Filled with electricity! Third Window Films is ecstatic to present the world debut Blu-ray release of Sogo Ishii’s punk classic Electric Dragon 80000v, as well as the first physical release outside of Japan for his most recent film Punk Samurai!
Ken, a gang leader dreaming of a quiet life with his girlfriend Noriko, and Jin, Ken’s maverick successor, who isn’t about to let yakuza kingpins tell him what to do or whom to kill. Jin’s violent individualism in a world where even outlaws follow the bosses’ orders references the doomed anti-establishment heroes of Kinji Fukasaku, but Crazy Thunder Road points toward a new style of genre filmmaking-fast-paced, quick-witted and brilliantly stylized.
Shinya Tsukamoto directed this wonderfully bizarre adaptation of Daijiro Morohoshi’s Yokai Hunter manga as his first studio project. Called to an idyllic countryside town, disgraced archaeologist Professor Hieda teams up with high schooler Masao when a series of disappearances – including those of Masao’s father and classmate crush Reiko – take place. Together, the unlikely duo discover that the local high school sits atop an ancient burial mound that may very well be a subterranean gateway to hell.
One of Osamu Tezuka’s most adult and sexually-charged works, Barbara (1973-74) was originally serialized as a follow-up to Ayako (1972-73) in Big Comic from July 1973 to May 1974. Barbara is an adult-orientated fantasy tale filled with love and the occult. Its story deals with the erotic and bizarre experiences of a famous novelist called Yosuke Mikura whose life is tossed upside down by a mysterious girl named “Barbara”.
One Cut of the Dead: Hollywood Edition is a limited edition 2000 unit pressing of the Japanese box office smash One Cut of the Dead, featuring 4 hours of content, including the spin-off film, One Cut of the Dead in Hollywood; available 31st May on Blu-ray from Third Window Films. One Cut of the Dead opens in a run-down, abandoned warehouse where a film crew are making a zombie film. Yet this is no ordinary warehouse. It’s been said that it’s the site of military experiments on humans…
Third Window Films is pleased to announce a special edition Blu-ray set of two gruesome fantastical pieces of ‘geki-mation’ (imaginative hand-drawn cutout animation) from the weird and wonderful world of Japanese director UJICHA; available 25th January. Bobby and his friend Akkun set out for the mountains to build a secret hideout. On their way, they stumble upon a mysterious amusement park called Violence Voyager.
Third Window Films is pleased to announce Europe’s first blu-ray and the UK’s first release of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Gemini. Adapting the Edogawa Rampo short story The Twins, Shinya Tsukamoto’s modernist Meiji horror represents the director’s first foray into period films and fleshes out Rampo’s original tale of savage sibling rivalry considerably. Yukio is living a charmed life: he is a respected young doctor with a successful practice and a beautiful wife. His only problem is that his wife is suffering from amnesia…
Despite having graduated from the prestigious Tokyo University, Kazuhiko is unemployed and living with his parents without any plans for the future. Everything changes, however, when he takes up a job at a local bathhouse and discovers that it is used by the yakuza as a convenient place for executions and corpse disposal. Winner of the Best Director Award at the 2018 Tokyo International Film Festival: Japanese Cinema Splash.
In 1985, Macoto Tezka (son of the great manga artist Osamu Tezuka) met musician and TV personality Haruo Chicada, who had made a soundtrack to a movie which didn’t actually exist: The Legend of the Stardust Brothers. At the time Macoto was just 22 years old, a film-student with many short experimental films under his belt, but yet to make a feature-debut. With Chicada as producer, Tezka then adapted this “fake soundtrack” into the real movie story of The Stardust Brothers.
Samurai, robots, flying tiger sharks, time-traveling baseball players and alien monsters: the legendary – and above all notoriously bad – Japanese detective series Ronin Suiri Tentai had it all. In Japan, the series was strangely enough no more than a modest success. But in Australia, where it was released in the early 1990s under the title Top Knot Detective, the series became a gigantic cult hit.
Written and directed by Shinichiro Ueda, One Cut of the Dead begins with an impressive 37 minute long take set in an abandoned Japanese water filtration plant. “It’s just an urban legend… On record, this place was built for water filtration. But the Japanese army used here for some sort of experimentation… Human experimentation. Like…bringing the dead back to life.” Shinichiro Ueda’s movie injects the zombie trope with new life; thus reanimating the sub-genre. This is not Dawn of the Dead, nor is it Shaun of the Dead. Instead, One Cut of the Dead celebrates low-budget filmmaking.
One Cut of the Dead opens in a run-down, abandoned warehouse where a film crew are making a zombie film… Yet, this is no ordinary warehouse. It’s been said that this warehouse is the site where military experiments once took place…
