The Good Doctor's Countdown to 200 Japanese Movies

[DragonClaws]

2 minutes ago, One Armed Boxer said:

Bolo did quite a bit of work on Japanese productions, I remember him popping up in a few episodes of Yasuaki Kurata's 'Fight! Dragon' series (he was also billed as co-star on the Region 1 DVD box-set artwork!). 

 

Hi Paul, thanks for the feedback.

Thats I great series, I picked it up last month, it was called G-Men75 in Japan. The Millcreek set listed him twice on the cover, once under his name Yang Sze, then again as Bolo Yeung. There's a superior Japanese release, but it way too pricey for even a die hard fan like me. @NoKUNGFUforYU made a post about it this, a few clips have surfaced on YT from this release.

[One Armed Boxer]

11 hours ago, DragonClaws said:

Hi Paul, thanks for the feedback.

Thats I great series, I picked it up last month, it was called G-Men75 in Japan. The Millcreek set listed him twice on the cover, once under his name Yang Sze, then again as Bolo Yeung. There's a superior Japanese release, but it way too pricey for even a die hard fan like me. @NoKUNGFUforYU made a post about it this, a few clips have surfaced on YT from this release.

Pretty sure 'G-Men '75' & 'Fight! Dragon' are 2 different shows -

 

[DragonClaws]

15 hours ago, One Armed Boxer said:

Pretty sure 'G-Men '75' & 'Fight! Dragon' are 2 different shows -

 

 

 

Thanks for the link,  the thread below was the only one that came up in a search I did for the show's.

 

 

Edited July 6, 2019 by DragonClaws

[DrNgor]

#163 - Returner (2002) - Entertaining mishmash of several different Hollywood Blockbuster properties, mainly The Terminator; E.T. The Extraterrestrial; and Transformers, with visual tics taken from Independence Day and The Matrix. In 2084, the last human settlement (located in Tibet) is being eradicated by an invading alien force known as Daggra. They send one of their number, Milly (Anne Suzuki), back to 2002 to kill the first member of the Daggra to arrive on Earth. She teams up with a hitman, Miyamoto (Takeshi Kaneshiro, Downtown Torpedoes and House of Flying Daggers), to track down the spaceship and its sole inhabitant. Luckily for her, Miyamoto's sworn enemy, Mizoguchi, is a yakuza-triad also out to steal the spaceship in hopes of harnessing the aliens' weapons.

For action fans, there's a lot of crazy Matrix-inspired gunplay and a smackering of wire-fu, as was the style of the time. One of Milly's futuristic toys is a device that causes the person to move at superspeed, just perfect for Matrix-esque shenanigans. There are also a couple of action sequences set in the future, with soldiers fighting against the superior firepower of the Daggra and their power suits (see Independence Day for reference).

The movie on the whole is hardly original, given the sheer number of Hollywood movies it rips off--although I must point out that the Transformers moments are taken from the cartoon, as this came out 5 years before Michael Bay's film. But the movie is fun and there are some neat twists and character moments, with Goro Kishitani stealing the show as the scenery-chewing villain Mizoguchi. Giving him a run for his money is Kirin Kiki as Xie, Miamoto's middle-aged Chinese agent and equipment/intelligence supplier. The scene where she blows up the villains' car with plastic explosives is priceless.

My major complaint is that the mixture of Hollywood storytelling and Asian action sensibilities makes me wonder just who this film was for. Was it made for an international audience? For otaku overseas? For the locals? I'm sure local Japanese audiences would be accustomed to levels of violence higher than those in a typical PG-13 blockbuster. But if the movie was made for foreign consumption, than the solid special FX and occasional overwrought emotions mainstream audiences would be used to would've been offset by the graphic violence, including the senseless slaughter of numerous female characters. Obviously, Western fans of Asian cinema appreciate the idea that nobody is safe in these sorts of movies, but if this movie had a hefty pricetag, it'd need to appeal to a broader base than people like me.

[DrNgor]

#164 - Transformable Shinkansen Robot Shinkalion Movie (2019) - For the sake of comparison, I'm pretty sure that if I asked my late dad to watch the third Pokémon film without having seen any of the other films or the series itself, he would view it with the same sense of bewilderment that I watched Shinkalion today. This is definitely a film for the kiddies/fans, overflowing with characters that such will be undoubtedly familiar with, pseudo-scientific babble that will probably make more sense to people more familiar with the program, and subplots involving minor (or major) villains that come and go at a moment's notice. Add all that to a film set in a world that fetishizes trains, and in which said trains transform into giant robots to protect the world from the bad guys, and you have a real head scratcher. Oh, and there's a barely-coherent story involving time travel, to boot!

Hayato is a 14-year-old boy who's in love with trains and whose father, Hokuto, is president of the Shinkasen/Train company in Japan. An excavation in Hokkaido by the Shinkasen company reveals a completed Alfa X model train, which is still in development at company labs. Where did it come from? The excavation also causes a rip in the time-space continuum, resulting in a giant monster showing up near the Hokkaido station. Hayato and his family are on a much-needed vacation to Hokkaido when the monster shows up, so Hayato and Hokuto get into the train-cum-giant-robots to fight the monster. However, the monster's beam has an abundance of light particles--sigh--which cause a second rift in space-time and replace adult Hokuto with his 9-year-old self. All the while, the previous inhabitants of Earth, the Valhallans, who live on a space station and travel the galaxy on trains made of light, decide that they want to take back their old home. And lots more stuff happens.

