Serdar | Genji Press

Casshern is one of a very small category of movies I call “experimental epics,” where a groundbreaking look-and-feel is combined with an engaging story to produce something totally new: part science fiction, part retro-futurism, part mystic fantasy and part family epic. It could have been a mere exercise in effects technology, but it has a fearless passion to it, a heedless excess that makes it transcend its pulp-fantasy roots and its occasional heavy-handedness. The real source of the film’s inspiration is the mid-Seventies anime Robot Hunter Casshan, but the film bares only the vaguest possible resemblance to the original story. A slavishly faithful remake would scarcely have been worth bothering with. Instead, the movie takes some of the core conceits, surrounds them with an all-new setting and and allows them to take on an unexpected gravity.

Casshern is set in what could be called a “retro-fascist” world, one where Asia and Russia have been fighting the rest of the world in a war that has dragged on for decades. Massive steel effigies of various dictators loom over giant factories that belch out filth and fire, and all the signage is in both Cyrillic and kanji. Airships ferry soldiers to and from the battlefields, where a few stalwart holdouts (branded as “terrorists,” of course) continue to make trouble. The look and feel of the movie are absolutely dazzling, even if (and sometimes because) they seem not quite real, but fanciful and exaggerated. Blade Runner showed us what the future might actually look like, but Casshern is entirely imagined (which is no flaw, simply a difference of intention).

The third of the Alien films was a murdered movie — abandoned by its director, David Fincher, cut to shreds by its studio and savaged by both critics and audiences — but it was, sadly, never that good to begin with. For years people had speculated about a director’s cut, but Fincher went on record to say that he would never bother; the less he had to do with Alien³, the better. When Fox reissued the other Alien movies in a fantastic series of 2-disc reissues, they decided to produce a special edition for Alien³ as well. Without Fincher, however, they had to rely on using the film’s original answer print, a two-plus-hour version with many additional and extended scenes that represented the state of the film before the tampering began.

I saw the original Alien³ many moons ago, and I was in agreement with its detractors: it was a magnificent-looking movie that completely failed to enlist my interest. The extended version supplies us with far more interesting characters than the first one, gives them more to deal with, and looks terrific, too — but the biggest problems with Alien³ were and still are its weak story. If the first movie was a haunted house in space and the second movie was a war movie in space, the third movie is — what? A monastery in space? A prison in space? Not that the exact label would matter much, but it’s one way of showing how patched-together and haphazard it all is.

Shin Gendai Ryoukiden is a despicable bag of garbage with no reason to exist save to cater to the lowest impulses of its audience. It claims to be (at least in part) a fictionalization of several stories of the “true-crime” variety, but I wasn’t fooled. No one read True Detective magazine because they wanted to get a better idea of how law enforcement really worked, and they’re not going to read this to have any light shed on the various criminal acts detailed within. Its sole purpose is to show sexualized sadism, gore, torture, and murder, with the disclaimer that it was “based on true events” as spice.

What, indeed, are the limits for this sort of thing? I wasn’t offended by the gory violence in Dario Argento’s movies, nor the sadism in Salo, nor even the over-the-top splatter of Riki-oh. Part of it is because, I suspect, none of those movies dealt with something that allegedly happened; they were fiction. I don’t find porn offensive, either, because it usually deals with good times between consenting adults (and this book most decidedly does not). Yes, I was offended by Ichi the Killer, because it contained things I could barely stomach in any context — the same mixture of sadism and sexuality that Shin Gendai Ryoukiden seems to wallow in under the pretext of being “factual.”

I am all too aware that there are people — mostly teenagers, from what I can tell — who get off on this sort of stuff, who ogle it not because they themselves have fantasies to slake about torture and murder, but because it represents something forbidden. Just being able to see something that’s specifically not for you is in itself titillating. I suspect that there may be a few of them who will read this and hit up their buddies to find a copy of this book, and I doubt I could stop them by not writing about it. Maybe I sound passé just taking the time to tell people how I feel it is debased and degenerate, but believe me, I have my reasons.

Shin Gendai Ryoukiden translates to something like Modern-Day True-to-Life Stories of the Bizarre. At least half of the book is taken up with a retelling, in lurid comic-book form, of a horrific incident that did indeed take place in Japan in 1989. If it were wholly fictional, disclaimers aside, I might not have been so offended, but they went through the trouble of invoking the specter of the event themselves. The second half deals with a couple of mostly unverifiable true-crime tidbits done in equally poor taste, and the last few chapters are entirely fictional but no less repugnant for their inclusion here.

“Without demons,” the sorcerer Abe-no-Seimei says at one point in Onmyōji II, “human life would be pretty dull, wouldn’t it?” That’s easy for him to say — he’s the one who can summon, banish, invoke, curse, bless and enchant just about anything in the land. It’s his friend, the churlish Hiromasa, who almost always gets the worst of it when goblins and spirits start running amuck in the capitol. (Given how easily he continues to be spooked, I’m amazed Hiromasa hasn’t opted for a nice, quiet clerical job somewhere out in the country by now.)

Onmyōji II is of course a sequel to the original Onmyōji, which was a visually lavish but ultimately fairly silly fantasy. II is no less lavish and only slightly less silly, but perhaps this time I was primed for that. I walked in expecting nothing more than a goofy good time, and got it. But the mystique inherent in the concept as it is presented here is evaporating fast, and by the time Onmyōji III rolls around I may not elect to bother. You can only ride the same merry-go-round so many times before you realize the horses never change.

Ryuhei (Versus, Azumi) Kitamura’s Alive begins with a premise so intriguing and unexpected that I’m loathe to talk about it openly in a review. It is one of the most well-thought-out and -executed SF movies I’ve seen that doesn’t depend on a giant budget or massive effects scenes to make its points — in fact, the effects and fights are almost an afterthought.

In that sense, it reminded me of Vincenzo Natali’s equally compact and effective movies Cube and (to a degree) Cypher, both of which also grabbed me from the opening frames and never looked back. If that description intrigues you and you’d simply like to be surprised, go see the film and come back here when you’re done. Otherwise, read on; I still plan on preserving the film’s numerous secrets.

Alive begins with Tenshu (Hideo Sakaki) locked in a gloomy maximum-security prison. His crime: murdering the six thugs who raped his girlfriend, and then murdering her. Guards escort Tenshu out and strap him into the electric chair. When they throw the switch, he realizes after a second the current isn’t nearly enough to kill him.