Category: Business

It’s been a rough 4 or 5 years for fans of Japanese horror, gore, and general head-explodey extremeness. Sure, there are the usual suspects like Noboru Iguchi and Yoshihiro Nishimura who generally have the means and contacts to make whatever they feel like making, knowing that the distribution rights will get snatched up by western distributors pretty quick. However, most Japanese genre stuff has been pushed so far into indie territory due to lack of domestic interest that the western “extreme” labels have been scraping the bottom of the barrel for silly no-budget OV releases that nobody in Japan has even heard of. There simply aren’t enough quality genre films coming out of Japan to fill the international demand. If you’re like Media Blasters, you could just finance your own made-to-order extreme projects, sell them in the US as something uniquely Japanese, and then sell them in Japan after the fact because hey, Americans liked it. It’s a bizarre system, to be sure, but it seems as though the game is about to be changed.

Screen Daily is reporting that Japanese film company Nikkatsu is starting up a new extreme gore label called Sushi Typhoon. And with a name that ridiculous, you know their releases will be primarily geared toward the west. On a positive note, it will give the filmmakers who are exceedingly good at that stuff at least one major outlet of production and distribution that simply hasn’t existed over the past few years as they struggled to create and promote everything themselves.

Producer Yoshinori Chiba, who’s worked on several of those aforementioned Media Blasters-financed projects, will be overseeing the label. First up will be an action film called “Alien vs. Ninja” by Yuji Shimomura (Death Trance) which will be released on DVD in North America at the same time it hits Japanese theaters. Future projects are promised by heavy hitters like Nishimura, Iguchi, Takashi Miike, and Shion Sono. Here’s hoping the new label also gives opportunities to some lesser known directors who haven’t had the backing to accomplish what they’re capable of yet, much in the way Nikkatsu Roman Porno did in the 70s. If that does end up being case, this could turn out to be a very good thing. If not, well, at least the gorehounds will be happy for a while.

From indieWIRE comes the news that indie film distributor New Yorker Films is no more, apparently the victim of bad business practices by their parent company. New Yorker Films has been exposing the masses to little-known films and filmmakers from all over the world since 1965, with a fair share hailing from Japan. They’re largely responsible for names like Shohei Imamura and Hirokazu Kore-eda getting much-deserved exposure in the west, spurring bigger distributors on to release some stuff they probably never would have known existed otherwise.

There’s been no word on what will happen to their current library of releases, but if I were you I’d bump these titles to the top of your Netflix queue tout de suite:

Taboo (Gohatto)
The Eel (Unagi)
Maborosi (Maboroshi no Hikari)
After Life (Wonderful Life)

Their older Japanese licenses expired a long time ago and either fell out of distribution or got picked up by bigger companies. Hopefully these all fall into the latter category when the time comes.

So as many of you have probably heard, Navarre’s Asian/genre DVD label, BCI Eclipse,  due to less than stellar sales numbers. Now, normally I stay away from business stories because I don’t particularly care about box office statistics, DVD sales, and bottom line issues other than exposing more people to cool movies, but I think this move is relatively simple to explain:

I’m sure it won’t be the last domino to fall in the US DVD market, but please don’t make the mistake of thinking there’s no hope for all the exciting releases BCI Eclipse has been coming out with based on a last-ditch panic move by a failing company in the midst of an international economic meltdown. It may take a few years, but we all know the pendulum swings both ways.

No word yet on what will happen with the titles that have already been released by the label, but you may want to hurry up and buy the ones you want now, just in case they go OOP in the near future.

The Shonen Merikensack distributor Toei has come up with a bizarre-yet-innovative way to promote their upcoming punk rock comedy while generating good will by saving Japanese motorists gas money. Gas prices have reached 180 yen per liter recently; the highest price in history. Toei is offering a special sticker people can put on their cars so that when they fill up at “Usami” gas stations they can get a discount of 5 yen per liter. There will be 900 stickers total distributed evenly to 9 stores nationwide. If my math is right that amounts to about 18 cents per gallon. Not too shabby. Check out this image (dead link removed - http://www.meriken-movie.jp/news_img/news_03.gif) for a cutesy illustrated representation of the process.