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Trailer of the Week: Horrors of Malformed Men (1969)

Director: Teruo Ishii

So...wait a second...trailer of the week? What happened to the trailers of the week for the last two months? Well, truth be known, I started graduate school at the beginning of August and wasn't able to do...well, anything...for about a month and a half because of a giant writing assignment. Now that I'm finished (with the assignment, I still have another year, minimum, of school), I'm better able to ration out the free time in my schedule.

Anyway, enough about me and more about Teruo Ishii's "Horror of Malformed Men". Given Ishii is at the helm and the story is based on Japanese horror author Edogawa Rampo, you know this is going to be a trip. Long banned in its native land for its unintentional discriminatory overtones to Japan's burakumin minority, it's been made available on DVD in the West by Panik House/Synapse Films. God bless 'em.

P.S. You might want to note that part of the soundtrack used in this trailer and movie was also used in one of Ishii's other films, Yakuza's Law Lynch!

Trailer of the Week: Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (1974)

Director: Yukio Noda



Widely recognized as one of the wildest but also one of the last in the cycle of "pinky violence" films, Zero Woman is a gorey, downbeat, yet somehow satisfying flick. Don't make the mistake of seeing the Zero Woman rehashes that came out in the mid to late '90s though, they are tepid at best.

Soundtrack: The Best of Lone Wolf and Cub

Everyone likes pleasant surprises. When I was first tipped off about this soundtrack collection, I was expecting the worst. I'm sure a lot of you have ordered what looked like really interesting soundtrack collections and ended up with an obviously burned labelled with a Sharpie CD put in a slimline case with a scanned cover. Upon putting said CD in player, there is usually a lot of hiss and in-film dialog and/or sound effects betraying the fact that the recording was taken directly from the DVD or, worse, a umpteenth generation videotape. Yup, that's the unfortunate world of ordering obscure film soundtracks online.

This is not the case, though, with The Best of Lone Wolf and Cub. Not only do we have here an officially licensed product, professionally produced package with synopses of the individual films in the series, a few film stills, and liner notes from Randall D. Larson of Cinescape. The consistently good sound quality of the whopping 25 tracks is just the icing on the cake. The only nitpicky negative in the package is the cheap Chinese restaurant font that was used in most of the insert. Still that's just a font and it's a hell of a lot better than Sharpie scratchings any day.

For those unfamiliar with the venerable Lone Cub and Wolf, it's a six film series based on a manga about a ronin who, disgraced from his position as the shogun's executioner, walks the earth with his infant son as a hired assassin. One of the things that distinguishes the series from other samurai/jidaigeki was its unique blend of old world settings and situations mixed with a '70s filmic over the top violence and gore, and occasional sex. Likewise, the music reflected the same sensibilities. While there is a lot of traditional Japanese instrumentation (shakuhachi, koto, etc) in the tracks, there are also several touches of music popular during the era: funk, acid rock, Henry Mancini-esque soundtrack jazz, etc. The "Main Title" fuzz guitar riff, which most of the films share in variations, is one that could have been taken from the Iron Butterfly or Blue Cheer catalogs. This mix of instrumentation, though, makes for some great opportunities for texture, which this release has loads of.

Definitely a worthy purchase for all Lone Wolf fans and soundtrack fans in general.

Available here from La La Land Records.

Bonus Clip: Oedo Sousamou (1970)

My apologies for missing last week's round of posts. I just got a new laptop and it took the whole week trying to tweak everything to my liking and I'm still only about 80% there. Anyway, while I was testing things out, I ran into this title sequence clip from the '70 TV show Oedo Sousamou, yet another period show with Meiko Kaji. Bet you didn't think she was on the tube that much back then, eh? Enjoy!

Bonus Clip: Sengoku Rock: Wandering Claw (1973)

I was poking around YouTube for this week's Trailer of the Week and, by chance, noticed that someone uploaded a clip from Sengoku Rock: Wandering Claw (Sengoku Rock: Hagure Kiba). I had mistakenly thought this was from the Yasuharu Hasebe pinkie/jidaigeki film Sengoku Rock: Female Warriors but got straightened out by user noranekoCO plus a little Google search turned up a blog entry about the show (here).

Thanks to user lopls over at YouTube for uploading this otherwise obscure show. Now let's all hope that Panik House or Tokyo Shock do us the favor of reissuing it.

Also, in case anyone is taking tabs on these things, this is the show that the limited edition Meiko Kaji figure was taken from - notice the belt buckle:

Trailer of the Week: Burst City (1982)

Director: Sogo Ishii

....aaaand speaking of sci-fi (well, the cyberpunk kind anyway), we have this week's trailer for Burst City, Sogo Ishii's Mad Max meets Decline of Western Civilization classic and one of just a couple of his films on DVD outside of Japan (one of the others being the equally crazy Electric Dragon 80.000 V) . Burst City was one of Ishii's earlier films and you can see the sort of influence that he's had on the modern Japanese film scene (a la Tsukamoto, Miike, et al) just by checking out this trailer.