This movie is amazing. The storyline is a bit hard to follow due to the relentless violence and gore, but thats what this movie is all about. The gore is some of the best I've ever seen, and the characters all act as if they were straight out of cartoons. It is a fast paced, awesome, and badass movie from start to finish. The very end doesn't make much sense, and they should have just left that part out, but i guess it leaves room for a sequel. Overall, this movie is the best movie ever, people can stop making movies now because they cannot top this amazing, heart-wrenching (literally), fun, kickass, badass movie.
Paint the Forest
"Versus" is cheap. It's low-budget. It's trashy. It's funky. It's mind-blastingly stupid in places.
And you know something? "Versus" is gigantic trailer-loads of bloody, gory, brutal, uber-stylish and often beautifully filmed good times.
Let's review:
Japanese Zombies? Check!
Splatter, gore, intestines, brains, severed heads, arms, legs, and virtually anything else that can be dismembered and used as a club, truncheon, weapon, or engine of destruction? Check!
Cool leather trenchcoats? Check. Katanas and wakizashis and a fully locked-loaded-and-primed paramilitary arsenal that would make the 5th Armored Division blush? Check, check, check!
"Verus" is Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamura's red-in-tooth-and-claw salute to flesh-eating zombie flicks like the immortal Peter Jackson's "Dead/Alive"---and what a salute!
"Versus" is just hardcore when it comes to hip: the too-cool-for-school Yakuza in their stylish shades, their tight-fitting leather trenchcoats, sleeveless leather battle dress, hip guns, hip nihilistic attitudes, hip giggles of bloodthirsty insouciance. It's all hip in "Versus", even when hip is slathered in blood and brains and gore. The Yakuza are bright plumed birds, so garish, so insultingly stylish, that you know they're marked for bloody death.
Not to worry. Death's no Game-Over in the Forest of the Resurrection.
Let's boil this thing down: you watch "Versus"---no, wait, you BUY the unrated 2-DVD disc "Versus" for two reasons: 1) Gorgeously shot (on a shoestring budget) High Style and 2) Yakuza on Yakuza action!
Plot? We don't need no steenkin' plot! But since you asked: Mysterious Prisoner KSC2-303 (played right down to the wire and the Miso-soup T by Tak Sakaguchi, who swings that katana like a champ and wears that leather trenchcoat with an aplomb that would have made Marlon Brando proud) escapes from a maximum security prison into the mysterious, fog-shrouded Forest of the Resurrection with a prison buddy. A prison buddy, ummm, handcuffed to a severed hand.
What's the Forest of the Resurrection? It's a dark, spooky forest. It's a dark spooky forest where the local Yakuza gang buries its victims (with their guns, mind you). It might possibly be an ancient aperture to Hell, one of 666 that exist in our innocent world.
A mob pickup turns sour, chiefly because Prisoner KSC2-303 decides he's a "feminist" (I'm not making this up---he says it) and tries to save the damsel in distress. And really, that's what "Versus" is all about. Sakaguchi, girl in tow, runs into the Forest. Yakuza follow. The battling prisoners and mobsters discover that the brutalized dead have a habit of coming back.
Zombies claw their way up from the grave, strapped up with their best-loved gats. Blood flows like meth at a rave.
The truth is, "Versus" was shot for maybe 5 bucks (that's 500 Yen!). And the corollary truth is, "Versus" looks like it was shot for a lot more: it has style in spades, rolling spinning camera sequences that would make most professional Hollywood studio directors blush with shame, and---this is the most important thing of all---it's flesh-ripping good fun!
Be warned, though: this isn't a horror movie. It's not remotely scary. But frankly, it's cool. It's engaging. At moments, it's nearly brilliant. And the tracking shots---my God, the tracking shots are intense. The timing is perfect. This is all about honor, all about vengeance, all about the Death Wish stated, announced, consecrated and celebrated between the once-and-future hero (and long dead Samurai warrior) played by Sakaguchi, and his immortal villainous and way-chic sorcerer nemesis (played to the uber-wicked hilt by Hideo Sakaki).
