Youth of the Beast

What a treat 2 awesome yakuza flicks in a month! Youth of the Beast is easily the coolest most coherent gangster film I have ever seen come from Japan. Violence and jazz splash across the screen with style years ahead of its time. I want to put a real emphesis on how well the story flowed. Seijun Suzuki's later and more popular Tokyo Drifter was a bit too sporadic, while Takashi Miike's yakuza movies with a few exceptions tend to be strongly influenced by 80's and 90's American action movies thus ending up a bit lite on story. Youth of the Beast on the other hand shares elements of more traditional story telling bristling with all the turbulent energy of the 1960s. There is such an awesome sense of anarchy in Seijun Suzuki's movies that very few Japanese directors have managed to emulate.
Fantastic entertainment
9/10

Survival of the Dead

Most zombie movies are total garbage, as a zombie movie fan I have become accustomed to seeing box covers with things like "ZOMGBBQ ITS LIKE DAWN OF THE DEAD BUT SOOO MUCH BETTER" on them only to find out its worse than a lifetime original. No I do not want to watch druids fighting zombies, no you cant kill a zombie with a nun chuck, and no Survival of the dead, zombies do not ride horses nor can the be killed with a hot dog skewer. For every good thing Survival does it turns around and does something terrible. In the first 10 minutes we are treated to a great scene where people shoot their infected family members then we get gag like head shots, there is an awesome scene with a guy swimming across a shallow lake with zombies on the bottom only to have the tough male bad ass character light a zombie on fire, light his cigarette on the burning corpse then kung fu kicks that said zombie off the side of a boat. Why? No idea and the movie is full of moments like this. Survival never tries to hide the fact that its a western, at no point is it ever subtle but that's OK, it gives the film an energy that Diary of the Dead severely lacked. The acting is that of a typical Romero film, sparks of genius and incompetence but fairly steady when no one is zinging the undead with one liners. Now what really matters in a zombie movie is the gore but I'm afraid to say the man that pioneered shock is nowhere to be found here. There are a couple good face munches and a spinal cord here and there but the zombies feel awkward and non threatening. I am not a fan of this thinking zombie plot he has going on, it worked in Day and has progressively become worse with each film. I will say it again, ZOMBIES DO NOT RIDE HORSES, ZOMBIES DO NOT REMEMBER ANYTHING OTHER THAN WHERE YOU LIVE SO THEY CAN EAT YOU AND YOUR FAMILY. Where the hell is my sequel to the remake of Dawn of the Dead?
6.5/10

Dead or Alive

There has been little time for movies lately, Tatsunoko vs Capcom and Megaman 10 have eaten my soul. I made one last run to the Hollywood video and found two Takashi Miike films sitting next to each other in the back as if hidden away waiting just for me. Dead or Alive is far from Miike's best work, its 99 minutes and few things are worth mentioning except the last 5 minutes but holy crap, what a last 5 minutes. This is more than a wtf moment its a carefully constructed scene where Miike continues to top himself slowly pulling the viewer in with one intense act of violence after another until quite literally they blow up the world. Note that until this point there has been a fair amount of shooting, stabbing and punching but nothing too far removed from reality, which is what makes the ending so freaking fantastic. This is for Miike fans only.
7.9/10