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DVD Gyakushû! Sukeban hantâzu: Jigoku no kettô
 Run time: 73 min Rating: 5.1 Genres: Action Director: Shin’ichi Okuda Writers: Shin’ichi Okuda, Makoto Shinozaki Stars: Asami, Chuck Johnson, Naoki Kawano |
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| Plot Keywords: punctuation in title, exclamation point in title | |
| Details: Country: Japan Release Date: 27 February 2010 (Japan) |
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DVD Gyakushû! Sukeban hantâzu: Jigoku no kettô
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"Yakuza Hunters: Duel in Hell" is the second movie of the "Yakuza Hunters", but honestly, they should have stopped after the first movie, because this sequel was nowhere near as good or interesting as the first movie.
Continuing the story from part one, just three years later, Asami returns to the town, finding it in trouble with the Yakuza group yet again. This time they are evicting all people in order to build a casino, killing people in order to get the property. And of course Asami have to come in and save the day.
First, let's take a moment and see what happened here with all five fingers that Asami cut off her left hand in part one. Yeah, you guessed it, they are all back and functioning. Apparently Asami have super regenerative powers or the director just completely opted to forget about this fact and hoping none of the viewers picked up on that little detail.
The story in "Yakuza Hunters: Duel in Hell" failed horribly as the director tried to blend in drama and comedy with the action, and the end result was just bad. At one point in the movie, the film started having an old quality print to it and suddenly it stopped and a note popped up on the screen about the director apologizing for the lack of footage. What? That was just such an epic fail attempt at being funny. And the movie focuses a lot of character building, trying to give Asami a personality by introducing a drama element to the movie, which again just failed terribly.
As for the action sequences, well as in part one, they worked out well enough, but there is far less action in "Yakuza Hunters: Duel in Hell" compared to the first movie, and that was a major setback for the movie.
I enjoyed part one, despite it being cheesy and campy, but this sequel is just downright bad. If you have seen part one you are better off without part two. And if you have seen part two first, then definitely backtrack and watch part one because it is far superior.
Not only does "Yakuza Hunters: Duel in Hell" have a worse storyline and lack of entertainment value compared to part one, but it is also 20 minutes shorter in playing time.
"Yakuza Hunters: Duel in Hell" was a bad disappointment.
This picks up 3 years after the original Battle Girls vs Yakuza. Only Asami (played by Asami) is the only survivor. many people won't dig this but there's a tradition in Japan about those kind of flicks. In the seventies Japan released a lot of flicks about girl gangs. But they added some kind of spaghetti western over the story, Asami do dress up like some kind of cowgirl.
Were part 1 had a lot of sexy looking warriors this doesn't. In fact it doesn't offer anything to part 1. But there is gore at the beginning that is rather okay but the new style is that HKIII flicks moved from splatter to CGI gore. And there's a bit of CGI here and there especially in the part with shotguns.
Asami is something strange to follow. Starting with hardcore porn she moved further as some kind of cult figure already playing in a lot of horror flicks. But even there she's a bit strange, sometimes she goes full nude other times she just stays in her clothes as in this one.
Still, most flicks clock in around 70 minutes were most Japanese flicks did take more than 2 hours to watch.
The front cover is what you will get, a revenge between Asami and Akira. The back cover is taken from part 1 and non of these girls are seen in part 2.
Only for fans of Asami or samurai geeks. Don't be fooled by the sleeve!
Gore 3/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 2/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5
Asami has fought gangsters before and does some more in this film. She gets taken in by a family, and a good third of the film seems to be the group just waiting around, going to the arcade, chatting while getting drunk, and other mundane activities.
Every so often, some evil doer shows up, and Asami fights them. She dispatches a couple one night, then has to fight Akira. That ends badly for Asami.
More people get hurt after Asami recovers. Asami gets more galvanized.
Will Asami prevail against the gang violence? If she gets that far, will she get revenge versus Akira?
——Scores——-
Cinematography: 6/10 Lots of bad lighting. The spaghetti western camera work (shooting through heat mirages, long shots with narrow focus, filtered shots of the sun, and so on) were so-so and did not add that much.
Sound: 6/10 Incidental music reminiscent of Spaghetti westerns. Spoken word seemed clear enough. Foley was a little exaggerated, but that's common enough in such films.
Acting: 2/10 Bad.
Screenplay: 0/10 Bizarre mix of low level silliness (documenting playing kids' arcade games; women giggling while getting drunk), comedy, cult nonsense, gore fest, and spaghetti western traditions. None of it was very good, and the disparate pieces did not fit together well at all. Incredible cruelty for the sake of amusement was much too common. Catching bullets in the bare hands? Done three times, but should not have been done once.
Beautiful yet deadly female warrior Asami (Asami) wages war against the Shoryu yakuza, who have been using extreme measures to force the townsfolk of Sagawa from their homes in order to make way for a casino.
I've yet to see the first Yakuza-Busting Girls movie, so I cannot comment on how this sequel fares in comparison, but I do think that the other reviewers here on IMDb (all two of them) have been a little harsh in their assessment: fans of AV star Asami will no doubt be disappointed by her lack of nudity, and the film does admittedly feel rather uneventful at times, writer/director Shin'ichi Okuda devoting a little too much of the running time introducing and developing his characters, but I reckon that the gnarly splatter and fun fight action still qualify this as an entertaining watch.
A gruesome pre-credits sequence, in which the yakuza chainsaw a man's arm off and shove the whirring blade between a woman's legs, sets the mean-spirited tone for the violence, with subsequent nasty scenes including some messy shotgun damage to a mother's hand and foot, her baby being skewered on a samurai sword, and a juicy head explosion. There's also some reasonably well choreographed martial arts (with a nifty training montage for good measure), neat references to both classic Western and Japanese cinema (Asami mimicking Meiko Kaji's Female Prisoner #701 and Okuda employing a Spaghetti Western atmosphere throughout), and a really cool villain in the form of ruthless hired killer Akira (Hitomi Miwa).
Duel in Hell might not be the finest example of Japanese excess available, but it is enjoyable enough, and if anything, it's REALLY made me want to check out the first film.