The creators of the upcoming Stephen Chow-produced film Shaolin Girl are having a hard time convincing Japanese bloggers it’s about Shaolin Kung-Fu at all. While some people have been mistaking the martial arts used in the film and its Hong Kong predecessor “Shaolin Soccer” for Shorinji Kempo - a Japanese martial art inspired by Shaolin Kung-Fu, others are convinced it’s about Kobayashi Shorin-ryu, an Okinawan style of karate. Apparently the kanji for “Shaolin” (少林) is so close to the kanji for “Kobayashi” (小林) that many Japanese blogs and online media outlets have been reporting on the two films under the titles “Kobayashi Soccer” and “Kobayashi Girl”.

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Director Issei Oda has spent the better part of his career coming up with bizarre special effects on a shoestring budget for films such as Uzumaki and Long Dream. So when the decision was made to film a movie adaptation of Izumi Kawahara’s manga “Warau Mikaeru”, he was a logical choice to be in charge. St. Michael’s Academy is a pretty whimsical place where 100% reality is never an option. Thus, Arch Angels is appropriately chock full of CGI and various camera tricks to bring that unique fantasy world to life. The most obvious pitfall in a project like this with an inexperienced director is that the actors might get upstaged by the attention-grabbing scenery. The solution? Hire a cast of actors with attention-grabbing personalities. Juri Ueno was the perfect choice to play Fumio, having an eclectic enough personality to be believable as a straight-A-student, star athlete, and former newspaper delivery girl. Like Swing Girls, Arch Angels has a large cast of characters and you really need someone to be the undisputed center of attention for it to work. Ueno is once again up to the task.

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For being a prequel to such a popular movie like Ichi the Killer it’s kind of surprising how far 1-Ichi flew under the radar. It could be the lack of Takashi Miike‘s involvement in the project, the inconspicuous DVD cover art (I thought it was an anime for the first few months after its release), or the fact that the title consists of words that are so commonly found next to one another that any kind of web search comes up with hundreds of pages of completely unrelated results. Regardless of the reason, the end result is that nobody’s really missing out on much. 1-Ichi was an extremely low-budget movie filmed on a tight schedule and in the end it really offers no new insight into Ichi’s origin. Nevertheless, what it lacks in overall quality it makes up for in campy violence and a specific brand of completely inappropriate black humor only Sakichi Sato is capable of injecting into a script.

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I’m not much of a fan of visual kei or J-pop aside from a mild obsession with downloading torrents of Japanese variety shows so the prospect of watching a movie written by and starring Gackt wasn’t very appealing to me. Knowing that Moon Child was somehow vampire-related I went into it completely expecting this film to be a vehicle for Gackt and Hyde to show off their ultra-mopey outward personas while occasionally pausing in those I-want-to-die poses that drive the fangirls crazy. I’ll admit I was mostly wrong in that assumption, but not quite wrong enough to warrant a glowingly positive review.

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Finally after a few years of being relegated to supporting roles and small cameos in his friends’ films the master of disinterested destruction, Tak Sakaguchi, is back in a starring role in Death Trance. Not only that, but since his long-time friend and Versus action director Yuji Shimomura was the director of the project Sakaguchi was put in charge of the action direction himself. This was no small task given the scale of the battles and it’s something he took very seriously. He had very clear ideas of what he wanted and injected his own street-fighting style into large-scale “1 vs. everyone else” battles, going so far as to invent his own discreet padded gloves so that he could punch with full force and not cause any real damage to other actors in those scenes. For all of those fanboys out there who have been waiting with bated breath for a sequel to Versus, Death Trance is not only a good alternative, but even exceeds Versus in many ways.

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