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

Gokudo no Onnatachi: Jo-en ****

Directed by Hajime Hashimoto, this latest installment in the "Yakuza Wives" series is a classic. Hashimoto goes for a smoldering '70s intensity, and does the old "Sasori" trick of zooming in on the white-hot glaring eyeballs of not one woman, but two babes burning with righteous vengeance! When a gang boss is rubbed out in a suspicious "accident," grieving widow Reiko Takashima, looking regal in her black kimono and haughty stare, more than holds her own against the Kobe syndicate members jockeying for her territory. Aya Sugimoto, who made such a memorable impression in Takashi Ishii's "Hana to Hebi" last year, is a gun-toting, tiger-tattooed woman on the trail of her deadbeat Korean gangster husband. As usual with the genre, the film takes its time getting started with a seemingly endless exposition of gang rivalries, but once Takashima and Sugimoto get their true enemies in their sights - a snakelike Yutaka Matsushige (the Christopher Walken of Japan!) and gangster scion, hostess-club owner Ai Maeda - events start moving with an operatic, tragic beauty. The final showdown with a sword-wielding Takashima and pistol-waving Sugimoto in a den of sneering vipers is totally awesome. Kakkoi ya de!

Inu no Eiga ***

In pet-crazy Japan, it seems dog movies are guaranteed to succeed at the box office. After last year's "Sayonara Kuro" and "Quill" here's "Inu no Eiga" (The Dog Movie) poking its snout in your groin. A collection of short, funny, fuzzy films centered on dogs and their owners, the sequences are all over the place, and in all genres, but structured around a sweet tale of Pooch and his lonely owner Shido Nakamura. In between, there's a silly musical segment with competitive dog owners in the park singing and dancing; a broad satire on the advertising industry wherein a cool dog-food commercial is hijacked by client and talent so that it has to be handled with a pooper scooper; a shaggy dog story about the man who invented Bowlingual; and a romantic comedy where a mongrel re-unites a struggling actor and a selfish woman. The funniest sequence is a dog romance between a lugubrious French bulldog (voiced with plenty of lugub by Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) and a Chihuahua! The determined efforts of a strong cast including Yuki Amami, Eriko Watanabe, Jay Kabira, Katsumi Takahashi just go to prove WC Fields' advice about never working with animals.

Chakushin Ari 2 *

The Asian horror boom peters out here with a totally perfunctory sequel to Takashi Miike's shocker from 2004. With a hack TV director at the helm, this is a mess of sketchy characters, nonsensical plot twists, bizarre leaps of logic, and plain shoddy acting. When the creepy ring tone starts again, disheveled cop Renji Ishibashi (from the original film) is tracked down by driven reporter Asaka Seto and hooked up with next potential victim Mimula. I must have dozed off, because suddenly Seto and Mimula are in rural Taiwan, tracking down a "rural legend" to its roots in a derelict well, no sorry, a ruined mine. The reporter hides her own trauma - her twin sister was killed after answering a rural public phone - and she acts traumatized by wearing the same drab gray pantsuit throughout the film, and frowning hard to turn her face into an emoticon. The usual contingent of strange deaths, spooky children, and women trying to crawl out of mobile-phone screens. To misquote John Donne: "Ask not for whom the cell rings, it rings for thee."

Tetsujin 28 Go *

This live-action remake of a well-loved animation from the '60s about a small boy and a giant robot is a huge disappointment. Director Shin Togash, of the indie films "Gomen" and "Unbalance," seems completely out-to-sea directing save-the-world heroics, battling giant robots, mad scientists and Tokyo crowds on the verge of turning ugly. Sosuke Ikematsu just looks over-directed and constantly near tears as the bullied son of crazed physicist Hiroshi Abe. When a naughty giant black robot ties a knot in Tokyo Tower (I admit, that was way cool!), the Japanese government forces Sosuke to resurrect his dead father's rusty giant robot Tetsujin 28 and take up the remote control once again. Sosuke must battle the evil black robot created by Teruyuki Kagawa, who looks like phantom 4th member of '80s techno-band YMO and comes complete with leggy groupie Ayako Kawahara. The climactic showdown between the robots is a complete letdown: instead of awesome weapons and secret laser beams, the two tin-can lummoxes duke it out, endlessly, clumsily, and with much lumbering and clanking. Back to the smelting pit, the pair of you!

Nudo no Yoru (DVD) ****

This early gangster film by Takashi Ishii, manga artist turned film director, is one of his best. A stylish exploitation director, he went on to write and direct "Gonin," "Kuro no Tenshi," "Freeze Me," "Hana to Hebi," etc. In this gangster noir black comedy, an abused Ginza hostess Kimiko Yo stabs and kills her brutal pimp Jinpachi Nezu in the first scene and then calls on odd-job man Naoto Takenaka to help clean up the mess. Takenaka and Yo try to stay one step ahead of the vengeful gangsters - a task made difficult because they are dragging the yakuza's rotting corpse around Tokyo in a very large trunk. An unlikely romance blossoms between battered woman and hardened loner as they hole up in his very '90s pad, a spacious empty apartment lit by moonlight and neon from nearby Kabukicho buildings, and await the arrival of the dead gangster's vicious gay lover (Kippei Shiina in an outrageous Versace shirt).