The plot is ridiculously convoluted for a kid's animation film and assumes that person watching will have an intimate knowledge of all the characters, their relationships, the different train/mechs and their powers, and God knows what else. A world in which the greatest technology and defense weapons are reserved for trains that transform into powerful robots is a bizarre one, but then you get the bit where teenage popstars sing J-pop songs about railways that run up and down the Japanese coast and it gets surreal. 

I mainly watched this one because the aforementioned giant monster who shows up is none other that Godzilla himself. This incarnation is now known as "Snow Godzilla." He fights the Shinkasen mechs on two occasions, and then inexplicably shows up as a Deus ex Machina at the end to blast the villain with his atomic ray when all the heroes are unloading their Insanely Powerful Beam Weapons at the villain, too. The reasoning? Something about Light Particles, that simultaneously open portals to other times and dimensions, but make you lose your memory in the process. Or something like that.

[DrNgor]

Sort of out of order (mainly because I forgot to include them), but #165, #166 and #167 would be the three Godzilla anime films:

Godzilla: Monster Planet (2017)

Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (2018)

Godzilla: The Planet Eater (2018)

[DrNgor]

#168 - Castle of Cagliostro (1979) - This seems to be Hayao Miyazaki's first feature film, although he had already worked on the Lupin III property earlier in the decade when it was a series. Man, this animated movie has it all: action, adventure, a little bit of romance, danger, suspense, a smidge of political commentary...it has gunfights, car chases, foot chases, explosions, and a smidge of hand-to-hand combat...it has secret passageways, dungeons and hidden graveyards, it has a damsel in distress, a buxom mercenary woman, henchmen that almost come across as zombie ninja, lasers, and complex action set pieces set among clock gears. A lot of fun and recommended to everyone save the most obsessed of helicopter moms who might object to the fact that the two man protagonists are avid chain-smokers.

Edited October 5, 2020 by DrNgor

[DrNgor]

#169 - Junk (2000)

 

[DrNgor]

#170 - Wild Zero (1999)

 

 

[DrNgor]

#171 - Tag (2015)

 

[DrNgor]

#173* - Black Rat (2010)

#174 - Cursed (2004)

 

* - Actually, I counted #156 twice.

Edited December 9, 2020 by DrNgor

[DrNgor]

#175 - RINGU (1998) - Okay, I'll finish this countdown to 200 Japanese movies watched in the next couple of months. I started in 2016 and then kinda petered out because I was watching so many Chinese movies. But okay, back to business.

I watched RINGU, which was the adaptation of the horror novel RING, which eventually inspired the popular 2002 Hollywood movie with Naomi Watts. And why did we get a Hollywood version in 2002 instead of a release of the Japanese version? Because stupid Americans (collectively, not individually) hate subtitles and ridicule dubbing.

 

Strangely enough, I think I prefer the Hollywood version more than this. It has a stronger female heroine, more bizarre imagery, is more explicit in just how horrible it is to be attacked by the ghost, and has a stronger feeling of dread to it. I'll have to watch it again, as I haven't seen it in a decade or so.

 

In this version, they visit Oshima Island, home of the volcano Mount Mihara. During that sequence, I could only thing about how cool it'd be for Godzilla to rise from the volcano and make a cameo (if you've seen Godzilla 1985 or Godzilla vs. Biollante), you'll know what I'm talking about.

[DrNgor]

#176 - Rasen (1998)

 

[DrNgor]

#177 - Ring 2 (1999)

#178 - Ring 0: Birthday (2000)

 

[DrNgor]

#179 - Karate Warriors (1976)

 

[DrNgor]

#180 - Long Dream (2000)

#181 - Haunted School/Kotodama (2014)

 

 

[DrNgor]

#182 - Message from Space (1978)
 

 

[DrNgor]

#183 - Ocean Waves (1993) - A lesser-known Studio Ghibli effort--I guess it was a TV movie--about the experiences of a young high school student, Taku, living in Kochi when an attractive girl from the big city (re: Tokyo) arrives and attends school with him. His friend, Yutaka, falls head over heels for her, although it's Taku who ultimately gets dragged into the girl's world of personal problems. A very human story about human beings with human foibles and human problems--the US rarely (if ever) could see animation as a vehicle for this sort of story. And for all the mistakes the characters commit over the course of the film, it does remind us that as time passes and we mature, many of the lesser rivalries and other idiocies of high school tend to stop mattering.

[DrNgor]

#184 - School-Live! (2019)
 

 

[DrNgor]

#185 - The Sacrifice Dilemma Part 1 (2013) -

 

[DrNgor]

#186 - Tomie: Forbidden Fruit (2002)

 

 

[DrNgor]

#187 - Kamen Rider × Super Sentai × Space Sheriff: Super Hero Taisen Z (2013)

 

[DrNgor]

#188 - The Vanished (2006)

 

[DrNgor]

#189 - Pulse (2001)

 

 

[DrNgor]

#190 - Jigoku (1960)

#191 - Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968)