New Japanese film reviews appear every last Friday of the month.

Bakko Youkaiden Kibakichi ***

This ambitious low-budget flick tries to bring the world of traditional Japanese monsters - like those in Shigeru Mizuki's Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro - to life as a live-action samurai movie. Directed by special-makeup-effects expert Tomo Haraguchi, it's a striking entertainment that combines swordplay, cartoonish action, impressive yet sometimes cheap makeup effects, anachronisms, western cliches, and some stylish dramatic sequences. Ryuji Harada plays Kibakichi, a lone swordsman and gambler who turns up in a desolate village. The boss of the gambling den Kentaro Shimizu hires him as a bodyguard against a fearsome quartet of baddies in Matrix-fashion long coats and armed with Gatling guns. Geisha turn into giant carnivorous spiders, samurai change into werewolves, and skulls on sticks prance around in a charnel house. Great for people who like this sort of thing.

Zebraman *****

The prolific Takashi Miike opens yet another movie this month, and it's very different from his usual gore-drenched yakuza operas: a superhero comedy for the whole family. This is nonstop fun, a well-written, fully developed comedy that works the comic potential of a sad loser obsessed with a long-forgotten TV superhero. Yakuza V-cinema star Sho Aikawa plays a meek teacher whose students and family ignore him. Obsessed by the Zebraman, he makes his own costume and runs about the neighborhood at night righting wrongs. Tacky but wacky CGs add to the film's charm (the aliens look a lot like the ones in Tim Burton's Invasion from Mars movie). Aikawa plays it straight, with an earnestness and shyness that is consistently funny, and he is given good support by Kyoka Suzuki, as the mother of one of his students. Miike directs with a workmanlike efficiency, keeps the tempo up, and shows a fine sense of comic timing in the editing. Miike's best film yet.

Heat *

This yakuza movie tries to inject new blood in a tired and fading genre. Directed by Kenji Yokoi, who favors smokily backlit set ups and Japanese hiphop, this one has the usual mayhem as cool young chimpira (punk) Shinji Kasahara takes on the gangs in the multiracial Shinjuku underground. The young punks in this film sneer and posture with all the attitude they can muster, but still look like a gang of hosts concerned about mussing their hair or creasing their suits. Kasahara is particularly vain, so cool he doesn't even put out his cigarette as he impassively humps a hooker to orgasm in a love hotel. V-cinema stalwarts Kenichi Endo and Susumu Terajima show the youths how it should be done.

Shibuya Kwaidan 1 and 2 **

The Japanese horror movie industry continues to eat itself with such regularity and profusion, it's a wonder anybody bothers anymore. This sounds like a modern take on the famous Yotsuya Kwaidan, but is closer in tone to Big Slaughter Club or Suicide Club. In Kei Horie's double bill, most of the victims are cute Shibuya teenage girls - played by Maki Horikata, Asami Mizukawa, Fumina Hara, etc. - meeting grisly ends in the most innocuous places: changing rooms, elevators, cars, etc. Part one starts out with a picnic in the country, where some callow youths behead a stone statue for a laugh. Meanwhile, back in town, schoolgirls talk of a magical coin locker that answers prayers - an urban myth that is explored in Part 2, when it is revealed that a coin-locker baby is out for revenge. Not much really happens most of the time, but both films deliver some creepy shocks near the end - if you can be bothered to sit around waiting for them.

Fukurou **

Famous for his 1968 classic Onibaba, 92-year-old veteran Kaneto Shindo returns with The Owl. It's a peculiarly old-fashioned black comedy, and keeps a languid musical tempo that sets it apart from modern MTV filmmaking. Set almost entirely in one-room, it has a very theatrical feel, further enhanced by the rather overblown acting of its heroines Shinobu Otake (who won Best Actress at Moscow for her scenery chomping) and Ayumi Ito. A starving mother and daughter, the last surviving inhabitants of distant village, open a knocking shop and gleefully murder all the lonely men who come for sex and special home-brewed shochu. Shindo shows us a parade of men getting serviced, each one dying while foaming at the mouth and neighing, snorting, chirping or bellowing. Onibaba remade as a black farce for the stage, this is one for fans of cinema from another age.

Joshu Sasori: Kemono Beya (video) *****

Sexploitation and arthouse come together in this unclassifiable genre flick from 1973 by Shunya Ito. Starring the incomparable Meiko Kaji, owner of the most furious glare in Japanese film history (she can even outstare Riki Takeuchi), this is the third in the popular series and starts with Kaji, nicknamed Sasori or Scorpion, caught and handcuffed to cop Mikio Narita on a subway train. She escapes by hacking off his arm and fleeing through the Tokyo streets with the severed limb still dangling from her wrist! The Scorpion holes up with a troubled hooker and helps her take on her vicious pimps and their brutal madam Reisen Li, a goth old dame who keeps crows as pets. Meanwhile, the one-armed cop is still on her trail, and when Kaji hides out in the Tokyo sewers, he smokes her out with a gasoline inferno. It may be schlocky sexploitation, but this is played with a passion and intensity that puts modern Japanese cinema to shame.