13 Steps of Maki: The Young Aristocrats (Makoto Naito, 1975)

KARATE LADY RETURNS!

Amid the success of The Street Fighter and Sister Street Fighter series, Toei Company had found a new star in Etsuko Shihomi and had created its first female martial arts hero, one that was tough, virtuous, and courageous. In 1975, Shihomi found herself in possibly her sleaziest film: 13 Steps of Maki: The Young Aristocrats, a pinky violence genre mash-up that mixed girl gangs, women in prison, yakuza, and martial arts action into a single sensational movie. As Maki Hyuga, Shihomi is the leader of the Stray Cats girl gang, fighting for justice against evil gangsters and stuck up rich girls. Though her karate skills are unsurpassed, Maki is framed and thrown into a sadistic women’s prison. Will she escape and take her revenge?

Making its worldwide Blu-ray debut, 13 Steps of Maki: The Young Aristocrats is paired here with Norifumi Suzuki’s The Great Chase, an oddball action flick released the same year and starring Etsuko Shihomi as a race car driver moonlighting as a secret agent. Filled with unceasing action, outlandish situations, and plenty of female resistance to male domination, 13 Steps to Maki and The Great Chase reveal new shades to Etsuko Shihomi’s stardom and stand as spectacular examples of Japanese exploitation in the 1970s.

Special Edition Contents:

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation of 13 Steps of Maki: The Young Aristocrats and The Great Chase
• Original uncompressed Japanese mono audio on both films
• Optional newly translated English subtitles on both films
• New video interviews with actor Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba and director Makoto Naito
• Theatrical trailers for both films
• Stills and poster galleries for both films
• Reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by Kungfubob O’Brien

The Super Inframan (Shan Hua, 1975)

HONG KONG’S ORIGINAL MONSTER MASH!

When the sinister Princess Elzebub and her demonic minions ascend from the centre of the Earth to conquer Hong Kong and then the rest of the world, only Professor Liu Ying-de and the Science Headquarters stand in their way. Danny Lee stars as a young man transformed into Inframan, the sensational superhero made beyond bionics! With solar rays and thunderbolt fists, he sets out to vanquish humankind’s enemies forever in this fantastical story of rubber-suited villainy and plastic armor heroism.

Featuring not just one but two Bruceploitation stars (Danny Lee and Bruce Le), the mind-boggling fight choreography of Lan-Shan Ho (The Way of the Dragon), and costumes and creature designs by Ekisu Productions (Kamen Rider), The Super Inframan is a singular tokusatsu action experience from the legendary Shaw Brothers Studio.

SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS

• Brand New High Definition digital transfer
• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
• Original Mandarin mono audio, plus 2.0 and 5.1 Dolby Surround Options, and English mono audio dub track (uncompressed LPCM)
• New English subtitles
• New interviews with actors Danny Lee, Bruce Le, and Terry Lau
• Introduction by Mystery Science Theater 3000 producer Joel Hodgson
• Director Jörg Buttgereit on The Super Inframan
• Original theatrical trailer
• Image gallery
• FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Booklet featuring writing on the film by Damon Foster and August Ragone and interview with director Shan Hua

SFFF Day 4 – Go Big and Go Home

The Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival’s final day was even more massive than expected. With a packed program and an extra short film (moved from the previous day due to a technical issue), there was little downtime between screenings and the Festival’s final midnight show started late and wrapped well past 2:30 a.m. Those that saw the marathon day of screenings to its bleary end enjoyed without question the SFFF’s best block of films (plus some welcome giveaways for lucky attendees).

SFFF Day 3 – Actually, They’re All Labyrinths

There’s a running joke in Bill Watterson’s Dave Made a Maze (2017), a film about a man who builds a massive cardboard maze (bigger inside than out) and then gets trapped within it. As Dave’s friend Gordon (Adam Busch) repeatedly points out, the maze is full of traps, making it, in fact, a labyrinth. Day 3 of the Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival offered a disparate collection of films – a comedy recounting a slacker’s epic quest in a DIY fortress; a trippy, coming-of-age, prom night parable; a genre-mixing, science fiction blockbuster; and a dreamy descent into a housewife’s trauma and a cult’s terrifying prophecy. Each offers its own twists and turns, finding new dangers as they progress through corrugated caverns, genre conventions, and layered realities. In fact, they’re all labyrinths in their own ways.

SFFF Day 2 – Chillin’ with the Villains

The Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival went globe-trotting to start Day 2. The “Drawn from Around the World” block of animated shorts offered some enthralling works. Many conveyed a sad or lamenting poignancy. Keiro (Tatiana Jusewycz, Benoît Leloup, Franck Menigoz, Zoé Nérot, and Charlotte Poncin, 2016) traced a girl’s journey to adulthood and its effect on the giant creature that accompanies her, Beyond the Books (Jérôme Battistelli, Mathilde Cartigny, Nicolas Evain, Maéna Paillet, Robin Pelissier, and Judith Wahler, 2017) envisioned the highly detailed collapse of an impossibly immense library, the Spanish short Dead Horses (Marc Riba and Anna Solanas, 2016) revealed the brutality of war from a child’s perspective and amid fabric devastation, and the Indian film Schirkoa (Asian Shukla, 2017) imagined political strife in a world where citizens wear bags and boxes on their heads. Others brought the funny, like Daniel Sterlin-Altman’s Hi, It’s Your Mother (2017), about motherhood, blood loss, and middle class living told in crude claymation, and Deuspi (Megacomputer, 2017), a very short work about a pair of astonishingly inept stick-up men and their hilarious fates.

Master of the Flying Guillotine (Jimmy Wang Yu, 1976)

IT’S A MEAN MACHINE – CUTS YOUR HEAD OFF CLEAN!

This classic martial arts death match pits two wuxia icons against each other – the famed One-Armed Boxer (Hong Kong superstar Jimmy Wang Yu) versus a blind assassin (veteran character actor Kam Kong) and his legendary Flying Guillotine. Set in 1730, during the early part of the Ching dynasty, ethnic Chinese Hans formed bands of rebels to fight their Manchurian oppressors. After the One-Armed Boxer, a stoic kung fu expert and Han revolutionary, disposes of two would-be assassins, their master, a formidable blind emissary of the Ching posing as a Buddhist monk, swears revenge, searching out every one-armed martial artist and snatching their heads with his tethered decapitation device called the Flying Guillotine.

Arguably the most famous Hong Kong martial arts film of the post-Bruce Lee, pre-Jackie Chan period, this independently-produced classic is more popular than ever, with a legacy extending to films like Kill Bill and video games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. With its wild, fantasy face-offs and its cosmic Krautrock soundtrack, Master of the Flying Guillotine is undoubtedly a film worthy of losing your head over!

Special Features:

• New High Definition digital transfer
• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
• Original Mandarin version and English dub track (uncompressed on the Blu-ray Disc)
• New optional English subtitle translation
• Audio commentary with film critics Andy Klein, Wade Major, and Alex Luu
• Interviews with star/director Jimmy Wang Yu
• Spinning Vengeance – director Quentin Tarantino on Master of the Flying Guillotine
• Design for Decapitation – Grant Imahara on the mechanics of the Flying Guillotine
• Trailers
• Reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork
• Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Craig Lines