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Dump Buckets and Buckets of Water Back into this Dry EVIL Well. “Ring Shark” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Ring Shark” Now Curses the DVD Market! Own It Here!

For the subscribers of her Youtube show, vlogging social media influence Kanamasa and her co-host search for a stone well rumored to be in a haunted forest surrounded by unfriendly villagers who aggressively ward off unwelcomed visitors.  Upon discovering the well, a shark-like creature emerges suddenly and bites Kanamasa, scaring them off.  A few days later, another pair of Youtube investigators of the Psychic Investigations Big Summer learn of Khana’s disappearance after her last video surfaces of what looks to be a shark fin and then a ghastly body surfaces from within her bathtub, attacking her bikini-garbed body.  Seeking the truth and eager to find Khana, the investigators conduct interviews with “shark” experts and attempt to visit the same well only to be shooed off by the villagers until, finally, they’re able to reach the same spot and experience the same sharp-teethed horror lurking within it.  Unknowingly, that same supernatural terror of the well had follow them home. 

Sharksploitation has admittedly gotten out of hand.  The beloved horror subgenre that began with Steven Spielberg and Bruce the mechanical monstrous shark who terrorized the beaches of Amity Island have since drowned in its own watery subcategory of the ocean’s maneater predators with microbudget ineptitude that takes the shark from its natural ecosystem and rehomes it in a miscellany of nonsense locations, such as on land, in the weather, and even circling in toilets.  Well, today is the day we’ve come across a movie been assimilated into that same fatuous collective with “Ring Shark,” aka “Well Shark,” aka “Ido Shark.”  The Japanese, found-footage comedy-horror is the first of a trio of incongruous shark films released between 2023 and 2024 by Taichiro Natsume with “Love Shark” and “Last Shark” to follow, connected by the Big Summer team of Psychic Investigators.  Natsume also wrote and produced the feature.

Unfamiliar with the Psychic Investigator Big Summer series, which there’s uncertainty if Big Summer is a Japanese comedic troupe, equivalent to the Broken Lizard of America, what “Ring Shark, or “Ido Shark” begins is a series of various haunted case probes by the Big Summer team, which in this film in particular include actors using modifications of or using their actual names as characters in the story, such as director Taichiro Natsume being the single male lead in the group under character name Daiichiro Natsume.  Daiichiro Natsume can be a bumbling, yet persistent fool when it comes to the mysterious case of Kana-san with his steady motif of exclaiming his love for big boobs and determination to resolve the mystery.  He’s joined by colleagues on-and-off screen in Momoka Asahi and Chihiro Nishikawa, the latter not to be confused with Chihiro Nishikawa of JVA.  While Nishikawa and Natsume continue the running gag conversating about big breasts, Momoka Asahi enters the picture much later as the third investigating team member when Natsume goes down with a well shark bite infection that haunts him from the inside out and puts him in the hospital.  From there, Nishikawa and Momoka take the reigns on investigation by not only tending to Natsume’s dwindling health but also interviewing internet paranormal sleuths Hiroshima Freddy, a Japanese horror influence in real life, as well as Black Story Kuro, who I imagine is another influencer but couldn’t confirm it.  Typically, the Japanese language has a ton of fluid inflections and tones that dictates situations and mood, but “Ring Shark” avoids much of the vocal ups-and-downs with a consistently level tone of flat and dry humor peppered with fear, arbitrary bickering, and a pinch of kawaii to sustain a semi-serious documentary style investigation.  Maya Mineo, Issei Kunisawa, Yacch Chara, Daiki Mizuno, Honey Trap, Umeki, and the wrestler known as The Shark fills out the cast.

“Ring Shark” is “Blair Witch Project” meets “The Ring.”  The latter having the most prominent appearance as the at home media, that was once titled, or probably is likely titled in Japan, as “Ido Shark,” is marketed for U.S. consumption because every moviegoer is either well versed or knows of Hideo Nakata’s “The Ring” series and its heebie-jeebies Samara spirit.  Instead of a cursed tape that summons Samara out of the depths of her murdered resting spot, a well, to kill anyone after a week of viewing said tape, “Ring Shark” only real connective tissue to “The Ring” is that there is a well in the story and a murdered girl’s body was dumped inside.  That’s it.  From there, the structure is more to the tune of “Blair Witch Project” with a pseudo-found footage of one social media’s disappearance igniting the Psychic Investigator Big Summer team to check it out after the tape is brought to their attention form Kanasama’s co-host.  The docu-style incorporates dry wit of interviewing shark experts, creature academics, urban legend connoisseurs, and thorough analysts and researchers, as well as themselves as angry villagers and a supernatural hand puppet shark head subverts their stratospheric sublayer with soul-chumming results.  Yet, none of everything just said really clicks in a flimsy and slapdashedly put together microbudget story derived for effect for true and absurd exploitation of sharks gone wild. 

