Two young men survive ultra strict samurai training at Otokojuku school only to get involved in a war with rival school Kanto Gogakuren.

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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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Samurai warlord Daigo Kagemitsu makes a deal with demons and trades his first-born son for a victory on the battlefield. When his son Hyakkimaru is born 48 of his body parts are missing, having been distributed amongst the demons Daigo was indebted to. Although Hyakkimaru is nothing but a living husk his mother refuses to let him be killed, and instead sends him down the river in a basket. Eventually a kindly doctor discovers the baby and raises him as his own, building him a new body out of corpses and artificial artificial hardware. When Hyakkimaru gets older he decides to hunt down the body parts he’s missing and with the help of a thief named Dororo he meets on his journey he recaptures them one at a time and eventually grows strong enough to confront his father.

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When Fumio’s mother dies she is reunited with her brother and sent to St. Michael’s Academy, a prestigious catholic boarding school for only the most refined girls. She feels like she doesn’t fit in until she meets Kazune and Yuzuko - two girls that share her love of chicken ramen, chocolate snacks, and trashy literature. When young girls start getting kidnapped all throughout Asia, including some from St. Michael’s, the three girls suddenly find themselves bestowed with super-human abilities. It’s clear that some higher power expects them to set things right, all while feigning the civility necessary to fit in with their stuffy classmates.

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Dead End Run features three frenetically-paced short films by Sogo Ishii, each consisting of a chase scene ending at a dead end where two people are forced to confront each other in some way. The results vary from the dramatic to the surreal as Ishii explores the tenuous relationship between life and death / contentment and misery.

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