"Director: Miike Takashi"

• Visitor Q | DVD | (28/01/2013) from £8.60   |  Saving you £6.15 (89.91%)   |  RRP £12.99

  More outrageous and deranged fare from Japanese director Miike Takashi featuring everything from incest sodomy and necrophilia to a lactating mother who breastfeeds her husband and adult daughter. Failed reporter Kiyoshi Yamazaki (Kenichi Endo) visits a brothel to make a documentary about debauched youths and is surprised to encounter his estranged daughter who has become a prostitute. He then meets a stranger 'Q' and invites him back to his home to meet the rest of his staggeringly dysfunctional family. 'Q' embarks on a mission to teach each family member a lesson they'll never forget.

• Dead Or Alive | DVD | (24/06/2002) from £5.49   |  Saving you £9.50 (63.40%)   |  RRP £14.99

  The director of Dead or Alive, Takashi Miike, made his name on the international scene with Audition, a chilling psychological thriller that builds from a quiet start towards a prolonged torture sequence almost too unbearable to watch. But such deliberate pacing isn't typical of Miike, whose movies often assault the viewer with an onslaught of slam-bang action that makes John Woo look like Eric Rohmer. Dead or Alive, his most successful cops-vs-yakuza thriller to date, kicks off with six non-stop minutes of machine gun-paced violence, sex and slaughter, all set to a pounding heavy-metal beat. Thereafter things calm down a little, though not much. Given Miike's penchant for murky, livid-toned visuals and skewed camera angles, it's not always too easy to work out exactly who's doing what to whom, but the general outline's clear enough. The Tokyo underworld is being torn apart by a turf war between the yakuza gangs and the invading Chinese triads. Ambitious yakuza member Ryuichi isn't above playing both sides off against each other in his bid for power, while police detective Jojima, himself none too scrupulous in his methods, is out to destroy the gangs. Into this conventional plot framework Miike piles enough warped characters and bizarre, twisted happenings to fuel half-a-dozen Tarantino movies, while cheerfully borrowing--and inflating--key moments from such hard-boiled gangster-noirs as The Big Heat and Kiss Me Deadly. One character deep-fries his own hand, a stripper is drowned in a paddling-pool filled with her own excrement, and the literally apocalyptic finale, the showdown to end all showdowns, will leave you gasping. The appallingly prolific Miike, who regularly makes about five movies a year, has since directed two sequels--the first only three months after the original.--Philip Kemp

• Ichi the Killer - 3 Disc Special Collectors Box | DVD | (05/07/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  A bumper box set featuring the live action feature film and the anime spin-off adventure. Ichi The Killer Yakuza boss Anjo disappears with 100 million yen. His loyal gang members led by Kakihara start a search but their aggressive methods worry the other yakuza gangs. Kakihara's most scary counterpart is the mysterious Ichi a psychopathic killer with a dark childhood secret... Ichi The Killer (Anime): Bullied at school by day and psychologically tormented by th

• 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

• Over your Dead Body | DVD | (22/02/2016) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Stage star Miyuki Goto plays the lead in a new play based on the ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan. She pulls some strings to get her lover Kosuke cast in the play, even though he's an unknown actor. Off stage the cast's possessive love and obsessions exist as reality. Trapped between the play and reality, the cast's feelings for each other cross the blurred line between reality and fantasy.

• Asian Horror Triple Pack | DVD | (26/10/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Three classics to remind you why the new wave of Asian horror has been ripped off by Hollywood so often! A single man looking for a good time finds terror instead in the notorious Audition directed by cult auteur Takashi Miike (Ichi The Killer Visitor Q). T he man who kicked off the J-horror wave with Ring Hideo Nakata increases the tension realism and unease in the urban nightmare Dark Water since remade by Hollywood. Finally Pan-asian auteurs The Pang Bros. bring their famed editing skills to bear on the horror genre in the tense terrifying The Eye.