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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In 2005 director Shinya Tsukamoto was given the opportunity to make a 25-minute short film for the compilation entitled “Digital Short Films by Three Filmmakers 2005” which would open the 2005 Jeonju Film Festival in South Korea. The result was the short version of Haze—a film that presents a vision of Hell which could be described as a compilation of individual nightmares played out within the confines of an oppressive concrete cavern. The film was extended to 49 minutes for a theatrical release called the “long version”.

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Director Shinobu Yaguchi is not one to shy away from winning formulas. In the 90s he had a run of tough-luck films in which a chain of events ranging anywhere from unlikely to downright ridiculous would occur, sending the protagonist on some sort of comical adventure. Yaguchi quickly established he cares much more about the dialogue and individual jokes than the framework of the storyline itself. As a result, his films are usually summarized in half-paragraph blurbs that don’t quite do justice to just how funny his simplistic approach can be. Swing Girls is the perfect example of this. It follows the same formula that has been done repeatedly within the past few years both in Yaguchi’s own 2002 film Waterboys and Katsuhide Motoki’s 2003 film Drugstore Girl - that formula being a group of people joining a club for all the wrong reasons and then actually finding themselves compelled to succeed for different reasons altogether. It’s not quite as cliché as his former obsession with people finding suitcases full of ill-gotten money, but it’s getting there. Nevertheless, Swing Girls is a worthwhile comedy featuring a cast full of up-and-coming Japanese actors with seemingly flawless comedic timing and charm to spare.

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The Blessing Bell may take fans of Sabu‘s other directorial work by surprise. It’s not completely unlike some of his other films thematically or stylistically but the pacing definitely is. This film is extremely slow and methodical. We get a preview of what we’re in for right from the start when we’re presented with 8 full minutes of Susumu Terajima walking. That isn’t a just an oddity presented specifically for the title sequence, it’s a glimpse of what’s to come for the rest of the movie. If you’re not a patient person you may want to skip this one or you may just end up shutting it off early. However, those that stick around for the duration will ultimately be rewarded with an occasionally-absurd, yet completely quaint story which delivers a simple message that really resonates.

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A Delicious Way to Kill is an absurd comedy/murder mystery which originally aired as a television special on BS Fuji in February of 2006. It was directed by Nylon 100°C troupe member Keralino Sandorovich. Sandorovich draws a lot of his creative inspiration from the collective works of Monty Python, and that brand of nonsense comedy often shines through in whatever he does. This movie is no exception.

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