Black Tight Killers: Yasuharu Hasebe

Here's what you really need to know about Yasuharu Hasebe's Black Tight Killers: it ends with a couple of go-go dancing ninjas defeating an American businessman named 'Bill' in a kung fu fight on a mysterious island while on a search for $10 million worth of gold stolen from Okinawa during World War Two. The film's plot doesn't really make sense. But if that above description of the film's climax intrigued you, then I'm pretty sure that you will love Black Tight Killers regardless of its flaws. The film is an admittedly brilliant exercise in stylistic excess and abandon. It begins when Daisuke Honda, a war photographer flying home to Japan from Vietnam, meets with a plane stewardess named Yuriko Sawanouchi. They go on a date and appear to hit it off. But Yuriko is repeatedly threatened by a 5-woman team of go-go dancing ninja (yes, I was being completely serious about that) named the Black Tight Killers. It is revealed that Yuriko was related to a man who was involved with a plot and so on and so forth. Essentially, for much of the film Daisuke could just walk away. But his love for Yuriko keeps him digging deeper and deeper into the conspiracy until it's too late for him to escape. The film displays the same kind of stylistic anarchy that would get Seijun Suzuki fired the next year for Branded to Kill (1967): scenes of go-go dancing are spliced in almost at random, actors are frequently framed against brightly-lit backdrops of obscenely bright colors, and bizarre props are used in inexplicable ways (my favorite being an explosive golf ball used by one of the Black Tight Killers to free Daisuke and one of her comrades by hitting it into their room with a golf club from several buildings away). At first, I thought that Hasebe's style was deliberately parodying similar Japanese genre films, particularly with how each of the five Black Tight Killers are given dramatic, over-the-top death scenes in Daisuke's arms. But then I looked at Hasebe's filmography and discovered that one of his biggest hits was a film entitled Rape! 13th Hour (1977). So maybe parody played a lesser role in Black Tight Killers than I originally imagined.

6/10