British distributors Third Window Finns will add three new titles to their Blu-ray catalog: The Legend of the Stardust Brothers (1985), nflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967), and Gushing Prayer (1971).
Synopsis: In 1985, Macoto Tezka (son of the great manga artist Osamu Tezuka) met musician and TV personality Haruo Chicada who had made a soundtrack to a movie which didn't actually exist: The Legend of the Stardust Brothers.
At the time Macoto was just 22 years old, a film-student with many short experimental films under his belt, but yet to make a feature-debut and of course had the pressure of the TEZUKA name. With Chicada as producer, Tezka then adapted this "fake sountrack" into the real musical story of "The Stardust Brothers".
With inspiration from "Phantom of the Paradise" and "Rocky Horror Picture Show", Tezuka assembled a cast of some of Japan's most famous musicians of the time, including such greats as Kiyohiko Ozaki, ISSAY, Sunplaza Nakano and Hiroshi Takano, alongside many famous names in Manga such as Monkey Punch (Lupin the 3rd), Shinji Nagashima (Hanaichi Monme), Yosuke Takahashi (Mugen Shinsi), Genki Yoshimura (Sailor Moon) and even many upcoming film directors of the time such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Tokyo Sonata) and Daihachi Yoshida (The Kirishima Thing). The resulting film "The Legend of the Stardust Brothers" is the exact definition of a cult film. Despite the huge array of talent on board with a large budget, the film is totally unknown even to this day in both Japan and worldwide. More than 30 years since its release, The Stardust Brothers will finally make itself known worldwide with a new master and a brand new Director's Cut!
Atsushi Yamatoya's Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands is a deliciously delirious cult film about a hitman (Yuichi Minato) who is hired by a rich real estate agent to find an abducted woman (Noriko Tatsumi). This simple setup gives way to a hip and chaotic worldview full of hard-boiled characters, sexy action, and hallucinatory imagery. A close collaborator with the likes of Koji Wakamatsu, Yamatoya was part of the group of anonymous writers who worked on Wakamatsu Productions and was also one of the anonymous writers on the script of Seijun Suzuki s Branded to Kill. In his book Behind the Pink Curtain, Jasper Sharp calls the film probably the most idiosyncratic work the genre has ever produced.
The most cryptic and formally radical pink film from the most politically radical director ever to work in the field: Gushing Prayer deploys actual suicide notes and a haunting guitar refrain by folk musician Minami Masato to express the spiritual and political left vacuum in the wake of the failed student movements of the 1960s. The cinematography by Itô Hideo, who also shot Ôshima Nagisha's In the Realm of the Senses (1976), captures an intriguing melding of the documentary with the cinematic.
STREET DATE: MARCH 16.