves her brother apparently dead, and Iria now the target for the corporation, who want to hush up their thoroughly-dubious plan, by any means necessary. Fortunately, as well as her own skills, our heroine has the assistance of former rival bounty-hunter, Fujikuro Chiva , endearing urchin Kei Kanai , and Bob Ikeda , a colleague whose consciousness has been turned into an AI.
There were times in the movies where you could see where Amamiya wanted to, but has to restrain his imagination for budgetary reasons. However, there remain weaknesses. We used to be fairly well into roller derby, and reports of these bouts have previously graced the pages of this site. Our involvement in the scene came to a sudden halt a couple of years back when a shift-change at work left me holding down the fort on Friday and Saturday evenings, which are basically the prime nights for bouts.
I still possess my AZRD shirt, which I wear it to work occasionally, and have followed vaguely the schisms and ructions as groups have split, flourished and folded locally.
But while randomly kicking around Netflix, I noticed not one, not two, but three documentaries covering the topic, and figured I might as well use my bandwidth to watch them. The revival of modern-era roller-derby started in Austin, Texas, when a man of dubious background and apparently even more questionable character, Dan Policarpo, arrived in the city and started talking up the sport to anyone who would listen.
At the center in Austin were four women — Heather Burdick a. However, it was not long before the inevitable drama starts, with the rest of the participants wondering for exactly whose benefit they were risking life and limb, as well as sacrificing their free time. As for the former, most get-togethers appear to take place in bars, or other places not conducive to the recording of crystal-clear dialogue. It would have been easy to portray the Gang of Four as exploitative tyrants, but one makes the point that they wanted to run the league like communists, and it failed miserably.
I think you lose much right to credible outrage at that point. But, for all its uncritical approach and other flaws, this is the Declaration of Independence of roller derby, a historic document which shows how the whole thing got started. For the next entry, we leap forward to , and Portland — a city which all we know about, we learned from Portlandia. Is it heretical to say that roller derby chicks can be stereotypical in their individuality, just as much as those in the mainstream they profess to detest?
That is the impression that comes over here, and a couple of the women are… Well, to be honest: really annoying. What next? In contrast to some other leagues, the theatrical fights and things like the punishment wheel are nowhere to be found in Portland. In contrast to Brutal Beauty , this succeeds to a far greater degree is in putting over the attraction of roller derby. The first couple of films seem aimed more at the devotee, and it was more or less taken as read that already you liked it, or were at least somewhat interested.
Here, I think even the more casual viewer will find themselves sucked in. They may or may not want to go any further, but the doc does a much better job of explaining the entertainment to be found, both for participants and spectators.
The sheer sense of fun that is found at the best roller-derby events [or even, to be frank, the crappy ones, which we have also attended! Not that there is any shortage of said personalities, such as the mother and daughter who both take part in the sport, or the three sisters who have been roller-skating virtually their entire life, and are feared across the entire Seattle league.
There are, admittedly stories about romance and marriage included, but even these have a close connection to roller-derby, like the guy who proposes after his girlfriend became part of the championship-winning team [I can relate to this, having proposed to my wife immediately after the Arizona Diamondbacks won the World Series!
I also enjoyed the insight into the different teams, like the Sockit Wenches right or the Derby Liberation Front, and the different ways in which they both perceive themselves and are perceived from the outside.
Each has a different group personality, which of course, attracts other like-minded individuals, reinforcing that aspect of the team. In common with the rest of the films, it covers a period of time rather than necessarily any particular sequence of events, mostly around the season, where the Wenches were trying to dethrone the reigning champion DLF. Most obviously, Cynthia Rothtock was a five-time World Karate Champion in forms and weapons, and has a number of black belts in various disciplines.
Similarly, Jeeja Yanin was a third-Dan black belt in Taekwondo, before hitting the silver screen in Chocolat. Born in , Takeda was reportedly inspired to take up the martial-art at the age of ten, when she saw her father get knocked out of a karate tournament, and was determined to avenge his defeat.
