Fudoh: The New Generation
Cinema Forum Groningen
Nieuwe Markt 1, 9712KN Groningen GroningenTo avenge his older brother, who was murdered by his father – the boss of a yakuza gang – a secondary school pupil establishes his own crime syndicate consisting entirely of children. Three years before Audition, this inventive spectacle film already put Miike Takashi on the map.
High school student Riki Fudoh leads a double life in organised crime. With his gang of underage assassins (including five-year-olds with handguns and a teenage stripper who shoots deadly darts from an unexpected opening), he attempts to seize power in the underworld on the Japanese island of Kyushu. But Fudoh is not only interested in power: as a child, he witnessed the gruesome murder of his older brother by his father, a yakuza boss, and now he is seeking revenge.
This Shakespearean plot leads to bloodshed when Riki and his underage gang members try to wipe out the biggest criminals in the local underworld, with the patriarch as their ultimate target. This fluorescent gang parody looks like a manga brought to life, is delightfully over-the-top and directed by a young Miike Takashi at his crudest. Fudoh ended up in TIME Magazine's top 10 films of the year, after which Francis Ford Coppola and Wayne Wang asked Miike to join their Chrome Dragon project, which unfortunately never got off the ground.