Paul's Take: This is an odd beast of a film. I went in thinking it was going to be an 80s neon hard boiled cop film, like a HK set Black Rain but dumber, but instead its kind of a goofball exploitation picture that could star Leo Fong. Take an 80s Dirty Harry movie, insert Jackie Chan , but his on screen partner is Danny Aiello, and the film is directed by pulp hack James Glickenhaus, he of McBain fame. Sounds great doesn't it?! It isn't really but I still had a lot of fun with it. Nathan covers a lot of the plot in his review below, so I'll jump ahead to my main points. The Protector has a vibe of one of those odd movies that popped up after Enter The Dragon, stuff like Shatter, with East meets West vibes mixed with exploitation elements and some hairy violence. There is a lot of action but a lot of it seems laboured and apparently was a cause of friction between Glickenhaus and Chan. There is still liberal use of giant squibs, half decent martial arts and Jackie doing...

Nathan's review:  Kuroda (Bunta Sugawara), a Yakuza with no affiliations, takes on a job from Tetsu (Tsutomo Yamazaki), an Owada Family lieutenant and ends up assassinating a rival boss in his place landing him 7 years in prison. On his release Kuroda returns to Hiroshima looking forward to receiving a large sum of money for his service, but instead finds Tetsu abandoned by Owada and strung out on heroin. Determined to get his money, Kuroda ends up involved in a succession dispute over leadership of the family due to Lietenant Aihara's (Mikio Narita) scheming ways. If 'New Battles' is the perfect gateway to Kinji Fukasaku's filmography, then 'Boss's Head' is the Greatest hits compilation of his work until that point. Armed with a much stronger script, courtesy of legendary Yakuza writer Koji Takada, Boss' Head is a considerably better film than its predecessor that combines all the key elements of the Jitsuroku genre into one neat little package. The...

  Yes, this isn't a gangster film but it is hard edged and hard boiled, so it gets covered. As far as I'm concerned, anything tonally that fits under our blog description can get a look in.  This era of Japanese gore cinema is especially interesting to me, you get film makers basing short run time movies around ideas of showing off practical gore effects and wild ideas on probably very limited budgets. The usual outcomes might be flawed but they are usually very unique. With that said, Cyclops is a weird little slice of originally made for VHS odd balls sci-fi horror directed by George Iida , more famous for Spiral and Another Heaven. Cyclops is a very strange experience. The story, as far as I could figure out, was to do with the control of human evolution. That is, scientists were creating babies born with mutations to help them survive in a world damaged by heavy pollution. Most die from these mutations while still in their infancy, but due to the work of of one scientist K...