2002 ‘アライヴ’ Directed by Ryûhei Kitamura
Tenshu is imprisoned and sentenced to death for murdering the men who raped his girlfriend. However, he manages to survive his execution and is presented with an option: face another execution attempt or subject himself to their bizarre and dangerous experiments.
Ryūhei Kitamura took all the goodwill and money from Versus and dumped it all into Alive's production design. It shows. If you like the sub-sub-genre of futuristic prisons then it really really really shows.
Alive slots right into Kitamura's overly-stylized too cool aesthetic. There's not really enough here to stretch into a two-hour movie, but when Kitamura's mind and what's on-screen is synced up it's one of the coolest fever dreamscapes I've seen. The first hour is a lot of setup to introduce the idea with brief windows into action, but once the second half comes around it's a mile a minute.
The Versus sequence with Tak is some of Kitamura's best stuff, and that is a very high bar to meet. Badass and absolutely bonkers.
A hyper stylized dreamscape. A deranged social experiment that gets stranger by the minute. Resurrection, sorcery, kung fu, and super powers. Mad scientists. A smoke filled Japanese sci-fi oddity. Real weird shit. Hideo Sakaki is pretty decent, he has yet another awesome standoff with Tak Sakaguchi. Some bad cgi. Not amazing but pretty good. Need more time for it to really sink in.
5 Directors x 5 Unseen Films – Round 1 - 14 of 25
HORRORx52 (2021) - 5 of 52 (#16 Made in Japan)
Two people sentenced to death who survived their execution take part in an experiment. Unfortunately, nothing in this film can really convince. The acting is not good, the few sets are rather simple and plain and the light sources are more disturbing than useful, the fights are actually not really successful either. All the strange digital effects, especially in the final battle, were rather strange. Only once the effect of a kind of bullet-time was somehow a little charming.
"My only fear is, to be forgotten." Tenshu Yashiro
Well, sad to say, that's gonna be the case!
I really like Kitamura, his funny Low-Budget-Trash-Pearl Versus was a delight for me, as well as the Epic-Trashy Godzilla: Final Wars! Even his First Expedition outside of his country, was a big gory Laugh for me.
But his adaptation from Tsutomu Takahashi's Alive was a let down for me. It were just too much elements to fit in a two Hour-Movie.
From the protagonist's Death Sentence to an Experiment that seems to be a Human behavior analysis, it's starts pretty decent, but then they have to add Aliens, Superpowers, 'Love conquers all' and throughout the whole running time of this Flick i…
Two death row inmates find themselves in some kind of experiment, the goal of which may be to harness power far beyond that of ordinary humans.
Ryûhei Kitamura's first feature was Versus, a glorious mishmash of action movie tropes, but he followed it up with Alive, an unfortunate mishmash of science fiction tropes. It may be saying something about the difference between the genres of action and science fiction that a conscious remixing of past ideas is inherently fun in the former and inherently tired in the latter. Or maybe it's that Versus felt in many ways like a spoof of the pretensions of The Matrix, whereas this movie felt like it was taking those pretensions seriously.
As everyone who regularly follows Japanese genre cinema knows,filmmaker Ryehui Kitamura(AZUMI,GODZILLA:FINAL WARS) is one of the most talented filmmakers in The Land Of The Rising Sun which is something that he unfortunately doesn't display in this dready mishmash that was his follow-up film to his incredibly successful VERSUS,with ALIVE having Hideo Sakaki(STILL THE WATER,BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL) as a man who murders the rapists of his beloved girlfriend(with that very vengeful action happening off-screen) as that act lands him on the electric chair as he survives the electrocution enough to become an unwilling participant in a laboratory's human behavior experiment that has him at first sharing a cell with a violent inmate whom he kills in self defense as he experiences endless…
It's hard to fault a movie for having too many ideas considering that most rarely bother with a single new one. That said, "Alive" was kind of a jumbled mess of Cronenbergish horror-sci-fi mixed with sub-par "Matrix" fight scenes sprinkled with director Ryuhei Kitamura's love of the bizarre. An interesting failure that is still worth a watch.
When the SWAT team barges in to kill off the lead, they charge at him one by one with loaded guns instead of shooting at him all at once. There's even close ups of their laser scopes! I guess they were interns.
Hard to label as the film throws a lot of things/ideas at the wall but they don't stick.
this is way too long and devoid of any tension for what it is. a man survives his execution after killing the men who raped his girlfriend, and then her also, and is put into a room with another condemned killer in order to conduct an experiment. which will kill the other first? it's a premise with some potential, but kitamura has no idea to execute on it, and it's story isn't interested in following it through, rather skipping ahead to another premise, then another, then another. it's all an excuse for the guy to obtain powers and then fight another weird guy with powers, which fine, whatever, but did it have to take a hundred minutes to get there?…