“Ring Shark” swims right into SRS Cinema’s well-house with a brand-new DVD from the microbudget cult film distributor.  Upscaled to 1080p, the MPEG2 encoded, single layer DVD5 presents the Big Summer production ion a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio.  Though upscaled to 1080p, the cell phone footage renders stretched limitations under the light of low-budget constraints.  Night vision and poor lighting coupled with closeups-to-extreme closeups, and shaky camera work dematerializes story-important images.  Natural lit and stationary camera work provide cleaner visuals in what is mostly a deluge of exposition and regular camera angles without atmospheric makeup.  The Japanese language Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo provides lean composition with ample inherent surrounding ambience, picking up the natural wildlife chirping in the background, the vocal amplification of someone talking through a microphone, the hustle and bustle of a restaurant, etc. Dialogue isn’t impeded by the commercial phone camera recording that creates a rather good reproduction and diffusion of sound amongst the space.  Added audio effects, such as the shark’s growling or snarling, does feel unnaturally alienated from the rest of the audio but works to the film’s advantage despite the obvious hand puppetry.  English subtitles are burned in but do synch well and appear error free. There’s also what looks to be double English subtitles along with Japanese title cards or subtitles that are a part of the Youtube investigation and often coincide with the main English subtitles in a distracting, screen space absorbing real estate. The Japanese electro-rap graced static menu, which samples Lil Jon’s Yeeeah, contains no bonus feature selection; instead, the bonus content is right on the main menu with short film “Shark of the Dead” (8.26 minutes) and the “Ring Shark” trailer.  I love bad movie cover art and SRS Cinema’s “Ring Shark” is no exception with smokey-eyed, electrically charged, and monstrously toothy shark breaching from a little stone well underneath “The Ring”-font film title.  The disc is pressed with the same image and there are no inserts included.  The barely hour-long film, clocking in at 63-minutes, comes not rated and has a region free playback.

Last Rites: “Ring Shark” is a monumental prosaic mockumentary aimed to swell Sharksploitation into further ill-repute and disrepair with an unfunny and uninteresting undertaking of underwhelming pastiche.

“Ring Shark” Now Curses the DVD Market! Own It Here!

Sacrifice and Intestines Make Great EVIL Slashers! “Ikenie Man” and “Harawata Man” reviewed! (Wild Eye Releasing / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Ikenie Man” Available on DVD Home Video!

“Ikenie Man”

Four university friends involved in a movie making club trek deep into the remote, phone service-snuffing forest eager to make their esteemed stamp on the slasher genre, or rather just the director does, as frustrations build between them, exploding furiously into an inability to find cohesive creativity, and their lead actress quits and walks off location in a fit of distaste for horror and their Prima donna director.  Idea and idea between the rest of crew of how to recoup their film from being a total failure and loss has been rejected by the nitpicking auteur looking for that novel concept to make him famous until he and the crew stumble upon a group of eight campers who all conveniently fit into conventional tropes of horror characters.  A plan quickly arranges to use their masked and knife-wielding movie villain to scare the unsuspecting campers with guerilla filmmaking tactics but there’s more to these seemingly innocent young campers than what meets the eye. 

A meta horror self-aware to all the necessary components that make a great horror movie becomes upended in a topsy-turvy tumbling machine of all the aligning mechanisms you thought you knew about a horror story.  Yu Nakamoto (“Phone of the Dead,” “Teacher! It’s a Slit-mouthed Woman!”) writes and directs the meta, self-deprecating, indie Japanese horror-comedy “Ikenie Man.”  Ikenie, translated literally to the word Sacrifice, is used to describe the in-story director’s deranged masked killer the direct himself portrays and finds himself at the sharp end of a knife, barbed wired baseball, razor edges of a chainsaw, and etc.  The 2019 released film is an open-faced hotdog of an absurd horror comedy, slathered with gory ketchup, and self-produced by the then 28-year-old, Hiroshima-born Yu Nakamoto as his sophomore short feature length film under his indie credited production company of Nakamoto Films. 

Also, Follow Up With “Harawata Man” on DVD Home Video!

“Harawata Man”

One year after the terrifying ordeal in the woods, the university movie club has evolved with the departure of the director and lead actress after graduation.  The two remaining members are joined by newcomers with an actor, actress, sound engineer, and camera operator to work on another masked slasher, titled “Harawata Man.”  When directed to meet up and shoot inside an abandoned manufacturing plant, the crew praises the location’s creepy atmospherics, but they run into another film crew shooting simultaneously on a project of their own.  Mistaken as the hired assistant crew members, they jump at the opportunity to work on a bigger-scale film until an actress is brought into the scene, sat in the middle of the room, and is bludgeoned to her actual death by the story’s plastic apron killer.  The opportunity of a lifetime just became a snuff film nightmare they can’t escape.

