Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		2.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		4.0
Overall		2.5

The Sleeping Beast Within Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 30, 2018

Note: This film is available as part of Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years, Vol. 2 - Border Crossings: The Crime and Action Movies .

Arrow is continuing to give Japanese cinema fans a field day with new sets devoted to the genre offerings of Seijun Suzuki. Almost a year ago now, Arrow released Seijun Suzuki's The Taisho Trilogy, a trio of frankly often near hallucinatory efforts that initially had their theatrical exhibitions in the 1980s and 1990s. Arrow has now reached further back into what might be thought of as the formative years of Suzuki, offering both Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years, Vol. 1 - Seijun Rising: The Youth Movies (which Arrow has unfortunately been unable to provide a screener for as of the writing of this review) and Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years, Vol. 2 - Border Crossings: The Crime and Action Movies. This second volume obviously includes the sobriquet “Crime and Action Movies”, and as fans of Suzuki will know, at least some of his now considerable reputation was built upon yakuza outings, but as the rest of that subtitle announces, probably all five films in this set could be seen as crossing borders, i.e., incorporating the kind of crazy quilt combo platter of idioms and approaches that became a Nikkatsu hallmark, namely the so-called “borderless action” film.

In an overview included in this set as a supplement, the typically articulate and insightful Tony Rayns makes the interesting case that one reason both The Sleeping Beast Within and Smashing the 0- Line may have shocked Japanese audiences back in 1960 when both films were originally released theatrically is that Japan considered itself more or less a drug free zone. While even some Americans might not equate 1960 with the same sort of “drugged out” mentality that came to be typified cinematically a few later with domestic offerings like The Trip or Psych-Out, drug use had at least occasionally been front and center even before 1960 in such famous outings as The Man with the Golden Arm. Smashing the 0-Line may be a bit more overt in its depiction of a supposedly nefarious drug trade going on in Japan, but The Sleeping Beast Within hints at a drug fueled subtext in its very title.

The Sleeping Beast Within actually seems to be a mystery, at least in its early going, with a successful businessman named Ueki (Shinsuke Ashida) returning home after quite a bit of time abroad, only to just as quickly disappear once he’s back in Japan. That sets his panicked daughter Keiko (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) on a quest to discover what happened to him, which in turn involves an enterprising journalist named Shotaro (Hiroyuki Nagato). Kind of interestingly, just as the search looks like it’s going to reach a dead end, Ueki turns up right back home, though Keiko isn’t buying his claims that he was simply sleeping off an over indulgent bender.

That ultimately leads to the whole drug smuggling angle, one that is rather strangely combined in The Sleeping Beast Within with the kind of mind controlling quasi-religious cult that was part of the periphery of the first version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. It’s a perhaps overly melodramatic aspect to an otherwise interesting approach to a potentially touchy subject (at least for a 1960 Japanese audience, again according to Rayns).

Suzuki is rather stylish in this outing, combining both an almost verité documentarian approach in certain sequences, but then going completely cinematic in other elements, in what some may see as a presaging of the often near psychedelic style that would define some of his later work.

The Sleeping Beast Within Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Sleeping Beast Within is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Video with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Arrow's insert booklet only contains the following pretty generic verbiage about all five films in this set:

The films in this collection were remastered in high definition by Nikkatsu and delivered to Arrow Films. Additional restoration and grading work was completed at R3store Studios in London. Each film is presented in its original aspect ratio with its original mono audio.

I kind of wish we had a little bit more information on the provenance of the various transfers in this set, since a cursory examination of the screenshots included with this review should hopefully show fairly clearly that there's a significant drop off in quality with The Sleeping Beast Within when compared to the rest of the films in this set. While there is fine grain evident, especially when backgrounds are lighter, the entire presentation here looks scrubbed and waxy, to the point that things look positively blurry quite a bit of the time. As has been well documented in supplementary materials included in this set, none of these films has really had a home video presence even in their native Japan before this release, but aspects of the appearance of this particular film do in fact look more like video than film. Those issues aside, contrast is generally pleasing here, and I will say that the film looks considerably better (if far from perfect) in motion than some of these screenshots might suggest.

The Sleeping Beast Within Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Fortunately there's nothing similar going on with The Sleeping Beast Within's LPCM Mono track (in the original Japanese). While there's the same generally boxy sound that the other films in this set also have, there's no real damage. Some of the music and occasional urban noises can sound a bit brash and brittle, but dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout.

The Sleeping Beast Within Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Disc One of this set contains The Sleeping Beast Within and Smashing the 0-Line along with the following supplements:

• Jasper Sharp Commentary - Smashing the 0-Line


• Tony Rayns on the Crime and Action Movies (1080p; 49:23) is another great piece featuring the knowledeable Rayns, who discusses each of the five films in this set in some detail.


• Trailers

  The Sleeping Beast Within (1960) Trailer (1080p; 3:25)

  Smashing the 0-Line (1960) Trailer (1080p; 2:54)

• Still Galleries

  The Sleeping Beast Within (1960) Gallery (1080p; 3:30)

  Smashing the 0-Line (1960) Gallery (1080p; 4:20)

Note: The supplement score above is for the set as a whole.

The Sleeping Beast Within Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's a bit disappointing that the video presentation here is lackluster, because The Sleeping Beast Within is really a rather interesting "little" film. While Tony Rayns makes the case that the title may refer to Keiko's father, who has given in to the "dark side" (so to speak), I think it could also be reasonably interpreted to mean the perhaps fanciful paranoia the film indulges in that the "pristine" island nation of Japan was being invaded by no goodniks resolutely intent on getting everyone hooked on the big H.