Details on Tak Sakaguchi’s next project as a director, ‘Samurai Zombie’
Posted by kevin at 9:54am on Thursday, June 26, 2008 EDT
Filed under: Comedy, Horror, Future releases
Thanks to Quiet Earth and The Gomorrahizer for the heads up on this one. Tak Sakaguchi‘s second directorial effort, Samurai Zombie (Yoroi) will premiere at this year’s upcoming Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival (PiFan). Here’s the official description from the festival’s website:
A family is kidnapped by a couple who have guns. Wandering lost, they get together in a place where there are zombies in samurai armor. Encountering zombies and police, reunited family struggle and get to confront a tragic secret. A fun action-horror on the low budget B-movie.
The word “Yoroi” means samurai armor so given that synopsis it makes sense. Not much more info is available on the project right now, but Sakaguchi did briefly talk about it in an interview last month. Apparently Ryuhei “Hollywood” Kitamura wrote the screenplay, produced, and did all the casting. Oh that diabolical puppet-master. As for cast info it’s pretty scattered right now; but so far we know about Issei Ishida, up-and-coming actor Arata Yamanaka, and cross-dressing television personality Yakkun Sakuraduka in his first starring role (as a man). As far as I know Sakaguchi does not have a role, since he had his hands full with directing.
Here’s a picture of Arata Yamanaka during filming, from his blog:
Yamanaka didn’t offer much info but did say it’s got a unique flair not seen in recent Japanese movies and is more of a comedy than a typical horror.
Sakiguchi says it’s basically just a fun splatter horror flick with limbs flying all over the place and we should all look forward to it. Oh we will Taku-san, we will.
Sidenote: In the same interview Sakiguchi reiterated the fact that Versus 2 probably isn’t happening any time soon, but since the story was about his and Hideo Sakaki’s characters facing off at different points through space-time we could actually consider Alive and Be a Man! Samurai School to be sequels themselves. Of course, he was doing some PR for the “Be a Man!” premium edition DVD at the time, so it may have just been salesman rhetoric.
Tags: arata yamanaka, issei ishida, ryuhei kitamura, tak sakaguchi, versus, yakkun sakuraduka
Comments
What was your opinion of Versus?
Posted by kevin at 7:27am EDT on Sunday, June 29, 2008
:) OK! Versus was also a movie with a wacky script and “bad” actors ! :) But much more fun that SAMURAI ZOMBIE. In my opinion VERSUS was some kind of fun project which turned out to be “good”. SAMURAI ZOMBIE feels like serious from the beginning but failed at the end…
One of the best ZOMBIE / SAMURAI flicks i saw was CHANBARA BEAUTY! This movie really rocks! It was a straight videogame to movie adaption. They used original sound and video effects from the video game… Computer generated blood and more… The movie works 100% as a video game adaption! From what ive heard some distributors started already a bidding war and im sure the movie is coming out soon… :)
Ps: Sorry for my bad english! Its not my mother language as you can see *laugh*
Posted by MegaJack at 9:37am EDT on Sunday, June 29, 2008
I’m jealous you’re getting to see all these movies so early! If you liked Versus and Chanbara Beauty that gives me a better impression of how bad “Samurai Zombie” must be, because it’s pretty much made for the same fans. It’s surprising though, because “Be a Man! Samurai School” was directed by Tak and it had pretty good production values.
Your English is better than mine and it is my mother language.
Posted by kevin at 11:15am EDT on Sunday, June 29, 2008
“As far as I know Sakaguchi does not have a role, since he had his hands full with directing”
MegaJack, you saw the DVD screener, can you confirm if Tak is in this (even briefly) or not?
Posted by Knifey at 3:35am EDT on Thursday, August 21, 2008
MegaJack,
Being a huge fan of cheesy asian splatterfests(my favorite ones being Tokyo Gore Police and The Machine Girl),I would like to purchase you the dvd screener of Samurai Zombie you own:you can contact me at the following adress:rochatagneau@laposte.net
Posted by Romain C at 4:03am EDT on Friday, September 5, 2008
Just saw a screener DVD of SAMURAI ZOMBIE and please beleive me: Not worth to mention! Some scenes are quite effective but the rest is more than an average Z Movie. Tak should concentrate on his stunt team instead of trying to be a director. Some kind of Versus rip-off with bad actors and script…
Posted by MegaJack at 6:21am EDT on Sunday, June 29, 2008