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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Even though The Machine Girl will be released on DVD here in the US tomorrow, it won’t be released in Japan until August 2nd. So in preparation for that date Spotted Productions has posted a new trailer on YouTube. It seems a little less stylized than the original and the new music has a 70s vibe. Here it is, followed by the old one after the break:

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It’s no secret that the Asian extreme cinema wave of the late 90s/early 00s has slowed down quite a bit in recent years. Directors like Takashii Miike and Ryuhei Kitamura have been working on very different projects than the ones they were churning out back then and as a whole the trend seems to be more toward comedy and drama. The recent collapse of Tartan USA can probably be attributed to this, having made its bones in the Asian horror heyday. So one has to wonder how a label geared around these movies can possibly stay afloat when there’s only a tiny pool of appropriate new titles coming out each year and plenty of bigger companies overbidding for distribution rights. The answer, at least for Tokyo Shock/Media Blasters, is to fund some of your own. I have to admit I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the process, but I did enjoy Yuji Shimomura’s Death Trance in a “mindless fun” sort of way. 2008 brings us two of these US-funded corkers - Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police which comes out later this year, and Noboru Iguchi’s The Machine Girl which I’m reviewing here.

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When a warlord sends his warriors to a convent to abduct seven young women for his own sexual interests, they suddenly become infused with ninja magic to fight their attackers. For an alternate trailer, see this link.

watch »

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When a warlord sends his warriors to a convent to abduct seven young women for his own sexual interests, they suddenly become infused with ninja magic to fight their attackers. For an alternate trailer, see this link.

watch »

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