Not Coming to a Theater Near You
You know him?”
“Not socially. His name’s Jaws, he kills people.
People often say that exploitation films are “an acquired taste.” This might be true of your garden variety Radley Metzger or Jess Franco film, but the films of Andy Milligan are no acquired taste. Watching Milligan films is like having an addiction to eating sticks of butter: it’s disgusting, it’s depressing, and it might just kill you, but worst of all it’s absolutely pathetic. Nothing makes you feel more worthless than spending eighty or so minutes of your existence watching a bunch of low-lifes caper around in stapled-together felt and organza costumes while screeching incomprehensible insults and epithets at each other. That’s why, of all the fine work released on little silver platters this year, I am nominating Something Weird Video’s release of Andy Milligan’s chef d’oeuvre, Seeds of Sin, as one of the greatest. This vile little exercise in sadism comes packaged with another piece of Milligan’s cinematic snot, The Ghastly Ones, and a whole swarm of extras guaranteed to make you vomit in your mouth: trailers for both films—the one for Seeds of Sin including scenes not appearing in the finished film, trailers for other Milligan atrocities, an extensive gallery of poster and ad art, two reels of Milligan’s newly-discovered original workprint for Seeds containing several scenes deleted from the grueling final cut, and (the item worth the purchase price alone) a commentary on The Ghastly Ones by long-suffering Milligan collaborator Haal Borske. From minute one of the commentary, Borske lets loose with a scorching verbal assault on Milligan’s memory, telling you exactly how big a piece of shit he believed the film to be (immense), how many times he let Milligan set him on fire for a scene (twice), and how much he adored Milligan (like a brother). It takes a lot of love to rip a dead man to shreds that thoroughly, and Borske does not hold back. If it is not made abundantly clear by the end of the commentary that Milligan was a genius, and asshole, a god, and a tyrant, you haven’t been listening.
The Ghastly Ones / Seeds of Sin
Something Weird Video
Can you believe that a movie exists in which Rex Reed (better known these days for shoplifting Carmen McRae CDs than for being a film critic) wakes up from surgery (performed by John Carradine) and says, “Where are my tits? ” Can you believe that a movie exists in which Raquel Welch sodomizes a cowboy with a strap-on dildo? Can you believe a movie exists in which Mae West (at nearly eighty years of age) puts the moves on Tom Selleck? Can you believe a major studio made and released this film and then put it out on a special edition DVD with two versions of the film, two commentaries, and a documentary? Well, it’s all true. Some people will tell you that this movie is not worth your time and that it is most certainly not worth paying $15 for. Those people are chumps and you should not listen to them. Have I ever steered you wrong? Would I recommend a film to you that was anything less than a masterpiece? That’s right. Operators are standing by to take your order.
Myra Breckenridge
Fox
Your generation knows the late Kinji Fukasaku best as the director of Battle Royale. Your parents’ generation knows him best (if at all) as the director of the Japanese portions of Tora! Tora! Tora! (he took over after Akira Kurosawa was fired). Between those films, however, Fukasaku directed a stream of unrelievedly violent yakuza films that reinvented the genre by decimating it and then rebuilding it. In 2004, Home Vision Entertainment—a kind of "little brother" label to The Criterion Collection—began releasing some of Fukasaku’s best work on DVD. The first releases, Blackmail is My Life from 1968 and If You Were Young: Rage from 1970, are films that exhibit abundant visual creativity and tremendous energy but do not quite transcend their pulpy origins. The next two releases, however, 1972’s Street Mobster and 1976’s Graveyard of Honor showcase Fukasaku at his peak. Both films, like the earlier releases, feature extraordinary filmmaking skill and inventiveness: the camera is often handheld and virtually thrown into the non-stop action; high-speed film stocks, shock zooms, still photographs, ’scope framing, and tight staging all add to the frenetic pace of the films that move along so quickly that they often must stop in a freeze-frame as on-screen text or voice-over narration identify characters, explain their relationship to one another, and catch the audience up on the action. Home Vision’s next release, The Yakuza Papers is the lynchpin of Fukasaku’s career and of Home Vision’s campaign to establish him posthumously as a formidable world director.
The Yakuza Papers, alternatively known as Battles Without Honor and Humanity, is a five-film series (released in a boxed set of five discs with an additional disc of extras) that Fukasaku worked on without halt for nearly three years. The series, a fantasia on yakuza life in Hiroshima from 1945 to 1970, has been compared to the Godfather series, but the only similarities to my eyes are a focus on gangsters and an epic story arc. While Coppola’s trilogy is so stately as to mimic the saga of a royal family, Fukasaku’s blockbuster is more akin in tone to the early-1970s films of Don Siegel, Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah, and perhaps even William Friedkin—directors who used violence in their films as a commentary on the capacity of and predilection for human beings to use violence as a solution to all problems. The five films in the series (which form not so much an original with four chronological sequels as they do five interlocking, interlaced but separate films that could also be considered one big film) are ultra-violent and hyperkinetic, consisting fundamentally of savage beat-downs, sword slashings, and shooting sprees tautly connected by a web of overlapping narrative ligatures. They also feature operatic performances by some of the most ass-kicking actors ever to work in Asian cinema including Bunta Sugawara, Jo Shishido (Branded to Kill), and Sonny Chiba.
Though I have compared Fukasaku’s films to the work of other filmmakers as a way of providing guideposts for those unfamiliar with him, it is somewhat unfair of me to do so. I have never experienced works so visceral, so shocking in their violence (and I consider myself fairly unshockable), so unexpectedly humorous, so grimly pessimistic yet at the same time so full of vigorous power and force, and so eminently watchable. In a year of great releases and incredible rediscoveries, the 1970s work of Kinji Fukasaku is the one for me that has reminded me how tremendously gratifying the movies can be.
The Yakuza Papers - Battles Without Honor & Humanity
Home Vision Entertainment
