News

Well Go USA Entertainment has acquired North American rights to Bernard Rose’s period action film Samurai Marathon following its North American premiere as the opening title of the recent New York Asian Film Festival.

Well Go is planning to release the film in 2020. The deal was negotiated by Doris Pfardrescher on behalf of Well Go USA and HanWay Films on behalf of the filmmakers.

Rose — whose wildly diverse career has spanned horror classics (Candy Man), historical romances (Anna Karenina) and indie dramas (Ivans xtc) — co-wrote the screenplay with Japan's Hiroshi Saito and Kikumi Yamagishi based ...

Well Go USA Entertainment has acquired North American rights to Bernard Rose’s period action film Samurai Marathon following its North American premiere as the opening title of the recent New York Asian Film Festival.

Well Go is planning to release the film in 2020. The deal was negotiated by Doris Pfardrescher on behalf of Well Go USA and HanWay Films on behalf of the filmmakers.

Rose — whose wildly diverse career has spanned horror classics (Candy Man), historical romances (Anna Karenina) and indie dramas (Ivans xtc) — co-wrote the screenplay with Japan's Hiroshi Saito and Kikumi Yamagishi based ...

Masaki Kobayashi’s “Hara-Kiri” (1962) is a towering giant of a film that has stood the test of time. Revered by many, the film often features on several “Best Of” lists time and again. Thus, It was a bit of a surprise when it was announced that Takashi Miike was recruited to put a fresh touch on the classic, only this time in 3D. It was hence that “Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, the first 3D film to ever be selected in Official Competition at the Festival, with a subsequent wide theatrical release later in the year.

With the rise of the Shogunate, several prominent Domains under them have been shut permanently, which has led to many a samurai being jobless and struggling to make a living. This has led to a unique spate of cons where such ronin go to...

Stars: Ko Shibasaki, Hideaki Ito, Hitomi Katayama, Ebizo Ichikawa, Maiko, Toshie Negishi, Miho Nakanishi, Hiroshi Katsuno, Ikko Furuya | Written by Kikumi Yamagishi | Directed by Takashi Miike

Time to fess up: I don’t know all that much about Japanese folklore. Knowing the source material for an artwork that leans heavily on popular cultural institutions isn’t a requirement when viewing said art, mind. I was hardly aware of the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter before seeing The Tale of the Princess Kaguya earlier this year but still managed to be transfixed by the beauty and sweet melancholy of that particular story all the same – though I am sure extra nuggets of meaning could be sifted from that film were I to read up on its origins.

Unfortunately for Over Your Dead Body, the latest in a long line of brutal but thematically complex psychological horrors from controversial auteur Takashi Miike,...

Stars: Kenji Sawada, Keiko Matsuzaka, Shinji Takeda, Naomi Nishida, Kiyoshirô Imawano, Tetsurô Tanba, Naoto Takenaka, Tamaki Miyazaki, Takashi Matsuzaki | Written by Ai Kennedy, Kikumi Yamagishi | Directed by Takashi Miike

Being a Takashi Miike fan takes you down some strange roads. Whether it is the extreme Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q, or the fun Crow Zero movies there is always something a little off about all of his movies. One of the strangest to come from him has to be The Happiness of the Katakuris, a musical about happiness, family and death which is out now from Arrow Video…

When the Katakuri family build a bed and breakfast in the country, they do so on the promise of a new road being built close to it to provide them with plenty of customers. When the road doesn’t appear though they start to wonder if they are cursed to fail.

Prolific director Takashi Miike has helmed an abundance of eclectic big screen stories over the years, memorably taking viewers on graphic killing quests in Ichi the Killer and 13 Assassins. Miike also made an indelible mark on the horror genre with 1999’s Audition, and he looks to scare audiences again with his new film, Over Your Dead Body, recently acquired by Shout! Factory for a 2015 release.

Earlier today it was revealed that Shout! Factory! acquired the North American rights to Miike’s new horror film, which made its international premiere at Tiff in September. Shout! Factory plans to release Over Your Dead Body on home media through its Scream Factory label sometime next year.

Synopsis via Tiff: “A star, Miyuki Goto (Ko Shibasaki) plays Oiwa, the protagonist in a new play based on the ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan. She pulls some strings to get her lover, Kosuke Hasegawa (Ebizo Ichikawa) cast in the play,...

While Over Your Dead Body conceptually represents everything that has made Takashi Miike one of the most exciting genre directors of the decade, its execution lacks the same infectious essence that turned films like Ichi The Killer and Audition into Japsploitation cult classics. Writer Kikumi Yamagishi blurs the realms of fantasy and reality together into a sinister tale of life imitating art, but as Miike blends the stories into one hazy fever-dream, the allure of deception morphs into cerebral confusion and questions galore. While the film comes with vested intrigue, the punchy metaphysical nature of Over Your Dead Body becomes a marginally incoherent exercise in romantic depravity. Miike weaves a tragically gory love story, but the novelty of parallel storytelling wears thin as Yamagishi’s plot becomes more contrived and convoluted with every mysterious scene, right until the curtain falls on another ultra-violent Takashi Miike head-scratcher.

