They are, in a sense, representatives of the Japanese population at large, only in bigger hats and higher platform shoes. They don’t consider themselves racist, but they blind to the racism running rampant in Japan. At least, that is, until Meiko’s Alleycats come into contact with a mixed-race gang led by the hunky Kazuma.
Even though the cast and crew are making a lark of a movie, Hasebe never lets it collapse under the weight of its own self-awareness. He understands that the best spoof of the campy spy film of the 1960s also has to be a very enjoyable spy film, and Black Tight Killers doesn’t forget to entertain.
Kobayashi couldn’t pull off the “Sun Tribe with a gun” mood of those movies, but he had his own more grown-up version of cool that still appealed to younger viewers. And then everyone started watching James Bond movies.
Goro himself seems neither disappointed or enthused by his small-time pursuits. His only regret is that he can’t yet go back to his beloved Tokyo.
Ito and his boss want Togawa to carry out a robbery that they’ve planned, involving an armored car shipment of racetrack receipts worth 120 million yen, and have hand selected a crew of four men to assist him in the task.
Within just a few years of Asia-Pol‘s release, Nikkatsu hit financial rock bottom and was forced to retool itself from being a purveyor of action films to the stylish kink of the more lucrative Roman Porno films it became known for in the seventies.
Hasebe, I’m told, learned his craft from the master of pop-art yakuza madness, Seijun Suzuki, and the influence of Japan’s number one maverick certainly showed in Black Tight Killers. By 1969, however, much of the eye-catching weirdness seems to have left the work of Hasebe, and while Bloody Territories is not a bad film, it’s also nothing special.