“Harawata Man” sequentially follows on the heels of “Ikenie Man” by taking place one year after the events of the first film and moving the setting from one genre-staple setting of the thick woods to the next best location of an abandoned factory.  Released the same year as “Ikenie Man,” one could deduce that both “Ikenie Man” and “Harawata Man” were shot essentially back-to-back with some down time in between productions and that might explain the mark of no return of some principal characters that didn’t, or couldn’t, appropriately fit into the new story, which would align with the absence of the titular “Ikenie Man.”  Harawata translates to the ever-delicate word Intestines describes the story’s small indie film crew’s killer who rips out the victim’s guts.  “Harawata Man” is a less meta than its predecessor film by relying more on its comedic context as another Yu Nakamoto Film production. 

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So, because I do not know the Japanese alphabetical language of hiragana, katakana, and kanj and there’s limited information on IMDB.com, as well as other referential sources, the cross reference of cast to characters is not obviously clear.  Instead, going through the character carousal to understand motivations and journeys has become a forced prudence.  “Ikenie Man’s” setup is an expositional setup from the indie filmmaking foursome to run through what us genre aficionados already know:  character tropes, emblematic motifs, and traditional character arcs, such as the rise of the final girl.  “Scream” had highlighted and called out the trade ingredients of recipe elements to make Grandma’s stew that much more appetizing to a new, inexperienced market of up-and-coming fans.  The franchise’s sequels to follow leaned into the rules of subsequential follow ups with each tweaking just a little to make them worthwhile.  Nakamoto flips the script for more campy devices into an un-genre-like routine that sees the virgin killed right away, the nerd is secretly a jock under his four eyes wear, and the only masked “killer” in the story turns out to be the unwilling hero.  “Harawata Man” takes a step back toward more familiar plot grounds of an independent film crew winding up into unfortunate chanceful circumstances and having to defend themselves against sociopathic snuff filmmakers.  However, it’s the way the misfortunate film crew becomes fortunately favored is how they use slasher rudiments to defends themselves that dips the toes of this sequel into the meta pool, taking on the role of maniacs and omnipresent killers who slice and dice with authority and the snuff filmmakers run, yell, and scream for their live becoming the hapless kill fodder.  Yûta Chatani, Maki Hamada (“Tokyo Gore Police”), Tomoaki Saitô (“Phone of the Dead”), Yasunari Ujiie, Yûko Gotô, Marie Kai, Tanabe Nanami, Tsugumi Sakurai, Sumre Ueno (“Ghost Squad”), Yû Yasuda (“Rise of the Machine Girls’), and Shigeo Ôsako (“Grotesque”) are the cast listed.

As far as Japanese gore films go, Nakamoto films are lite when looking at the niche genre as a whole, paling in comparison to such films as “Toyko Gore Police” or “Audition,” but that doesn’t stop “Ikenie Man” or “Harawata Man” from decapitation, severing, eviscerating, and perforating at will with fountainous blood splatter, one of the better absurd keynotes seen in gory J-horror that goes back to Japan’s samurai films of yore.  Gore certainly dangles the carrot of catching these films on either the preferrable home video or, dare I say it, Tubi, but Nakamoto refuses to make it the focal backbone of his films; instead, the story’s meta comedy goes hard with assurances toward every genuine horror fan out there will recognize Nakamoto’s admiration for the genre.  “Ikenie Man” and “Harawata Man” not only spoof horror but also adapt into a new breed of that line of thinking that reminiscent of how “Tucker & Dale vs. Evil” brought upon role reversals through character perception.  Plot paths switch to an unrecognizable gear, much like the films’ official synopses try to mislead with a generic framework, but these new directions still sate that blood thirst to keep interest, tone the black humor to be less wincingly slapdash, and keep the pacing fair, drive practical-effects with intent, and the intense horror-comedy upright in a saturated genre market.