Over Your Dead Body...

It’s always exciting when Takashi Miike releases a new movie — something that happens approximately 19 times per year. The guy is a workhorse who steps up to the plate often and strikes out a lot, but when he connects the impact sends you flying past the parking lot. Unfortunately, Over Your Dead Body isn’t one of the home runs. Leaving aside the quality shifts of quick turnaround, everyone essentially knows that there are two Miikes (and a third who makes children’s movies): gonzo horror Miike who made shockers like Audition, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q (got milk?), and polished prestige Miike who made 13 Assassins and Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai. They’ve advised one another on projects before, but this is the first genuine collaboration between the co-directors, and they’ve chosen to take on one of Japan’s most famous ghost stories. Written in the early 19th century, “Yotsuya Kaidan...

It's amazing how much awesomeness can be squeezed into 40 seconds. Case in point: the first teaser for Takashi Miike's new movie Over Your Dead Body.

Considered to be the most famous Japanese ghost story of all time, writer Kikumi Yamagishi uses "Ghost Story of Yotsuya" as a central plot point of Miike's new movie which stars Ebizo Ichikawa and Kou Shibasaki as actors playing lead roles in a stage adaptation of the classic kabuki play which mines themes of love, lust and vengeance. Those same themes start to take on new meaning for the actors when lines between reality and fantasy are blurred. Essentially there is death (at least one decapitation) and blood. Lots of blood.

Over Your Dead Body is looking really great and exactly the kind of thing to tide fans over until [Continued ...]...

The great Takashi Miike is making his way back to the horror genre with an as of yet to be titled new film focusing on one of Japan's most famous ghost stories, Yotsuya Kaiden. Read on for the first details.

Miike directs from a screenplay by Kikumi Yamagishi (Hara-kiri: Death of a Samurai, The Happiness of the Katakuris). Nobuyasu Kita (13 Assassins, Hara-kiri) rejoins Miike behind the camera as cinematographer with Toshiaki Nakazawa (13 Assassins, Departure) producing. Production designer Yuji Hayashida and composer Koji Endo are also join the crew. Celluloid Dreams/uConnect, the sales division of uMedia, has acquired the international rights for the project in Cannes.

Recognized in many contemporary representations including The Ring franchise, the evil spirit Oiwa appears in her white burial gown, straggled hair, and drooping eye from when she was maimed by poison. Originally presented on stage in the early 1800s, Yotsuya Kaiden has been remade and reconfigured many times,...

Hara-Kiri

Directed by Takashi Miike

Screenplay by Kikumi Yamagishi

2011, Japan

In a review of Japanese director Takashi Miike’s 2002 film Dead or Alive, The Av Club described his style as “splatterpunk,” and frankly they were not exaggerating. However, in recent years Miike’s films have grown and matured in their dramatic power, combining a punk-influenced desire to undercut traditional film tropes with a smaller (but not insignificant) amount of splatter. The culmination of this trend is Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, a film which attacks the samurai genre not with gore but with crushing, gut-wrenching human drama.

Koji Yakusho (who worked with Miike in 13 Assassins) plays the head of a famed house of samurai warriors in Tokyo in 1630. A samurai named Hanshiro Tsugumo (Ichikawa Ebizo XI, whom the London Telegraph once described as “Japan’s Brad Pitt”) shows up at his door, claiming that he is penniless and pitiful, with...

Anyone who has already seen Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 film Harakiri, of which this film is very much a remake, will very quickly realise when watching Miike’s 2011 update that little in the story has been changed but whilst the mechanics of the story are unchanged Miike makes significant changes in the way this story is told.

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai begins with Kageyu (Koji Yakusho), the head of the House of Li, telling Hanshiro (Ebizo Ichikawa) the tale of Motome (Eita), a samurai who arrived at the gates of the House of Li asking for the use of their courtyard to commit ritual suicide (Harakiri, or actually more accurately Seppuku).

Hanshiro is requesting this very same thing and it is clear that Kageyu is attempting to offer Hanshiro a warning. Motome had no intention of actually going through with the suicide and was actually attempting a ‘suicide bluff’, a...

Rating: 2/5

Director: Takashi Miike

Writer: Kikumi Yamagishi

Cast: Ebizô Ichikawa, Eita, Hikari Mitsushima

Remakes are an interesting beast.  Not only do they rarely play prestigious film festivals like Cannes, but also, they rarely get talent behind it quite like the talent behind the new remake of the Masaki Kobayashi film, Harakiri.

Read more on Cannes 2011 Review: Hara-kiri: Death Of A Samurai...