Just ask Angelina Jolie, whose career started with Cyborg 2…. The entertainment value you get from this may depend on your expectations. The plot — such as it is, and I wonder what they did with the rest of the postage-stamp — is as follows.
Another standout was the kickfest below , against another real-life karate star, Yuka Kobayashi. However, the inexperience of both her and the creators in the more traditional aspects of film-making — for the final battle, the location appears to be a school gymnasium, on loan to the Destroyers! Oh, and you must pay for this too, naturally. Ayaka Kurenai Takeda can only watch as her father, a master of karate, is killed in front of her very young eyes, and her sister Sakura Tobimatsu is dragged away by the perpetrators.
A decade or so later, Ayaka goes viral after using her skills to stop purse-snatchers in the cinema where she works, an event that brings her to the attention of Tagawa Shu Keisuke , the man behind it all. He still covets the family belt, having apparently missed it when killing the man and kidnapping his daughter.
I did enjoy most of the action, and the relaxed style of editing which lets you see the performers and their skill. British-born Heselton. Both Takeda and Tobimatsu show potential here. The latter is another young discovery — the next next generation of action heroines? One suspects child-labour laws must be a good deal laxer in Japan than the West. From the director of Alien vs. They ar returning with their latest batch of four, including Kisaragi Takeda , who is a ninja in her own right.
With the help of a mysterious man Sato , Kisuragi and her colleagues in imprisonment are released from their bondage — but that is only the first obstacle between them and their freedom.
Of course, it turns out the heroine is not quite as innocent as she appears, and has an agenda of her own, because her mother was kidnapped by the same sleazy ninjas, when Kisuragi was just a baby. Barely an hour long, this still somehow manages to outstay its welcome, managing to spend far more time engaging in borderling misogyny, rather than anything remotely empowering, and a distinctly sleazy tone with plot elements involving castration, venereal disease and a great deal more molestation of helpless women that I generally like particularly in my ninja flicks.
That can work in the right hands — Versus is justly the most well-know example of that genre. Hopefully, Takeda will soon move beyond this kind of Z-grade dreck: I did read rumours of her being in Chocolate 2 , which would be nice if said rumours had the slightest grounding in fact, which seems questionable.
It was originally the domain mostly of independent producers and studios, but as the Japanese market became tougher, due to competition from imported movies and other forms of entertainment, major studios like Nikkatsu and Toei moved in to the field.
While the former took the more traditional route, Toei opted to merge sex with the other staple of exploitation cinema, violence. But what makes them of interest here, is their focus on women as the central characters, active participants in the violence, rather than simply being passive victims.
Sometimes, the focus is on obtaining revenge or justice for some past crime, whether against the girl or someone she loves. The ratio of sex to violence did vary, as did the setting: while most had a contemporary setting, films like Lady Snowblood took the themes are ran them out against a period backdrop. We started by reviewing the four movies included in the box-set released by Panik House in December Further entries will continue to be added during the coming months, with the movies listed in order of release date.
That, alone, is odd, but not particularly memorable. Never say this site is not educational. It was, to some extent, a fortuitous accident: the publisher was expecting a detective tale, Wada was working on a high-school story, and the two concepts ended up getting welded together.
The heroine is more or less the same in all incarnations: Saki Asamiya, the trouble-making schoolgirl who ends up in prison, and eventually becomes an undercover spy for the government, though in the manga, it seems this only takes place after a fair amount of babes-behind-bars shenanigans.
The first two of these were spin-offs from the TV series, and appeared in and , while the third reached cinemas almost twenty years later. This ran for half-hour episodes over three series between April and October , which starred Yuki Saito, Yoko Minamino and Yui Asaka respectively. This appears to be episodes of the second series, and having watched them, I feel I can convincingly state, with little fear of contradiction, that I have little or no idea what is going on.
Also roaming the woods is a samurai, and another schoolgirl, who possesses fangs, and leaps to the attack accompanied by cat noises. There is a fair amount of largely-unconvincing fighting, ending when Saki has her memory jogged by a small trinket, apparently breaking the curse placed upon her.
