bloody territories (yasuharu hasebe, 1969. japan)

from imagesjournal.com:

Director Yasuharu Hasebe is probably best known for his lurid, sometimes explosively violent, pink films (sex films) that he made for Nikkatsu Studios throughout the 1970s. Films such as Rape!, Assault! Jack the Ripper, Sukeban Deka: Dirty Mary, and Rape! 13th Hour were just some of the many offerings that pulled in the crowds during Nikkatsu's reign as the leading manufacturer of violent pink films. In fact, due to dwindling audiences for their action films, Nikkatsu made nothing but sex films from 1971 onward.

But before Hasebe chose to wander down that rather profitable street of flesh and cinematic depravity, he got his start working with famed and notoriously iconoclastic director Seijun Suzuki, among others. Later, Hasebe got a chance to direct his first film for Nikkatsu in 1966, Black Tight Killers. In the following years, he made a series of action films for the studio, including the very successful youth-oriented Stray Cat Rock series, which mixed in a little sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll into the mix. Hasebe's fate and notoriety may have been sealed with his violent pink films, but his talent as a director of action films is arguably more representative of his cinematic legacy.

Bloody Territories, made the year before Hasebe would helm the first of his Stray Cat Rock films, is a hardboiled smack in the face that ends with some of the most brutal, unflinching yakuza-styled violence outside of Kinji Fukasaku's brilliant Battles Without Honor and Humanity series. Starring legendary, super-cool actor Akira Kobayashi (Kanto Wanderer) as the dutiful yakuza soldier who will stop at nothing to maintain his yakuza clan's honor in the wake of some serious criminal downsizing, Hasebe's Bloody Territories is-like most yakuza films quite honestly-the same story you've seen a hundred times before. Yakuza Clan #1 makes a truce with Yakuza Clan #2, the deal goes sour because of Yakuza Clan #1's (or #2's for that matter) greed and/or will to dominate the streets of Shinjuku (as in the case of Bloody Territories), and some lone wolf (of either clan, it doesn't really matter) rises to the occasion to slice up anyone stupid enough to get in his way. Oh, and there's lots of honor and tradition to uphold.

That simplified assessment is in no way meant as dismissive or as negative criticism of the yakuza genre. For the most part, a similar bare bones formula could be made about a number of different genres, most notably the western. But as any fan of westerns or yakuza films would tell you, their love of the genre usually has less to do with plot as much as it does with character, emotion, and that purest of cinematic forms, action.

Kobayashi struts through the streets like the icon that he was, ready to dish out some serious whacks but willing to take some as well. Like Fukasaku's take on the yakuza genre, Bloody Territories was filmed utilizing real street locations, lots of grit and detail, naturalistic acting, and plenty of unromantic violence (which ironically always makes yakuza film fans even more wistful). Unlike the wildly subversive and visually dazzling films of Suzuki, Hasebe's film dutifully serves up strictly the meat and potatoes--nothing fancy yet thoroughly satisfying.

allzine