Now available from Wild Eye Releasing is “Ikenie Man” and “Harawata Man” on DVD, encoded on a MPEG-2 compression DVD-5 with upscaled 1080p resolution. Curious enough, the opening company credits list both films as part of the Raw & Extreme sublabel but the physical cases list no such notation in what appears to be a regular Wild Eye Releasing title. Presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, the uncredited same camera and unlisted cinematography process by Yu Nakamoto is used for each production with “Ikenie Man” using gel filters to get a nice wide variety of primary glow splashed along character faces during night and light fog sequences. “Harawata Man” forgoes a colorful visual tone for more key lighting in a darker, basement dwelling. Picture quality and detail from the digital capturing translates fine from original print to reproduction with adequate compression of a short feature film with virtually no extras encoded. A LPCM uncompress Stereo 2.0 lines both audio tracks with fair fidelity in a clean and prominent pitch-accented Japanese language, balanced between two very contrasting scores of an energetic synth and “Halloween”-esque piano tracks of “Ikenie Man” compared to the generic stock of hurried, lower keyed tones that pale against Nakamoto’s first score. Depth is good and the range of sounds, such as the ripping of the chainsaw or the thwacking of kicks and punches, have a mixed realism that plays into the comedy side of the horror-comedy. Between hectic moments, you can recognize the unfiltered growling of a generator in the background in “Ikenie Man” to be able to shoot in the woods, a little indie film audio easter egg to discern. English subtitles are forced on both Japanese tracks and while the pacing is good and there are no misspellings, you can tell the translator is not a native English speaker as the written grammar is more literal and unnatural. Only trailers grace both films’ bonus features, but each individual physical set comes with new original compositional poster art front covers from Japanese artist Kit Nishino, staying the tried-and-true course of Wild Eye Releasing’s outrageous physical media facades, as well as the reversible sleeve contains the original Japanese poster art. Both discs are pressed with their respective primary cover arts and there are no inserts included. The Wild Eye Releases are region free, not rated, and have brief, under 60-minute runtimes of 52-minues for “Ikenie Man” and 46-minutes for “Harawata Man.”

Last Rites: Yu Nakamoto’s small but mighty meta slashers make a good double bill, an on its head combo of a run amok head decapitations for the sake of playing the reverse card to mix things up on a respectable homage, comedy, and horror scale that gives Wild Eye Releasing’s “Ikenie Man” and “Harawata Man” more than just the self-referential mediocrity treatment.

“Ikenie Man” Available on DVD Home Video!

Also, Follow Up With “Harawata Man” on DVD Home Video!

A Father Goes Looking for His Missing Daughter but All He Finds is EVIL! “The World of Kanako” reviewed! (Drafthouse Films and MVD Visual / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Purchase “The World of Kanako” From Drafthouse Films and MVD Visual

A washed-up former lieutenant detective now working as a lowly security guard becomes the first person to stumble into the aftermath of a gruesome, convenient store triple homicide.  After being questioned by police who suspects him of being involved because of his manic-depressive disorder, stemmed by his historical violent behavior and ugly divorce that virtually left him with nothing but his medication, the indecorous alcoholic floating through life receives a frantic call from his ex-wife about their teenage daughter, who he hasn’t seen in years and has suddenly gone missing for nearly a week.  Eager to have his family back in his life, he takes on the responsibility of investigating his daughter’s disappearance but the deeper he digs into her whereabout the more of the ugly truth surfaces between his daughter and the criminal underworld where deception, prostitution, and murder tells a different story than the one in his muddled head. 

In 2004, novelist Akio Fukamachi wrote “Hateshinaki Kawaki,” the rummaging into a lurid and pulpy underbelly of crime network through the eyes of one charismatic high school girl and her former detective father pursuing answers to her disappearance.  Fast-forward a decade later to 2014, director Tetsuya Nakashima (“Kamikaze Girls,” “Confessions”) adapts the novel’s darkness into a visual descent into lunacy under the title “The World of Kanako” from a script by Nakashima cowritten with collaboration writers Miako Tadano and Nobuhiro Monma of “3 Year Pregnant.”  The adaptation retains fidelity to the original Fukamachi story filled to the brim with violence, yakuza, sordid themes, and coldness that translates effortlessly and is well received in the likes of Japanese cinema that has decades of trenchant crime films under its wing.  “The World of Kanako” is no different yet still stands alone as an engaging entry produced by Satomi Odake (“Himizu”) and Yutaka Suzuki (“Confessions”) under the production of Gaga Communications.

