I, the Executioner / Requiem for a Massacre / Minagoroshi no reika (1968)

This is another movie from the bottom of my sixties stack that, since I was expecting a hitman movie, I almost overlooked. That would have been a terrible mistake. I, the Executioner is without doubt the bleakest, darkest movie I’ve ever come across from Japan, a nation that knew how to make bleak movies, and …

Red Peony Gambler: Gambler’s Obligation / Hibotan bakuto: Isshuku ippan (1968)

As the period yakuza genre began to wear down in the late sixties, film studios tried many attempts to expand or rescue the genre at the box office with odd-ball variations. The oddest, and most successful, was of course Zatoichi, a blind yakuza who just happened to also be a great swordsman. Somewhat less odd, …

Tattoo / Irezumi (1966)

Irezumi introduces one of the great man-eaters of film. Another fascinating picture by Masumura with Ayako Wakao, it can be seen as a horror story of a woman gradually becoming possessed by her urge for revenge, symbolized by the female spider tattooed across her back. Like so many young women we have seen in Japanese …

Okatsu the Fugitive / Okatsu kyojo tabi (1969)

The Okatsu trilogy is one of the stranger Japanese film series. Officially marketed as the Legend of the Poisonous Female, the movies have no continuity but for a theme of female revenge and the star Junko Miyazono. In the first, the woman even has a different name, Ohyaku, but the trailers for II and III …

Actor’s Revenge / Yukinojo henge (1963)

For Americans, one of the oddest traditions of Japanese theater is the onnagata, the fully adult male who plays women's roles in Kabuki. In An Actor's Revenge, we get one of our most detailed looks at the onnagata life, expressed through a flamboyantly over-the-top melodrama. As directed by Kon Ichikawa, it is also a shining …

Zero Focus / Zero no shoten (1961)

One week after her marriage, a young wife sees her new husband off on the train, supposedly to wrap up business at a branch office of his ad agency before moving permanently to Tokyo. He never returns and she sets out to find him. Before she's done, she uncovers a web of secrets and murder …

Scarlet Camellia / Goben no tsubaki (1965)

Sometimes you come across a movie that is far more interesting in concept than in practice, and Scarlet Camellia is a good example. It is a highly unusual movie because it is about a serial killer, a very rare occurrence in Japanese society or films, and even more unusually, the killer is a woman. But …