To say any more would probably be…unwise. It is, however, a masterpiece of comprehensibility compared to parts 35 and 36, though I was distracted by the arrival of a family friend, and so I must admit, my attention was largely diverted. If I had to hazard a guess — and you would probably need to use pliers and a blowtorch to get this out of me — it appears to be something to do with an after-school justice club, whose activities somehow land Saki in jail by the end of the episode.
There is also a metal mask of some sort, whose eyes occasionally glow red. Please note, I am simply reporting these things. This does not exactly make for enthralling television, in any language, but things do perk up towards the end. Thankfully, these did at least come with subtitles.
Most recently, Lovely Angel: Kei and Yuri debuted on radio in Osaka in October ; a second series was released a year later, relocating Kei and Yuri to the year as student ninjas. Which is, at least, different. As we also had a translation of the first novel released in America, September , the Dirty Pair bandwagon shows little sign of stopping, as the characters head towards their thirtieth birthday. Thus inspired, Takachiho went to work, and his duo made their debut in of SF Magajin , in February Though these novels are in many ways radically different from the other version, the core characters of Kei and Yuri are almost unchanged: a contrast in looks, personality and approach.
Kei is the loud, brash redhead; Yuri, a more cautious soul. The novels give a gift of clairvoyance to the duo, but seem to make it contingent on them having really bad luck. The stories take place around the year , with the human race now occupying several thousand star systems, and travelling between them in spaceships.
Original Dirty Pair. Though, as noted above, the first novel in the original series is scheduled for release in America later this year, there was an English translation of it published in August The fifth book was also originally released in an English translation on the Microsoft Network during Good luck with finding either though these days.
That said, I located the following, lurking on my bookshelves back from the days when I was a serious anime fan-boy. While in English, this came out in Japan, since it was part of a series of translations of popular works, intended as an aid for people learning the language. The plot is somewhat Project Eden -like; they head to a planet to investigate what initially seems to be an act of industrial espionage, only to uncover a far more lethal threat.
It was a flash of pure white light. Then a dizzying feeling of walking on air, followed by a tingling ecstacy. Everything went white. An image appeared. It appeared like a picture painted on a immaculate canvas. It went out. In a twinkling, color returned to my consciousness. Though the civilian death toll as a result of their actions in this novel — as noted previously, largely due to some terribly bad luck; here, involving a crashing space-ship and a major city — comes in at a brisk 1,, Well done!
Reaction to that, and the ongoing series of novels, was positive enough to allow Studio Nue, along with Sunrise Productions, to create a TV series starring the Dirty Pair. But as yet, it has not been officially translated into English — they have made it into several other languages, including French where the pair are known as Dan and Dany and Italian Kate and Julie.
Much of the darker tone of the novels was apparently jettisoned, in favour of lighter elements, and Takachiho was largely not involved in the show. While the series was still in production, a spin-off OAV, Affair of Nolandia was created, which was released at the end of , to tie in with the last TV episodes, but with a different approach and style. It was not a huge success, and subsequent entries generally went back, adopting a parallel look and feel to the television version, being tongue-in-cheek romps.
The pair are sent to locate a missing girl, who may be tied to a shuttle-crash where the pilot screamed the ground was shifting just before the accident. By the time they arrive, their client is dead, and the girl has holed up in a remote forest, filled with strange life-forms.
In some ways, this is superior to Eden , though the animation is not one of them. The storyline wins out for imagination, despite a frantically expositional scene where the film derails from one plotline to another in about 30 seconds. The intercutting between these two, separate yet simultaneous, sequences is splendid. Oh, and Yuri wields the Bloody Card,. However, this showcases some impressive imagination, with a trippy quality that blurs the line between reality and hallucination, where unicorns run through the trees, and you can water-ski through outer-space.
