Wednesday, October 13, 2010

The Dead Or Alive Films Reviewed Here

By Katelyn Fuentes

The Dead or Alive Trilogy belongs on your must see movie downloads list simply because it's so crazy. You've seen action movies, you've seen over the top action movies, but you've never seen anything quite like these three flicks from Mike Takashi . Every one is out to top the last in terms of sheer craziness.

Dead or Alive Part One was designed to be a way to bring together two hot Japanese stars, being Sho Aikawa, the Japanese Pacino, and Riki Takeuchi, the Japanese DeNiro, so Dead or Alive is sort of the Japanese Heat. However, it's really nothing like Heat, and it's sort of designed to fix the problem with that movie, being that the ending wasn't quite the climax most viewers were hoping for.

We can't spoil the ending of Dead or Alive for you, and you wouldn't believe us if we did. Just check it out and see for yourself. The whole movie is designed to be non-stop, exciting, fast paced, and entirely over the top the whole way through.

Dead or Alive 2 is one of those rare sequels that blows the original away, even though the original was already pretty good. Aikawa and Takeuchi are recast as two entirely different characters, that parallel their original roles in some interesting ways. Where the first is about a cop and a gangster out to get each other, this one focuses on two childhood friends who have grown up to become hitmen who donate all of their earnings to buying medicine for children in third world countries. This movie is all heart.

The first movie in the series has a very negative edge to it, it's very harsh. This one is all heart, it's very positive, so it's interesting to see the whole thing flipped on its head. It also deals a little more responsibly with the cost of violence on a person's soul.

The third film, Dead or Alive Final, goes in the science fiction direction, more specifically, cyberpunk, with replicants and evil dystopian governments. While it might not be the most exciting of the trilogy, it's worth seeing so you can check out how it ties the whole thing together in such a strange way.

If you like the Dead or Alive trilogy, you should also check out Deadly Outlaw Rekka, which feels like the fourth film in the series in spirit. It has the same sense of over the top craziness and stars Riki Takeuchi in the lead role.

As the trailer for the first film declares: Takashi Miike is the rabid dog of Japanese cinema. You never know what he's going to do in his movies. Interestingly, he's said in interviews that he tends to look for boring scripts. When the script is dull, that gives him a lot of opportunity to spice it up. And spice it up he does. Miike has always managed to take these director for hire movies and make something new out of them. He makes an average of four movies a year, and has made around a hundred feature films total. The quality of each of these movies... It goes up and down, but if only one in ten is worth watching, ten great movies is more than most directors ever get around to creating. - 40732

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