The film interweaves the past and present with a bi-story to help unearth cruel intentions from what starts off as a seemingly routine plotted mystery with a degenerate, deadbeat father looking to make recompences using his investigative skills to find his daughter to quickly spiraling recklessly into an abyss of bombshell revelations.  Yet, Akikazu Fujishima continues his crusade out of his own self-pity to a more deserving, rewarding, and if not, diverting objective that reveals just about as much of his cataleptic state of being than the exhuming of his daughter’s disappearance from out of the criminal underground.  Veteran, international actor whose had roles in such films as “Memoirs of a Geisha,” “Pulse,” and “Babel,” Koji Yakusho gives a conscious performance of a flawed man with flawed tactical awareness charging headfirst and sternly stubborn into a complex web where the giant carnivorous spider of seediness hides behind the veil.  At the opposite end of the casting table is then newcomer Nana Komatsu (“Destruction Babies”) making her filmic debut in a past timeline as the titular Kanako, paralleling her father’s story by accompanying fellow high school student and constantly bullied narrator of the historical account in Hiroya Shimizu (“The Outsider”).  Kanako’s story unfolds a yakuza narrative that’s nasty and perverse while shepherding in Kanako’s role that teeters upon the audience’s perception throughout.  What Akikazu fleshes out and discovers is the reason for all the mayhem that has, more-or-less, started with him, retorting whatever sliver of moral intentions he had begun with with the fact we can’t change who we are and the children we raise in a Darwin nature or nurture, or perhaps in this case both, environment.  Akikazu and Kanako meet a variety of unsavory characters along the way that ends shockingly and cynically, completely obliterating the happy family and happy ending conventionalities.  Satoshi Tsumabuki (“Tomie:  Re-Birth”), Asuka Kurosawa, Ai Hashimoto (“Another”), Fumi Nikaidô (“Lesson of the Evil”), Aoi Morikawa (“The Killing Hour”), Miki Nakatani (“Ringu”), Mahiro Takasugi (“12 Suicidal Teens”), Munetaka Aoki (“Godzilla:  Minus One”) and Jun Kunimura (“Ichi the Killer”) portray some of those uncharacteristic archetypes.

Stylish, pulpy, and darkly themed, “The World of Kanako” has a modern grindhouse pastiche of the hardboiled Japanese noir.  The story is a wrecking ball of all good ideals and hopes, a genuine cynical representation of an unpleasant situation.  An 80/20 mixture of live action and animation splice ins, Kanako’s world is certainly represented as a chaotic coup d’état over pedestrian storytelling and dissects the human condition to test family ties, reveal lost bonds, and really scrutinize hereditary genetics.  The film’s opening is a flurry of converging images, past and present, live and animation, and narration, soundtrack, and bits of dialogue that open with the gruesome convenient store murders of three people, seemingly strangers, setting the stage and tone for the rest of the Tetsuya Nakashima’s film that’s bleak to the dying core.  The rapid editing style doesn’t incur fluff or filler moments in a slimmed down for exactly what we’re supposed to experience.   While Akikazu Fujishima may not be the best example of a hero, a loafer with anger issues, physical abuse tendencies, glutton for food, alcohol, and manic-depressive pills, a rapist, and perhaps even engaging in incestual pedophile, the protagonist majority pushes forward with relentless determination and beyond the scope of being a good father to find his daughter, but for what purpose is about as ambiguous as the imbalanced human mind and Akikazu mind sizzles with insanity that affects his legacy to the point where he feels responsible for taking care of his own.  On the flipside of the protagonist narrative, Kanako begins as a savior of bullies, working to remove the threat from those too weak to defend themselves only for them to be exploited by that defenseless and vulnerability when the yakuza and more extremists take from their emotions and bodies.  

Tetsua Nakashima speaks an entirely new language in “The World of Kanako,” derived from a mix of the compellingly twisted story of “Old Boy” and the appalling violence of filmmaker Takashi Miike.  Drafthouse Films and MVD Visual re-release “The World of Kanako” on a high-definition Blu-ray.  The 2024 release comes with AVC codec on a dual-layer BD50 and presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio.  The various animation styles spliced into the live action coupled with some choice primary color grading in the opening gives “The World of Kanako” a very nostalgic touch of passé pink films of the 1980s and slight arthouse surrealism feel to the likes of Nobuhiko Obayashi (“House”).  The mixture doesn’t meld into one another with detrimental effect and leaves a stark impression between the formatted visuals that creates definitive delineation.  Details also don’t bleed in the sharp textures of character faces and clothing with objects being distinct and well defined.  Darker scenes are enshrouded in intentional shadow amongst grittier interiors to better understand the gritty context, losing some details but no issues with compression, such as blocking or banding. Two audio options are available, and both are in Japanese with a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. Presented with fidelity, “The World of Kanako” produces no issues with either audio track with a clear and absolute. The ambience denotes a nicely spaced standard fare of common routine movements and actions around the environment setting. Outside of that, punches and kicks knock with an authenticity and same goes with gunshots and the hit-and-runs during more tense and thrilling heights. Yes, there was a lot of hit-and-runs with Akikazu behind the wheel for most of them. English subtitles synch well and appear to be error free. Bonus features a making of featurette in Japanese with English subtitles, an equally as long interview with principal leading actress Nana Kamatsu, an interview with Akio Fukamachi, and the theatrical trailer and teaser for the film. Physical features pale in comparison to Drafthouse’s first release that came with a 11″x17″ folded mini-poster and color booklet with essays and acknowledgements. This re-release favors the slimmer model with no tangible goodies inside. The standard Blu-ray Amaray has a stark front cover image of Kanako starring forward with a blood smear behind her; the disc is also pressed with this image. The Not Rated presentation has a runtime of 110 minutes and has region A playback.

