Popular reviews

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  Review by viewer 🛸 ★★★★ 14

  Now this is something of a nexus: Giger designs in the film, Yoshitaka Amano and Suehiro Maruo artwork on the covers of the Teito Monogatari (帝都物語, Tale of the Imperial Capital) novels from which the film is adapted... Maruo himself has a long history of drawing manga fixated on the post-World War II era of Japan, Georges Bataille, circus freaks and everything strange, occult, and folkloric — heavily influenced by Shūji Terayama's psychedelic epics, including the use of a J.A. Seazer (composer for Farewell to the Ark, Revolutionary Girl Utena, etc.) score in Hiroshi Harada's adaptation of Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show (titled Midori). And then there's the image of the demonic imperialist soldier, a concept that has persisted in…

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  Review by Justin Decloux ★★★½ 2

  The Japanese equivalent of David Lynch's DUNE: A sprawling adaptation of a famous work of fiction filled with jaw-dropping visual delights (Giant monsters, stop-motion beasties and beautifully surreal cinematography) that's undercut by not making any fucking sense if you aren't familiar with the novels - which is especially difficult for Non-Japanese readers because they've never been translated. Did I have to pause the film at one point and look at the Wikipedia summary? Yes. In my defence, there are like a hundred characters, and it takes place over 14 years.

  Just like Lynch's DUNE, there aren't really set-pieces, but more or less a collection of wild images that flow with liquid-like ease in front of the camera of Director Akio…

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  Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★★ 7

  2nd Akio Jissôji (after Murder on D Street)

  Really, this isn't worth 4/5 or 8/10. It's a terribly clunky film in a number of ways; the music is crashingly loud in places it isn't and completely absent in places it should be, for one thing. The plotting is utterly haphazard, largely because of the incredibly dense nature of the narrative. Characters fly in and out of the drama at a ferocious clip and Jissôji piles storylines on storylines, cross-cutting repeatedly across the two hour and fifteen minute running time until everything feels completely nonsensical. And compared to what sort of SFX was able to do at the time in Hollywood (witness Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), the technical effects have a…

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  Review by Geoffrey Broomer ★★★½

  Teito Monogatari is a novel by Hiroshi Aramata that blends the history of Tokyo with occult themes. Its sold at least 5 million copies on its native soil, and is responsible for popularizing a number of mysticism concepts in modern culture - including onmyōdō and fūsui. If you're into the Japanese occult, there are good chances you've enjoyed some media that was influenced by it. My first experience with Teito Monogatari was Rintaro's grotesque anime adaption Doomed Megaopolis (1992) - a four part OVA split over two VHS tapes. I had the first tape. Would the foul antagonist, Yasunori Kato get his comuppence? Decades later even if it was readily available on DVD, I still left the answer unchecked, possibly…

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  Review by mdfmdf ★★★½

  you can’t have dessert (plump lil HR Giger-designed gremlin wheelie dude) until you eat your vegetables (two hours of overlong digressions about urban planning)

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  Review by Christian ★★★★½

  "What if a dense Japanese historical epic was also The Seventh Curse?" gets you in the ballpark of what this movie's deal is. Obscenely detailed period production design, go-for-broke effects work that ranges from Harryhausen-style stop motion to gonzo chroma-keying to incredible H.R. Giger designed creatures, and a magnetic, M.-Bison-inspiring central villain performance from Kyūsaku Shimada - this is an absurdly impressive, absurdly dense text of blockbuster Japanese genre cinema, and yet somehow these 135 minutes breeze by! Really great stuff, run don't walk.

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  Review by More_Badass ★★★

  Compared to the epic action-packed anime adaptation, The Last Megalopolis dragged too often for me to really love Akio Jissoji’s decades-spanning occult-history battle between good & evil. But the lavish period production, gonzo FX/VFX, and Kyusaku Shimada’s sinister Kato rocked regardless; the appearances of Shintaro Katsu and Jo Shishido were huge surprises, but the real delight was the extravaganza of creature/optical/miniature/etc. effects. Dueling magic, stop motion monsters, cross-generation possessions, disaster sequences, and so much more across these slow, talky, yet visually-striking tokusatsu.

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  Review by D Edward ★★★

  The English version of Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis that I watched is about a half hour shorter than the original Japanese version. No doubt character and story were lost in these edits, and in a story as huge as this one, it’s likely quite detrimental. There are a lot of things going on in this movie, and you get next to no setup for any person outside the main villain, who sorta looks like M. Bison. You’re just thrust into the action, and the movie, through its 110 minute runtime, it never lets up on the dazzling spectacle. This was one of the highest budgeted movies of its time in Japan, and it shows onscreen. Opticals galore, city destruction a la…

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  Review by Evan “Raymond Gun-Virus” Pincus ★★★

  Bit too dense for me to take in first thing in the morning - I definitely believe this is adapted (by my main man Kaizō Hayashi!) from a hugely popular series of books I know absolutely nothing about - but at the very least, is visually spectacular all the time, even - oh, who am I kidding, especially - when it’s actually just a movie about 1920’s urban planning.

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  Review by Chevalier ★★★ 1

  The 80s used to be consider the worst era for Japanese cinema, that is until 2010 kicked in. Now many critics, directors and actors see this decade as the darkest period in the industry. With dozens upon dozens of bland manga adaptations and other lifeless films with no heart, brains or soul. The 80s is still far from being the golden age of movie making in Japan, but it did produce classics like Ran, and fantasy epics like this one.

  Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, is the kind of big fancy production japanese cinema doesn't pull very often. Is based on a fantasy novel, and features one of the most iconic villains from japanese media, Kato, who is basically the source…

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  Review by nosferatu47 ★★★½

  This movie is so long and convoluted feeling, but then somehow it mostly holds together. I think it was the promise of not bad looking, stop-motion monsters and demons, hinted at when a crumpled paper on the ground transforms into a scruffy looking, mutated crow. And there's this giant hill that glows and seethes and shakes, and it's constantly insinuated that a dragon, or something is going to break out of it eventually. There are also little puppet demon monsters dwelling underground. If it weren't for the monsters this movie wouldn't really be that tolerable. It feels like some kind of bloated epic, like it's Japan's answer to a 1980s USA summer blockbuster. A very Japanese feeling disaster movie crossed with Raiders of the Lost Ark leanings and monsters. Though the idea of Tokyo the megaopolis being transformed into a giant graveyard is a very alluring premise.

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  Review by Jeremy N. ★★★½

  This earlier Megalopolis, based on a popular historical fantasy novel by Japanese critic/translator/polymath Hiroshi Aramata, is arguably more ambitious than Coppola's grande folle, with director Akio Jissoji incorporating a variety of special effects—Obayashi cutups, Harryhausen stop-motion, Henson puppetry, and Raimi point-of-view freakouts, among other referential practicals—over an expansive scope that recontextualizes Japan's 20th century as a power struggle between multiple occultish factions. It's also almost totally nonsensical unless you're familiar with the source material (the comparisons others have made to Lynch's Dune aren't inaccurate), yet the film remains compulsively watchable thanks to Jissoji's unwavering commitment to cramming a multitude of content into its 135-minute runtime, while the iconographical cast—which includes Shintaro "Zatoichi" Katsu, onnagata performer Tamasaburo Bando, Lullaby of the…