"Actor: Noboru Mitani"

• The Geisha House | DVD | (11/11/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A moving and entrancing exploration of a culture that has fascinated the Western world for centuries, Kinji Fukasaki's Geisha House was released in 1998, presaging a flurry of literature and memoirs that have helped to broaden our understanding of the geisha's role in Japanese society. Set in the late 1950s, when geisha culture was threatened by moral crusades, it tells the story of Omacha (Miyamoto Maki), a young girl who sees the geisha life as a way to lift her poverty-stricken family from their hand-to-mouth existence. Through her eyes, we see the protocols and complex financial relationships which dictate the running of the geisha house. Fukusaki's film is a work of great delicacy with moments of hypnotic beauty, and his tender direction, often touched with a sense of wonder, fills the screen with lovingly constructed scenes. At its heart is the poignant situation of the women who must sacrifice their normal relationships to live an ambiguous life in which they are a key part of society while being kept, for the most part, on its periphery, like perpetual mistresses. On the DVD: Geisha House is presented with subtitles in widescreen anamorphic format. The string-laden Dolby Digital stereo soundtrack is occasionally overpowering. The only extra is a short, text biography of Fukusaki. --Piers Ford

• Evil Dead Trap | DVD | (10/02/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A talk show hostess asks her viewers to send in home videos to profile on her program. When she receives a snuff video she and her crew set out to follow the path of the video and locate the scene of the crime and get to the bottom of this mystery. The only problem is that there is someone or something waiting for their arrival...

• Street Mobster | DVD | (21/10/2002) from £6.98   |  Saving you £9.01 (129.08%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Explosive Japanese cool hits the retail DVD market in the shape of Eureka Video's 'Street Mobster'. Internationally acclaimed guru director Kinji Fukasaku the highly distinguished exponent of ultra violence with a purpose. Street mobster Isamu Okita likes fighting and girls and is just out of prison for killing a rival in a bath-house. On release he finds things have changed: old gangs no longer have the power they once enjoyed. So he teams up with Kizaki an aspiring gangster who suggests he revive his old gang to take on existing mobs and claim their territory.