Kiyoshi Kurosawa's The Guard From Underground

I mean, the reaction I've seen from people about this whole director's company series that you're doing has been really excited.

And I was looking through the, so you've got a little sort of inset booklet on this new release.

Jasper Sharp wrote and it's got the filmography on the back and there's so many amazing films in there and I'm not for a second like you know predicting that you're going to get all of them but the prospect of getting any of them is pretty exciting

yeah there are some in the some aren't just aren't good to be honest and that's what I was looking at and I was like I've got I could get the rights to these quite easily but the film's a bit crap so um let me move on to something else in the meantime uh

I mean, there's some absolute bangers in there, though.

So obviously you've got some Sogarishi stuff, loads of Shinji Somae, and yeah, some of the Kiyoshi Kurosawa things.

I was looking at the whole Kandagawa Pervert Wars fiasco that he kind of reimagined into pumpkin soup, right?

Well, is it? Kandagawa Pervert Wars was his own film as a...

maybe that was a pink film or Roman porno.

I was speaking to somebody about it the other day and I had all this very interesting information and then it's just simply forgotten.

But the bumpkin soup or the excitement of the Dorefimi, Dorefimi La, yes, a girl, that was actually supposed to be a Nikatsu Roman porno.

And he made a film that was so strange that Nikatsu sort of disowned it and it ended up being its own sort of independent oddity.

Yeah, that's what I heard.

And he was kind of like blacklisted a little bit within the industry for a while, right? But yeah, and then Guard from Underground was basically the first film he made after all of that fiasco.

No, he made Sweet Home, which was an even bigger fiasco.

The Ito Junji film that he made.

I mean, Ito Junji is the manga artist behind things like Uzumaki and Gyo.

He's a very, very big manga artist.

But he had this project, Sweet Home, that Kurosawa was hired to do.

And they just fell out big time about the vision of the film.

And the rights, I think it was a Toho production, I believe, that also was a production from Ito Junji.

And I think Toho took the side of Ito Junji and sort of screwed over Kurosawa because of that.

Because it was a very big production.

And I think it really sort of made him go in to make a film like God of Underground afterwards.

Well, I mean, I've seen Sweet Home and I thought it was awesome, although I just watched the kind of, you know, poor VHS rip on YouTube, I think.