"Actor: Hiroko Isayama"

• Woods are Wet | Blu Ray | (09/12/2024) from £14.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Female Convict Scorpion - Jailhouse 41 | DVD | (19/02/2007) from £22.98   |  Saving you £-6.99 (-43.70%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Shunya Ito's incredible Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 is amongst Japan's most famous ever cult films and the primary influence on Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. It remains one of the most sought after cult films in existence!. A truly visionary one of a kind experience Female Convict Scorpion is an astoundingly visceral art house-feminist-exploitation hybrid featuring gorgeous Japanese cult icon Meiko Kaji. Shunya Ito's movie unfolds in a state of perpetual delirium and is by turns shocking perverse and hilarious. Beautiful bold and outrageous entertainment this is one of the most essential exciting DVD releases of 2007...

• Dead Or Alive 2 | DVD | (24/02/2003) from £8.49   |  Saving you £6.50 (43.40%)   |  RRP £14.99

  An off-the-cuff Japanese gangster movie with an absurdist streak that shades into surrealism, Dead or Alive 2 isn't thrown by its brief to sequelise a film that ended not only with the deaths of its lead characters but the destruction of Japan. Takashi Miike--the prolific auteur whose best-known film is the atypically considered Audition--brings back his lead actors in different roles and spins off another strange shaggy dog tale. The film starts out with a Yakuza vs Triads gang war in the offing, then sidesteps into "'Beat"' Miike territory as a couple of hit-men who meet when they turn up for the same assassination turn out to be childhood friends and enjoy a nostalgic wallow as they return to the orphanage where they met, re-encounter other old pals and even stand in for some injured actors putting on a play for the children. White-suited and terminally ill Sawada (Riki Takeuchi) and bleached blond and Hawaiian-shirted Otamoko (Sho Aikawa) get back to gunplay, committing contract murders and funnelling the profits into third world charities, which earns them occasional angel-wings or transformations back into innocent children. In constant danger of collapse, the film keeps pulling surprises: txt msg-addicted killers, an animated diagram of bullet trajectories through an unfortunate dwarf's brain. The first film blew up the country because it couldn't think of an ending, and this also has a lot of trouble signing off, with protracted deaths and redemptions for the heroes. Miike alternates clumsiness and confusion with exciting and powerful cinema. --Kim Newman