Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War of the Underworld was at many of last year’s international film festivals and it has finally made its way to Britain via the UK anime distributor Manga Entertainment. It starts its cinema run from January 06th and it will be screened at various cinemas across the country. To see if your cinema is going to play it and to book tickets, check the film’s UK website.
Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War of the Underworld
極道大戦争「Goku dou dai sensou」
Release Date: June 20th, 2015 (Japan)
UK Release Date: January 06th, 2016
UK Distributor: Manga Entertainment
Running Time: 125 mins.
Director: Takashi Miike
Writer: Yoshitaka Yamaguchi (Screenplay),
Starring: Hayato Ichihara, Riko Narumi, Lily Franky, Reiko Takashima, Kiyohio Shibukawa, Sho Aoyagi, Mio Yuki, Pierre Taki, Denden, Yayan Ruhian, Yuki Sakurai,
The film is the latest from Takashi Miike, famous for titles such as Audition (1999) and the Dead or Alive gangster series. His early films consist of madcap exploitation productions but in recent years he has courted the mainstream with remakes and adaptations such as 13 Assassins (2010) and As the Gods Will (2014). With Yakuza Apocalypse he heads back to the more extreme cinema he is famous for. I have seen the film and it is fun but it takes a while to get going. When it does get going Miike does show he still has that magic.
Synopsis: Akira (Hayato Ichihara) is inspired the by fearsome reputation of the so-called “invincible” yakuza boss Genyo Kamiura (Lily Franky) to become a yakuza himself. What he finds is not what he expected. His fellow gangsters don’t play by old-school rules of loyalty and honour. Even worse, they treat him like a fool and his sensitive skin means he cannot tattoos which makes him the laughing-stock of the criminal underwold. Things change when Akira gets caught up in an assassination of his boss Kamiura leads to the revelation that Kamiura is a bloodsucking vampire and things get even crazier when Kageyama inherits those vampiric powers and must battle a brutal gang of scary monsters and superfreaks…
I would have posted this on Anime UK News so a larger audience could have read it but the website has been down since December 31st. I’ll have a review of it ready for next week.
