Yakuza Apocalypse (2 Stars)

I don't even want to write about this film. I have mixed feelings about the director Takashi Miike. He's made some brilliant films, but he's also made some very bad films. For the first hour this film was excellent. Then it turned silly in the second hour. At the end it wasn't just silly, it was bad. It's as if the director was trying to see how much he could get away with. He has a lot of fans, and he was trying to see how much his fans would put up with. I'm not a fan, so my tolerance is low.

Kamura is the yakuza boss in an unnamed town. The members of his gang consider him to be too soft. He doesn't allow them to hurt civilians. There are repeated attempts to overthrow him, but they fail. Kamura is a vampire, and bullets can't hurt him. His true nature is only known to one man, a restaurant owner who keeps men locked up for him to feed on.

Finally one of Kamura's female captains (I don't think she's named) deduces that he's immortal, and she brings in help from outside, a pair of vampire slayers. They kill Kamura, but before he dies he bites his second-in-command, Kageyama, turning him into a vampire. Kamura had always been discreet about being a vampire, but Kageyama is the opposite. He bites victim after victim, turning the whole town into vampires. The only ones left over are the yakuza, because yakuza blood tastes bad.

Now it starts getting silly. The yakuza captain sees problems for her gang, because everyone has become vampires and there are no civilians left to charge protection money. She plants seeds in a greenhouse and grows babies to replace the civilians.

The vampire hunters summon a third member of their group to handle the vampires in the town. It's a giant kung-fu fighting frog. When he's finally defeated, an even bigger frog rises from the ground, breathing fire and threatening to destroy the world.

And the film ends on a cliff-hanger. I wouldn't mind if a sequel were promised, but no sequel is in sight. The film is just left open-ended. That's awful.

At first I felt tempted to give the film only one star, but it deserves an extra star to acknowledge how good the first half is. Nevertheless, my advice is to stay away from "Yakuza Apocalypse". I was disappointed, and you'll be disappointed as well.

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