Vanzi

A True Story of the Private Ginza Police

The war has ended but the killers bred by the state have not vanished. There is no where else for them to go, they have been filled with the false promises that fascism would have brought them and they have been thrown aside in the gutter to revel in the humiliation by the invading foreigners. The war continues to rage on within the slums and alleyways of the dilapidating city, people will continuously be torn apart by the violence that haunts the street. There is no one to help you, you will be all on your own and you will suffer. A particularly violent Toei film to the point I feel Junya Satō was experimenting with the limits of what can be shown. The whole film feels so shocking in its unrelenting brutality that by the end, it genuinely feels like the film is being ripped apart and torn apart like the minds of the people who are experiencing the horrors first hand, probably the closest Toei came to an ATG film (apart from the Toei-ATG co-production Aesthetics of a Bullet of course). I think the whole film in general tries to steer away from the Fukusaku inspired style that was very persistent with jitsuroku films and successfully stands apart as both a portrait of history, a mind-altering psychological experience and, well, a marketable Toei exploitation film.