We’ll be gladly helping share the mantle going forward as Media Blasters continues to project its predominantly Asian niche anime and live-action releases. The company, which ran successfully for fifteen years until tax complications and other business hamperings all but endangered its longevity, had been quietly awakening among its target consumer base with DVD-on-demand releases for the last two years, and to its credit, is shaping up for an even more formidable show of fan service in the past year.
As of Thursday, according to Dawn Of The Discs, one title on deck for Media Blasters that’s reportedly begun prepping a Spring Blu-Ray release is of Ryuhei Kitamura’s 2004 sci-fi action horror, Alive. Starring Hideo Sakaki, Based on Tsutomu Takahashi’s 1999 manga, Alive reunites Kitamura with several cast members from Versus, namely Hideo Sakaki who takes the lead. In the film, Sakaki plays Tenshu, a death row prisoner whose humanity comes into question after surviving a bizzare execution. Forced to contend with murdering his girlfriend and her rapists, Tenshu must also mitigate with being subject to the prison’s seedy experiment involving a murderous gangster, an elusive paranormal entity that can imbue its host with superhuman abilities, and a mysterious woman who stands as its current host.
Alive came at just the right time for Kitamura too, having earned the major ceremony he got from festivals for his work on Versus. Compared to its predecessor though – and between the two cuts – the film presents a more of a slow-burn mindbending psychological thriller aimed at emulating the more horrific, graphic elements stemming from striking manga imagery. Kitamura tends to flex much more on these cerebral aspects of his films at times, and provided you’re patient enough, you’re rewarded with plenty of spectacle and thrills along the way.
As for whether or not this film is a keeper, I would only say as much for collectors of Kitamura’s films. Kitamura’s arrival onto the global film scene occured as he rode the subgenre wave of Asia Extreme cinema, standing among the likes of Takashi Miike, Shinsuke Sato, Park Chan-wook and Kim Jee-woon to name a few. For this, Alive stands as part of the embodiment of the experience of Asian cinema coming into the new millenium and bearing witness to the DVD craze from wheelhouses like Dragon Dynasty, Hong Kong Legends, Tartan Asia Extreme and of course, Media Blasters and their subsidiaries (my go-to was always Tokyo Shock).
Alive also stars Koyuki (Blood: The Last Vampire), Ryo (Goemon), Tetta Sugimoto (Signal: The Movie), Jun Kunimura (Kate), Bengal (First Love) and Tak Sakaguchi (Rise Of The Machine Girls, Versus). The film is currently dated for an April or May release, so tune back to the site for future updates.