Last Rites: Welcome to “The World of Kanako,” a savage acceptance of responsibility down the rabbit hole of malfeasance. Family ties be damned as one father takes it upon himself to ensure the deed is done right by his own destructive hands.

Enter “The World of Kanako” On Blu-ray Now Available at Amazon!

Three Men, a Boat, and One Giant, EVIL “Crocodile” reviewed! (Synapse Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Crocodile” on Blu-ray and Lurking Behind the Wates of Thailand’s Film Industry!

Along the serene Thailand shores, a doctor and his young colleague take their family and fiancé to a beach resort for some much-needed time away after a massive casualty natural catastrophe on a nearby island swallows the entire village with seismic volcano bedlam.  Little do they know that a component of the disaster has swam to their very watery spot on the beach resort and gnashed without remorse on the doctor’s family and fiancé.  Not knowing what kind of creature could do such carnage, they soon discover through first hand witness accounts and the evidence gathered that a large crocodile, mutated by man’s own disregard for mother nature, is the culprit.  The men, along with a fisherman who believes in a destiny of a beastly showdown, swear to track down the killer croc and kill it.  The crocodile’s bloodlust on mankind is seeming unstoppable as it wreaks havoc swimming down river, destroying entire villages in its destructive and hungry path.

Thailand’s reptilian “Jaws” equivalent, “Crocodile” wriggles with wayward ferocity in this giant creature feature horror that rivals Bruce the shark.  “Computer Superman” director Sompote Sands oversees the enormous amphibious aggressor versus frantic and frightened man film that merged or morphed from Won-se Lee’s “Crocodile Fangs” into a blending of the two productions of the same film of one seamless man versus animal hunt above and below the surface of the water.  Sompote Sands produces the venture along with a postdated credit toward exploitation producer Dick Randall (“Pieces,” “Escape from Women’s Prison”) from “Crocodile Fangs.”  Coproduced by Robert Chan and Pridi Oonchitti, “Crocodile,” or rather “Crocodile Fangs,” was a multi-national undertaking with Thailand and Korean actors and crew and a Japanese special effects company bringing the giant, carnivorous maneater to cinematic actualization.  The Chaiyo Productions spliced feature was distributed into the U.S. under Cobra Media. 

Doctors Tony Akom and John Stromm have it all; Akom (Nard Poowanai, “Ghost Hotel”) has a beautiful wife and child and leads a charmed life despite his vocation challenges of being a doctor always on call. and Stromm (Min Oo) is recently and happily engaged to Angela (Ni Tien, “Black Magic” 1 & 2).  Their vacation doses audiences with a picturesque double date plus one child but does a rough patch setup of Dr. Akom’s family neglecting workaholism that isn’t crafted to be a strain on the relationship he has with his family but rather bring upon him tremendous guilt and inset the good doctor into a studious montage of crocodile research after his family becomes crocodile chow.  Sympathy toward the doctors is incurred but the level of sympathy falls low as the ladies’ death scene falters in the editing room, or perhaps was only partially shot, as only one of them is visually attacked while the others are grieved over in postmortem.  Character will is strong enough to carry the anticipated revenge but the giant crocodile is truly the main star stud, a vicious, village-obliterating mammoth of armor and teeth goes full Godzilla on the riverside communities and dining buffet style on anyone, land or sea, who makes a splash in his kill radius.  Unlike in “Jaws,” “Crocodile” is back-and-forth without the mysteriousness of the shark’s lurking underneath the glassy surface, snatching swimmers and boaters to a watery, gory grave, and this really solidifies the crocodile as an intended principal figure as a well-known, full-visible, antagonistic killing machine spurred by man’s own atomic-making hand; an idea that’s only theorized in exposition and not practically fleshed out.  “Crocodile’s” cast fills out with Kirk Warren, Angela Wells, Hua-Na Fu, Bob Harrison, and Nancy Wong.

“Crocodile” very much embodies the “Godzilla” and “Jaws” with deference without being a total negligent rip of either more widely successful hit.  The crocodile, in the form of its oversized whipping tail and rather big and detailed puppet head, raze miniaturized villages, much the same way Godzilla tramples over Tokyo in the 50s through the 80s, and the storyline for “Crocodile” parallels portions of Steven Spielberg’s 25-foot man-eating Great White tale of three men boarding a boat to hunt down a formidable creature, complete with yellow barrels and a sinking ship to an exploding finale.  Antiquated by today’s standards, for late 70’s, the special effects are a marvel to behold.  Kazuo Sagawa, of the special effects company, Tsuburaya Productions, lead the department with size-mattering scale and detailed depictions of villages and boats being quickly and violent undone by either a crocodile puppeteer or a mini-croc circling the boat and even, at times, being wire-flown through the air, bombarding the model ship with WWF elbows (do crocodiles have elbows?).  Action sustains an intensity that’s wrathful and keeps the heart palpitating with excitement.  The same thing can’t be said about the story through the choppy editing style, often times revisiting cut scenes being spliced into progressive context, but the setting, exterior weather, and clothing haven’t changed.

