DVD reviews: 13 Assassins | The Endless Summer: Collector’s Edition

13 Assassins

Artificial Eye, £15.99

The Endless Summer: Collector’s Edition

Go Entertain, £23.99

A PROLIFIC auteur of crazy cinematic trash, Japanese director Takashi Miike makes movies at a furious rate, but never really hits his targets, at least, not since breaking through with his twisted J-horror revenge movie Audition. Fifty-plus films later, though, and he’s finally made something approaching the sublime outrageousness of that film. 13 Assassins may look like another classic samurai film, but it is to Kurosawa’s genre classics what Sam Peckinpah’s westerns were to John Ford’s. In other words, the stately cinematography and leisurely pacing belie the deranged, deadly fun fomenting away beneath the surface.

The first hints of this come with the brief flashes of freak-show imagery Miike uses to depict the malformed victims of Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki), a cruel and sadistic feudal lord drunk on power and determined to rape and pillage the country into complete chaos. But the film really goes into overdrive as the titular band of freelance samurai (led by Kôji Yakusho) start kicking off their campaign of regime-changing carnage. Thenceforce Miike unleashes an extended, gorgeously orchestrated kill-crazy rampage, the mud-and-blood-soaked extremity of which is genuinely awe-inspiring. Extras include a so-so interview with Miike and a few deleted scenes, but it’s the full-on excitement of the gut-spilling samurai action that demands your attention.

EXCITEMENT of any kind is something that sadly doesn’t feature in surf doc The Endless Summer. First released in 1966, the title’s ubiquity in popular culture had me convinced this was a surf classic to rival Big Wednesday, Point Break or Stacey Peralta’s doc on big-wave surfers Riding Giants. Instead it’s a rather quaint – and at times troublingly patronising – film for surf nerds only. It has some value by virtue of the fact that director Bruce Brown was one of the first people to document the culture in a serious way. But the film’s travelogue aspect – in which Brown follows surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August as they follow the summer waves across the globe – doesn’t hold up well, with Brown’s knuckle-gnawing lapses into vaguely racist commentary as they make their way through Africa the only thing likely to prevent non-surfers from nodding off.

alistair harkness

l To order these DVDs, call The Scotsman on 01634 832789.