"Versus" is epic and hysterical. The movie is beautifully shot. The martial arts-work is tight and well done and very slick. The zombie do their thing and can even shoot---poorly. Blood flows. Fools get torn in half. Slaughter abounds. The Forest of the Resurrection is a Mecca for wanton carnage.
This isn't a cheap flick: far from it, and I'm sorry if I have implied it is. It has depth. It has ambition. For its miniscule budget, it is insanely technical in its shots and sweep.
He who becomes a monster gets rid of the pain of being a Man.
Literally.
JSG
MASTERPIECE
I have VERSUS 2 Disc Set Special Edition 5.1 AC3,A MUST SEE :)
I read quite a bit about this movie before actually seeing it. I was expecting some incredibly depraved, unholy sickness, just flowing over me and making me wonder why I wasn't turning the film off.
Eh.
That sure didn't happen. There's some unhappy stuff, but nothing shocking to me. It's not disturbing.
There is gore. I like that. I don't like that it's CGI. That about ruined it.
Then there's the story. Whatever. I didn't find it all that interesting, to be honest. WOOHOO SADOMASOCHISM. Yeah, ok. They got the point across fairly early on, and then the movie last another two hours. Really, this film kinda dragged near the end.
At least(MINOR SPOILER ALERT AHEAD) we got to see a little kid die. And in the end, that's what... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Takashi Miike DVD Release Date: Released the 18 November 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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There's not a single original idea in Returner, but that doesn't stop this Japanese sci-fi action thriller from being a whole lotta fun. Combining elements of (what else?) The Matrix, E.T., The Terminator, and Independence Day, plus a dash of Back to the Future (among others), the mayhem begins when scruffy survivor Milly (Anne Suzuki) uses a time portal to leap from 2084--when humans are being systematically wiped out by invading aliens--to 2002, where she hooks up with a gunslinging maverick (Takeshi Kaneshiro) whose swirling overcoat and hair-trigger attitude make him the live-action equivalent of the quintessential anime hero. Together, they thwart a Yakuza psychopath (played with hilariously laconic nihilism by Goro Kishitani) who's... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Takeshi Kaneshiro - Anne Suzuki - Goro Kishitani Director(s): Takashi Yamazaki DVD Release Date: Released the 10 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The director of Dead or Alive, Takashi Miike, made his name on the international scene with Audition, a chilling psychological thriller that builds from a quiet start towards a prolonged torture sequence almost too unbearable to watch. But such deliberate pacing isn't typical of Miike, whose movies often assault the viewer with an onslaught of slam-bang action that makes John Woo look like Eric Rohmer. Dead or Alive, his most successful cops-vs-yakuza thriller to date, kicks off with six nonstop minutes of machine gun-paced violence, sex, and slaughter, all set to a pounding heavy-metal beat. Thereafter things calm down a little, though not much. Given Miike's penchant for murky, livid-toned visuals and skewed camera angles, it's not always too easy to work out... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Sho Aikawa Director(s): Takashi Miike DVD Release Date: Released the 27 May 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Yuki Takemikazuchi (Yumiko Shaku) is the last blood member of the Takemikazuchi clan of that family and their associates, a band that has evolved from royal guardians into an independent society of trained assassins who specialize in using martial arts, focusing primarily on traditional Japanese sword craft. She is the "princess blade," the heir apparent by bloodline to assume command of the society at age 20, as did her mother before her violent death when Yuki was a little girl. She has been raised by the clan to wield the sword as swiftly as a thought, and to use her entire body as a lithe and lethal weapon. When the petite young woman is asked about her ability to kill like a wind filled with razors - and why she kills at all - she is puzzled, saying, "My body moves before I can think... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Hideaki Ito - Yumiko Shaku - Yoichi Numata Director(s): Shinsuke Sato DVD Release Date: Released the 18 November 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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