Trailer for Hard Revenge, Milly and The Masked Girl, coming out 8/9/2008.

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When I wrote up this wiki article on Takanori Tsujimoto’s Hard Revenge, Milly last month it seemed odd that it had a run-time of only 44 minutes. Well, it all makes sense now, because it’s actually being packaged with Isao Kaneko’s The Masked Girl as part of the Neo Action double bill premiering at Q-AX on Saturday August 9, 2008. It’s pretty good timing, considering The Machine Girl will be going public in Japan on the previous Saturday and they might be able to piggyback on whatever new found interest in senseless violence that generates.

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Japanese distributor Pony Canyon will be releasing Norihiro Koizumi’s Gachi Boy on DVD with English subtitles on September 17, 2008. For those who haven’t heard of it, the story revolves around a genius college student in Hokkaido named Ryoichi Igarashi (Ryuta Sato) who joins professional wrestling school. During his training he carries around a little notebook in which he takes copious notes of every little thing he learns. Still, he seems to have problems remembering important details. When he completely forgets that his debut match at a local shopping mall is rigged he treats it like a real life or death challenge. Surprisingly, his enthusiasm gets the crowd on his side and he becomes a popular character with the fans. His little sister (Riisa Naka) witnesses the match and clues his fellow wrestlers in on the real reason he acted the way he did: he suffered a severe head injury the year before and now has a higher brain function disorder that renders him incapable of retaining new information for more than one day. That’s why he takes so many notes.

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According to director Ryuhei Kitamura, he first met Tak Sakaguchi after witnessing him beat some guy up in a street fight. Since Kitamura didn’t really know any real actors at the time, he offered Sakaguchi a role in Versus—the frenetically-paced action film that would launch both their careers as well as the career of his co-star, Hideo Sakaki. Given his humble beginnings, the idea that less than decade later Sakaguchi would be directing veteran actors like Akaji Maro and Shun Sugata in his own movie is frankly hard to believe. Even so, the final product of his directorial debut: Be a Man! Samurai School, ended up being both absurdly funny and oddly charming. 

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After being repeatedly foiled by overcompressed DVD5, incomprehensible subtitles, and general low quality a few too many times myself I decided to stop mentioning anything but R1 and Japanese R2 DVD releases on Nippon Cinema. But I have it on good authority that aside from one small error in the subtitles, the new region 3 release of Takashi Miike’s Crows Zero from Singapore is pretty good quality. It includes DTS audio, anamorphic widescreen, an interview with Miike + male cast at a press event (not fully subbed), and a trailer (not subbed either). The audio is all in Japanese but the main movie includes both English and Chinese subtitles. You can find it for sale at HKFlix.

It’s important to note that Media Blasters has owned the distribution rights for Crows Zero since early in 2007, so all you patient people out there may want to wait until they come out with their R1 release which will probably have more features and cost less. Unfortunately, there’s been no word yet on when that may be (hint: sooner would be better than later).

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