Aside from “Be-bop High School”, Hiroshi Takahashi’s “Crows” is probably the most well-known juvenile delinquent shonen (boys’) manga in Japan. Therefore, making a live-action film adaptation that could possibly live up to readers’ expectations while also appealing to a mass audience was no easy task. Thankfully Takashi Miike was up to the challenge. Also, casting a schoolgirl-scream-inducing pretty boy like Shun Oguri in the lead role surely didn’t hurt.

Crows Zero features an original story which takes place before the events of the 1990s manga. Major characters from the comic like Hiromi and Bando are present, but at this point they’re still first and second year students that generally stay along the periphery of the main plot.

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Couldn’t it just have been about a lacrosse team?

With the amount of hype Shaolin Girl got in Japan prior to its release, it either had to be a really good movie worth backing or a really bad movie that was too expensive to fail. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m inclined to go with the latter. Having been billed as a Japanese sequel to Stephen Chow’s massively successful “Shaolin Soccer”, it probably wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect this movie to be an action-packed sports comedy with soccer switched out for girls’ lacrosse. Unfortunately, however, the comedy is pretty sparse and the lacrosse elements are completely glossed over save a few clichéd lessons on teamwork and a sequence that runs through the closing credits. What’s the rest of the movie about? Well, that’s where things get a bit dicey.

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Masaaki Tezuka‘s live-action adaptation of “Rescue Wings” deviates from the original by centering around a female rookie pilot played by 16-year-old actress (only 15 at the time of filming) Yuko Takayama. After her mother is saved, Haruka Kawashima joins an elite air rescue team and decides she wants to become the first female pilot of a UH－60J (Japanese version of the Black Hawk) rescue helicopter.

She goes through harsh, rigorous training and must overcome her emotions for the serious job of saving lives. After several mistakes she’s bluntly told she’s not good enough to be a rescue pilot, but the conflict only makes her more determined. One day, an F-15J fighter plane goes missing from radar and Kawashima receives the distress call. On reserve fuel and the struggling against all odds, she must accomplish her mission at any cost. Slated for release in Japan on December 13, 2008.

Official website

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Still waiting on a legit trailer for Tak Sakaguchi’s Samurai Zombie, but for now we can watch 55 seconds of footage at the tail end of a recent press event for the film. You can find the clip embedded after the break. Thanks to 24fps (via Quiet Earth) for the heads up.

Plot: A family find themselves confronted by relentless, worm-infested zombies in samurai armor after an encounter with a strange couple with guns on a remote mountain trail.

This is the second film directed by Sakaguchi, the first being Be a Man! Samurai School which came out in the beginning of this year. Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus, Alive) wrote the screenplay and picked the cast headlined by cross-dressing comedian and TV personality Yakkun Sakuraduka.

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Director Keita Amemiya has a long history of making sci-fi flicks in which fun and excitement take priority over everything else, including the story or any sort of emotional depth. 1991’s Zeiram is no exception, and basically amounts to nothing more than a beautiful female bounty hunter with lots of fancy gadgets and armor whooping up on a gruesome monster within the confines of a computer-constructed alternate dimension. Throw in a couple of hapless power company employees for comic relief and you have the recipe for a movie that may not completely capture one’s imagination with its use of simplistic sci-fi conventions, but still qualifies as a guilty pleasure for those that are into this sort of thing.

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