Synapse Films obtains the original Cobra Media distributed U.S. release and meticulously restores “Crocodile” in a 2K scan from the original 35mm camera negative, premiere the film for the first time on Blu-ray worldwide.  With an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, the AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 is a deathroll of beauty and when Synapse says meticulously restored, the poof is in the details and coloring.  Not a ton of age wear or damage, a nearly pristine print for some intricate touchups to invigorate the content.  One brief series of scenes appeared as if the film cell was folded with a blended vertical line down the right side, much like a scratch would appear on the film but this looked different; however, the line did not substantially affect viewing.  Between the rapid severity of the crocodile thrashing and the reduced frames of select slow-motion sequences, there is nothing to fault about Synapse’s compression with objects keeping intact and away from ghosting or aliasing.  Blacks are generally faded but don’t show signs of posterization or banding.  The English print audio spec is a DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono dub.  Fidelity of the original audio is retained, uncompressed for lossless sound in all areas of the ADR, Foley ambience, and the cue soundtrack of the impending or attacking crocodile, with a hint of John Williams theme in the opening credit track.  English subtitles are available, but the dub is perfectly clear and prominent.  Special features include an audio commentary with writer and film historian Lee Gambin, a video interview with Won-se Lee, director of “Crocodile Fangs,” deleted and alternate scenes from different country versions of the film, and the original theatrical trailer.  The standard release comes in a green Blu-ray Amaray without the “nude” slipcover but has the same original, clothed illustrated artwork.  Inside, the disc is pressed with a toothy faceless creature versus and a scantily cladded bikini woman.  Opposite side is the usually accompanying Synapse catalogue for this year, 2024.  The R-rated feature has a runtime of 92 minutes and is region free! 

Last Rites:  A Thailand terrorizing monster movie with unrelenting savagery and terrific special effects for circa late 70s.  if you can withstand the story’s choppy waters, “Crocodile” is a fun and fierce swim through predatory, blood-suspended waters. 

“Crocodile” on Blu-ray and Lurking Behind the Wates of Thailand’s Film Industry!

A Gang’s EVIL Ransom Elicits the Wrath of “Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs” reviewed! (Neon Eagle Video / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs” is Number One on Our Must Have Lists!

When undercover officer Rei lets her overwhelming emotions kill a suspect on an assignment, her displeased colleagues lock her into a cell, unable to decide her fate with fear of public outcry of police brutality that would blemish the department and force leadership regsinations.  When a prime minister candidate’s daughter is kidnapped by a ruthless gang of rapists and murderers and brought to a cathouse for sale, the brothel madam believes the young woman is better exploited by issuing a large ransom for her safe return.  Unwilling to face public scandal, the politician and a rigid yet loyal investigator of the clandestine Zero Division rig up a covert plan to eliminate every person involved with the kidnapping by offering a murderous deal to Rei in exchange for her freedom.  Rei’s able to infiltrate the gang’s inner circle only to see the plan devolve into chaos and blood between the gang and corrupt authorities.   

Japan doesn’t make films like “Zero Woman:  Red Handcuffs” anymore!  The violent Toei company pinkusploitation production, released in 1974, played a major role in unifying the sexual appetites of Japan’s pink pornos with the rough-and-tumble violence of exploitation action films.  The rising of Nikkatsu Roman Pornos forced the hand of the Toei Company to expand their portfolio, creating such as combinational conquest over salivating grindhouse cinema patrons that the radical subgenre deserved a new sublet coinage labeled pinky violence.  Toei company man Yukio Noda, a staple yakuza filmmaker for the company, helms the visuals translated from a script penned by “Female Prisoner #701:  Scorpion” writers Fumio Kônami and Hirô Matsuda.  Loosely based off the manga written by Tooru Shinohara (who also penned the manga of “Female Prison Scorpion series”), “Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs” stitches its own blood soaked and sexually provocative clothing that would later continue “Zero Woman’s” adventures throughout the years with more films.

