Action choreographer turned director Yuji Shimomura has become a great favorite around these parts over the past several years. Originally drawing attention as the fight choreographer of cult hit Versus, Shimomura has gone on to have one of the most interesting and consistently entertaining careers of anyone from the Versus crew as he has moved easily from small budget splatter to big budget period action while hitting all stops in between. And in 2005 Shimomura finally took the step behind the camera, directing Versus star Tak Sakaguchi in Death Trance - in my opinion a very under rated and under seen film.
Well, the next twelve months promise to be the year of the Trance-rs. We've already reported on Alien Vs Ninja, the new feature directed by Death Trance co-writer Seiji Chiba with Shimomura handling the action, and now here is Yassy - a seventeen minute short directed by Shinichi Fujita, another Death Trance writer, with Shimomura once again handling the action sequences.
Completely English-friendly, this is obviously a low budget affair but one that refuses to be confined by those limitations. The opening sequence, in particular, is an absolutely fantastic piece of martial arts fantasy and things just keep rolling from there. The film has turned up online segmented into two parts on YouTube but Shimomura was also kind enough to supply us with a single file, high res version, which you will find below.
Well, the next twelve months promise to be the year of the Trance-rs. We've already reported on Alien Vs Ninja, the new feature directed by Death Trance co-writer Seiji Chiba with Shimomura handling the action, and now here is Yassy - a seventeen minute short directed by Shinichi Fujita, another Death Trance writer, with Shimomura once again handling the action sequences.
Completely English-friendly, this is obviously a low budget affair but one that refuses to be confined by those limitations. The opening sequence, in particular, is an absolutely fantastic piece of martial arts fantasy and things just keep rolling from there. The film has turned up online segmented into two parts on YouTube but Shimomura was also kind enough to supply us with a single file, high res version, which you will find below.
No direct download? Highly disappointing.
It's a HUGE file for downloading ... my bandwidth can't support it and I don't imagine theirs can, either.
As luck would have it,
http://www.arthit.jp/yassy_tokuho/yassy.mov
That link works for viewing but not for downloading ...
Ah, Quicktime reference movies. Blast from the past
http://www.arthit.jp/yassy_tokuho/yassy-desktop.m4v
Not bad at all.
However-...
*Spoilers*
The ending was not just preordained by the set-up at the beginning, but was obvious about 4 minutes in...
Not to say that i didn't enjoy, and that the curve balls thrown in later in the piece were foreseen by this viewer.
The beginning credit sequence was overlong-even though very technically proficient given the means of production.
Actresses and Actors were quite capable. Fight Choreography was amazing given the budget.
Not bad, but a bit casually surreal with to many artifact edit points which gave away the ending.
This was Ten times better than Matrix 3!!!
Happy holidays, all.