Description

Fans of Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus, rejoice! Death Trance may not be the long-awaited sequel to Kitamura’s zombie splatterfest, but it’s the next best thing. At the helm is Versus action choreographer Yuji Shimomura, in the lead is Versus star Tak Sakaguchi (at long last given another ass-kicking lead role), and, though he’s not credited anywhere, there are longstanding rumblings that Versus director Kitamura spent a good amount of time on set and had a hand in the fight choreography himself.

Sakaguchi stars as a nameless wanderer, a warrior with only one goal: a fabled coffin housed in a remote temple in the east. Heavily guarded, there are conflicting reports about the coffin’s powers. Some claim whoever opens it will be granted whatever they wish for. Others believe it is a prison for a goddess of destruction. All agree it must be transported from its eastern resting place to the lost forests of the west to be opened. Sakaguchi gains his prize, but on the trip west to open it is under constant assault by gangs of thieves and other wanderers intent on gaining control of the coffin for themselves, not least among them a temple acolyte carrying a magical – and ludicrously phallic, right down to the pulsing veins in one key scene – sword, and a powerful warrior intent on gaining the coffin for himself – played convincingly and with a good amount of charisma by Steven Seagal’s son, Kentaro.

Shimomura proves a remarkable visual talent, arguably more so than his teacher Kitamura, giving the film a manga-inspired, wildly anachronistic visual charge well beyond its low-budget roots. He shoots beautiful film and augments it well with a series of dazzling set pieces choreographed by Sakaguchi himself. While Sakaguchi is more a brawler than any sort of disciplined fighter, he is smart enough to surround himself with others more skilled, a collection of fighters that begins with Seagal – who has obviously spent a good amount of time training with dad – and includes a capoeira fighter, a pair of vampiric ninjas and a hulking behemoth armed with a massively oversized sword. Character designs are stunningly inventive and somehow, it just makes perfect sense when the ninjas turn out to have machine guns embedded in the hilts of their katanas. Obviously intended to be the first installment in a series, Death Trance is simply great fun. Welcome back, Tak, we’ve missed you.

—Todd Brown

"…An outrageous spectacle of unique settings and offbeat characters combined for one hell of an action packed multi-genre entry" — Michelle Lee, DREADCENTRAL.COM

Website

http://www.deathtrance.us/

Credits

Director: Yuji Shimomura
Screenplay: Yuji Shimomura, Seiji Chiba, Shinichi Fujita, Junya Kato
Cast: Tak Sakaguchi, Kentaro Seagal, Yoko Fujita, Takamasa Suga, Yuki Takeuchi
Producers: Yoshinori Chiba, John Sirabella
Distributor: Media Blasters