Cladded in a chic long red coat, black boats strapped up just below the knee, and wielding an extra-long connector chain pair of red handcuffs, Rei is the anti-heroine of our manga fantasies.  Miki Sugimoto works deep into that fantasy vision as Rei, Division Zero’s lady cop who will do anything and everything, clothed or undressed, to get the job done, even with extreme prejudice.  A frequent delinquent girl portrayer for Toei Company’s gritty bad girl gang pink pictures (try saying that five times fast), Sugimoto’s filmography include the “Girl Boss” series, “Terrifying Girls’ High School:  Women’s Violent Classroom, and “Criminal Woman:  Killing Melody,” and so Sugimoto already had established this foundational layer for Rei as a fortitude of badassery and now tacking on another layer of a moral high ground, justified only by seeing her word through to the end.  Rei is up against a gang of five – four street thugs led by the recent prison released Nagumo (Eiji Go,” The Executioner”) and one lesbian brothel madam (Yôko Mihara, “Sex & Fury”) – as she agrees to a back-against-the-wall deal and slyly subverts the gang by helping Nagumo during a faux ransom sting operation.  Along with Sugimoto’s stoicism, the Toei porn actress retains her promiscuous allure, one where she doesn’t have to do anything to be seductive but just be herself, working not only toward the favor of her character, who continuously is taken advantage of sexually without shame, but also keeping the integrity of the Toei élan for Japanese sleaze.  “Harakiri’s” Tetsurô “Tiger” Tanba resides to the general’s overlooking hill as the prime minister candidate who sends his battlefield colonel in Hideo Murota (“Rape and Death of a Housewife”) to be the Zero Woman’s handler.  Their scheme quickly devolves as their plan evolve when the operation goes slower than expected and the gang’s leader Nagumo begins feel the pressure of paranoia and starts to unhinge, especially around his ruffian acolytes played by Seiji Endô, Rokkô Toura, Iwao Dan, Kôji Fujiyama, and Ichirô Araki as Saburo the mysteriously quiet, aviator-waring knifeman who in himself is an interesting character.  Cast fills in with the Japanese speaking Westerner Ralph Jesser in a wild opening sequence that results in a gunshot to the groin!  

Like most pinky films, “Zero Woman:  Red Handcuff’s” incorporates an X-rated sexual violence but unlike most pinky films, the pinky violence subgenre omits the softer side of sensuality, creating more of a nihilistic viewpoint toward sex of taking what you want, when you want it, and aggressively at that.  Yukio Noda picture contains hostile lesbianism, gang rape, and pressurized perversions that take control thematically in pinky violence.  The corrosive context that has a guilty pleasure pull in most patriarchal dominated cultures and fleapit cinemagoers goes hand-in-hand with the over-the-top violence conjoined at the hip of cause-and-effect.  Usually, the narrative goes an ugly rape equals hard-fought revenge; in Noda’s film, the cause is the kidnapping, and subsequent deflowering of a power politician’s little girl leas to the Zero Woman effect of silencing with corporal punishment that circumvents the law.  Stylish like a spaghetti western and brutally violent, “Zero Woman:  Red Handcuffs” is a meanspirited, out-for-blood, femme fatale engendered on the verge of the pinkusploitation genesis.

Neon Eagle Video, a collaborative boutique label effort between Cauldron Films and Mondo Macabro’s Jared Auner, releases “Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs” onto a new Blu-ray, restored in 4K from the 35mm print. The transfer is AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, onto a BD50 and shown in the widescreen aspect ratio of 2.35:1. A relatively clean 50-year-old print hardly displays any age wear, if any at all. Scarcely marred by blue vertical emulsion scratches in only a single scene, the print retains and is stored with care to diffuse the range of color and to effectuate as much detail as possible in textures and skin while without taking away from Noda’s underbelly surrealism. The lower contrast infuses a pulpy layer to create softer shadows, but contouring manages to stick an outline thanks to key Rembrandt lighting precision, akin to Hammer Horror with a splash of Kensington gore. The uncompressed Japanese DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono peaks with the best possible optical audio. While not much in the way of depth creation, there’s plenty of range in the Foley, even if it’s artificially abstract and illogical compared to shotgun microphone captured audio. The ADR synch is one of the best inlaid post-recordings with visuals that renders hardly any feedback or unnatural noises on the audio layer. English subtitles are burned into the only available Japanese language picture on the release. Special features include a feature length audio commentary by author and producer for Vinegar Syndrome Samm Deighan, Sex + Violence = Pink Violence TokyoScope author Patrick Macias analyzes “Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs,” and an image gallery. Graphic designer Justin Coffee produces a new, rich-in-red, and taletelling composite illustration of what kind of film to expect on the front cover art of the clear Amaray Blu-ray. The reverse cover houses another illustration, one pulled from the feature’s original poster line. The BD is pressed with more Coffee fiery and red-laced artwork. This particular copy reviewed is not the limited edition set with accompanying slipcover and neither copy contains insert material. The region A playback release comes unrated and has a runtime of 88 minutes.

Last Rites: “Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs” is a fine introductory film into the world of Pinky Violence, a starting line for those perverse-thirsty for the unification of sex and violence in Japanese cinema. Neon Eagle Video delivers excellences with their restored print, second to none in its picture and audio quality that will provide a sterling experience.

“Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs” is Number One on Our Must Have Lists!