HCF Review - Jigoku

BOHACHI BUSHIDO: CODE OF THE FORGOTTEN EIGHT (1973)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before; an enigmatic warrior arrives in a strange town and is enlisted by a nefarious local outfit to do the dirty work of a scheming villain… but his personal ideals interfere with the business at hand. The world of Samurai movies (and indeed Westerns) offers plenty of examples of this story. Which means a fresh take requires a certain kind of flair, or interesting take on the formula, to make it memorable. In this particular case Teruo Ishii’s vision is to take the material from an adult manga (from the writers of Lone Wolf and Cub) and fill much of the film’s running time with nudity and torture. Are the results a case of style (and sadism) over substance? 

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HCF Review - NeverEnding Story

EXIT 8 (2025)

With recent trends in both low budget ‘liminal space’ horror shorts and Japanese time loop stories, such as River, it’s perhaps unsurprising that someone took both and combined them into a single thriller. This is also a video-game adaptation that has a small scale premise to work with resulting in a film that doesn’t have much room to go wildly off target like so many others. But when the original horror-meets-walking-simulator is a breezy experience that lasts minutes, rather than hours, can an entire movie be consistently engaging? Let’s examine whether this micro concept, mostly in a single location, can maintain the suspense factor.

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HCF Review - The Wanderers

ADRIFT IN TOKYO (2007)

A tale of desperate loners, debt collectors, and even potential murder, isn’t exactly the sort of fare that is typically considered easy watching. But Satoshi Miki’s meandering hangout movie Adrift in Tokyo is anything but typical. Rather than being something like the gruelling Yakuza pictures one of its stars has appeared in this is more a strange and melancholy drama. It’s slow paced instead of gripping; punctuated by occasional moments of slapstick rather than violence. Can such a laid-back movie with a resounding lack of thrill power be engaging or even thought provoking?

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HCF Review - The Getaway

ONCE A THIEF (1991)

Discussions of John Woo’s classic run in the late 1980s to early 1990s often omit this caper, but unlike Bullet in the Head it’s not a case of it being too bleak. Plus the stars are all here; Leslie Cheung and Chow Yun-Fat return from the Better Tomorrow films, as do several other familiar faces. So are the locations the director enjoys; this time Paris. Perhaps it’s because the whole thing has a tendency to get rather silly. Some of the lead characters are named after desserts and Violet Lam’s score is very whimsical after all. The explosive set pieces are present and correct, however, there’s something off about the construction of the story itself that goes beyond some of the strange tonal shifts. Is it more than the sum of these parts?

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Review Roundup - Gods and Monsters

THE ODYSSEY (2026)

Like The Dark Knight there's a sense that some of the material in Homer's epic, and its predecessor The Iliad, could have a tendency to become rather silly. There are a lot of choices to unpack in Christopher Nolan's modernist (or perhaps minimalist) adaptation but the way he's decided to depict certain ideas and images is one of the biggest. He must have considered this one of the central problems; that a giant wooden horse, much like the caped crusader, is hard to take seriously. Going full swords and sandals fantasy camp was never on the cards so the results aren't entirely surprising. However, there's still plenty to enjoy in the resulting epic.