And then, as we all have come to expect from our heroines, blowing it up. Even complete novices will be up to speed by the pre-credit sequence, which sees them — oops! They discover that the creatures are the results of failed experiments by Dr. Meanwhile, gentlemen thief Carson D. Carson is there, for his own reasons. Pop-culture nods go to everything from James Bond through Star Wars to Aliens , though the female leads helps give familiar scenarios a fresh air. But as a semi-spoof, say along the lines of Our Man Flint , it works very nicely and is solidly entertaining, with slick production values and a good sense of fun.
I mention this, because my first encounter with Kei and Yuri was back when an unsubtitled camera copy of The Ultimate Halloween Party strayed across my eyes. I was hooked. The format is relatively simple, but an infinite universe allows almost infinite scope for development. But what works are the straightforward entertainment aspects. This is action-SF with tinges of humour, and a couple of central characters who swan around the galaxy in what are basically space-bikinis, engaging in gun-battles with their enemies.
But there are occasional moments of subtlety, such as Sleeping Beauty , where the Pair find a young girl who witnessed a murder but has been in cryogenic slumber for twenty years. The final scene there has surprising poignancy. Why let Kei and Yuri blow up one case, when you can save time by giving them two at once? You will not be surprised to hear that these two cases are interconnected, though it does appear to come as a shock to the participants here. Can they uncover the conspiracy before it uncovers them?
The action in this episode is significantly more restrained than Project Eden , which had a number of spectacular battle set-pieces.
Indeed, at times this plays more like a detective story than anything else, and with relatively minor adjustments, could be relocated to the present-day — I tend to feel that is something of a cop-out for science-fiction. On the other hand, there are some gaping flaws in the logic, not least some DNA evidence which appears to have materialized out of thin air actually, complete vacuum.
There are plenty of opportunities for mayhem here, sadly ungrasped, and the ironic, tongue-in-cheek humor is also largely lacking, not least in the sombre ending, noted above.
Founded in out of San Francisco, comic publisher and manga translator Studio Proteus bought the rights to create a new comic version of the Dirty Pair in , the key breakthrough being a direct approach to Takachiho, after the failure of negotiations with Studio Sunrise. There was one requirement, however: the style had to be changed from those already in use. This was agreed to, though there is almost as much evolution from the initial designs through to the most recent version, as between the novels of the Dirty Pair and, say, Dirty Pair Flash.
And their costumes. It must be said, their clothes get skimpier almost by the page; by the end, it appears improvements in engineering technology and low gravity are equally required, in order to avoid wardrobe malfunctions. For the first 3 series, the stories were written by company founder Toren Smith and Adam Warren, with Warren drawing the artwork.
From then on, Warren took over the entire project, with Smith returning to company management, at least until Studio Proteus was bought out by Dark Horse Comics in In addition, the later stories see the pair becoming implanted with all manner of technological accessories, becoming as much cyberaction heroines as human.
Rei and Nana survive the attack as the remaining henchmen retreat. With the apartment compromised, Rei takes Nana back to her own secluded home at the top of an abandoned apartment complex.
Kaneda is a lover of both men and women. Since Nana has left, Natsume Terunori Miyazaki has become the target of his affection. The crime boss is an eccentric fellow who likes to crossdress and seduce the unwilling Natsume nightly since Natsume is too much of a coward to resist.
Matoh orders Rei to forget about protecting Nana, but Nana still fears for her life since she betrayed the syndicate, giving up more than just her story of their operation. Most of the film focuses on the unusual relationship between Rei and Nana while the organ smuggling mess takes a backseat. The ending redeems the title some, but not enough for me to forgive the hints of a crime-syndicate plot that gets shelved until the last fifteen-minutes of the film. Ichiho Matsuda is quite good as the spoiled brat who exists to annoy you until you crack.
Like watching fans perform Rocky Horror , some of the English cast can get into the roles and be a bit more b-movie-over-the-top than the original cast on-camera.
The video is hardsub-free and clean, but it suffers some from the fact that the Japanese originally filmed this on early DV-cam equipment. Some of the gunfight scenes can get very grainy with red and blue dots because DV camcorders have trouble in rooms with poor lighting. The subtitles are error-free, though they have a slight transparency to them unlike most Central Park Media titles.
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