November (and slightly late) film round-up

With a new month and a new announcement (or two) it seemed a good time for a bit of a film release round-up. Some of it a trifle late, but better that than never.

So let's start with Radiance's latest announcement, a 4K restoration of Kinji Fukasaku's Hokuriku Proxy War. 2024 was a fine year for Fuksasku releases so a February 2025 entry seeing continuity into the new year, well, let's hope it's the first of many.

The BFI have several months ago released the blu-ray of the restored version of Akira Kurosawa's classic Ikiru and recently given us another restoration of his mighty Seven Samurai, which is currently in cinemas with the blu-ray middle of this month.

On the horror front, Eureka announced a 4K release of the other Kurosawa, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure for late January.

Now venturing into more salacious territory 88 Films have started to sneak in some 1970s Nikkatsu Roman Porno films with Woods are Wet (late November) Watcher in the Attic (which somehow I suspect won't folow Edogawa Rampo's story) and Apartment Wife: Affair In The Afternoon (both December). Add to this a release of Teruo Ishii's Love and Crime in January - and coming from the director of Orgies of Edo and the truly great Horrors of Malformed Men, I think we all know what to expect.

Arrow are firing Rampo Noir at us in January, with four different stories told by four unique directors, based on the stories of Edogawa Rampo.

Third Window have delayed their latest announcement but we know there are more Director's Company releases upcoming, and I think it would come as no surprise if Mermaid Legend and Bumpkin Soup (more rebellious pink!) are two of them - the latter of which when I saw it at the BFI opened proudly with the Third Window logo.

Want to know more, well, luckily for you I've shamelessly stolen synopses from all the respective distributors.

Hokuriku Proxy War

Loose-cannon gangster Kawada rebels when his two-timing boss forms an alliance with a major crime syndicate. The syndicate’s main rivals see Kawada as their perfect proxy, but his furious temper quickly rubs them the wrong way, leaving Kawada to face overwhelming forces. Fukasaku's final yakuza film features some of the strongest women’s roles in his career, plus a raucous central performance from Hiroki Matsukata (Cops vs Thugs) and support from the legendary Sonny Chiba.

Ikiru

Opening with a shot of an x-ray, showing the main character's stomach, Ikiru tells the tale of a dedicated, downtrodden civil servant who, diagnosed with terminal cancer, learns to change his dull, unfulfilled existence, and suddenly discovers a zest for life. Plunging first into self-pity, then a bout of hedonistic pleasure-seeking on the frenetic streets of post-war Tokyo, Watanabe – the film's hero – finds himself driven to give some meaning to his life, finally finding satisfaction through building a children's playground. Beautifully played by Takashi Shimura (who starred in 21 of Kurosawa's films), Ikiru is an intensely lyrical and moving film, and was one of Kurosawa's own favourites.

Seven Samurai (really do you need a synopsis? OK...)

When 16th-century farmers whose village is repeatedly attacked by merciless bandits ask an elderly, masterless samurai (Takashi Shimura) for help, offering nothing but food in return, he hesitantly agrees and assembles a band of warriors to defend and train the villagers. Boasting terrific performances (with Shimura and Toshiro Mifune – as a peasant masquerading as a samurai – particularly memorable), superb camerawork, and expertly mounted battle sequences, Seven Samurai is undoubtedly one of the greatest action movies ever made.

Cure

A series of murders have been committed by ordinary people who claim to have had no control over their actions, many of them having killed friends, co-workers or even their spouse. There are only two links between each crime: an X carved into the neck of each victim, and a mysterious stranger who seems to have had brief contact with the perpetrator a short period of time before each killing. But to follow these leads and end a seemingly inexplicable wave of terror, police detective Kenichi Takabe (Koji Yakusho, 13 Assassins) will need to put his own sanity on the line and endure a descent into hell.

Woods are Wet

Sachiko, an innocent young woman fleeing after being accused of the murder of her mistress, is thrust into an inferno of depravity, cruelty and perversion when she stumbles into a remote country inn run by a sadistic couple. Nikkatsu’s top director of its erotic Roman Porno line, Tatsumi Kumashiro, brings the Marquis de Sade’s Justine to life in the Taisho era of Japan in the 1920s in this dark and brutal exploration of the boundaries between pleasure and control.

Watcher in the Attic

A perverted loner roams the rafters of a boarding house in 1920s Tokyo in Watcher in the Attic, directed by one of the Nikkatsu‘s top Roman Porno filmmaking talents, Noboru Tanaka, peeping on the unusual sexual antics of its residents in this dreamlike tale of voyeurism, obsession and murder drawn from the “erotic grotesque” literature of Japan’s foremost master of mystery and the macabre, Edogawa Rampo.

Apartment Wife: Affair In The Afternoon

Japan’s oldest film studio Nikkatsu scandalised the nation when it launched its lavish Roman Porno brand of high-class sex films in 1971 with Apartment Wife: Affair in the Afternoon. Directed by Shogoro Nishimura, this sensuously shot classic of eroticism made a star out of the sensational Kazuko Shirakawa as the bored suburban housewife, Ritsuko, who embraces paid sex work in order to spice up her married life.

Love and Crime

Japan’s legendary “King of Cult” Teruo Ishii (Horrors of Malformed Men, Shogun’s Joy of Torture) delivers four dramatized tales of real life crimes of passion involving women across the ages in this grotesque anthology featuring the stories of the “Hotel Nihonkaku Murders”, the notorious “poison wife” and last woman in Japan to be executed by beheading, Oden Takahashi, the brutal serial killer Yoshio Kodaira and the story of Sada Abe, the infamous castratice featured in Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses.

Rampo Noir

In “Mars’s Canal”, by music video director and visual artist Suguru Takeuchi, a lone man encounters the other side of his psyche beyond the reflective surface of a circular pond set in a desolate landscape. Japanese New Wave auteur and longtime director of the Ultraman series Akio Jissoji (This Transient Life, Mandala) harnesses his distinctive stylistic sheen in his story of a mad mirror maker, “Mirror Hell”. “Caterpillar” sees the singular vision of cult director Hisayasu Sato (The Bedroom, Naked Blood) at its most grotesque, in his portrait of a wounded war veteran who returns from the frontline as little more than a bloody torso, helpless to defend himself against the increasingly perverted caprices of an embittered wife. Finally, a famous actor is subjected to the obsessive attentions of her limo driver in “Crawling Bugs”, the directorial debut of internationally acclaimed manga artist Atsushi Kaneko (Bambi and Her Pink Gun).
Produced by the same team behind Ichi the Killer and Uzumaki, and with a cast featuring some of Japan’s top stars, including Tadanobu Asano (Maboroshi, Silence) and Ryuhei Matsuda (Blue Spring, Gohatto), Rampo Noir is a stylistic tour-de-force that vividly evokes the “erotic grotesque” worlds created by Japan’s pioneering proponent of horror and mystery fiction.