New Battles without Honor and Humanity

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Synopsis

1950. In Hiroshima's Kure City, ambitious yakuza soldier Makio Miyoshi (Bunta Sugawara) botches an attempt on the life of a rival boss, and is sent to prison for eight years. In the interim, his Yamamori gang benefits from the country's newfound prosperity and extends its underworld power When he's released, Makio must mediate a split between the boss and his own bonded brother, Aoki (Lone Wolf & Cub's Tomisaburo Wakayama), which threatens to erupt into violence at any time, even though Makio longs to embark on a more stable life with a beautiful, ethnically-Korean hostess (Reiko lke) who's fallen for him. But when Boss Yamamori (Nobuo Kaneko) begs him to kill Aoki, Makio is faced with a crisis of honor which calls into question his loyalty to the gang. Kinj Fukasaku's immediate follow-up to his immensely popular five-film series is a darker, more violent re-telling of the original story, with a new cast of characters fighting to reach the top of the crime world of postwar Japan.

Picture 6/10

Arrow Video presents Kinji Fukasaku’s New Battles without Honor and Humanity on Blu-ray in a new dual-format edition, available exclusively in their New Battles without Honor and Humanity Trilogy box set. The film receives a 1080p/24hz high-definition encode on a dual-layer disc, presented in its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1. Arrow is using a master supplied to them from Toei.

These Toei masters can wildly vary though usually fall on the end of “okay” and that’s about where this is. What we get is a fairly mediocre presentation of which my praise would be limited to “it’s not awful.” It’s a gritty film with a fairly dirty look to it, with only the occasional burst of colour, so I wasn’t expecting an image that pops but even then it still underwhelms. I think this is mostly caused by the fairly milky black levels, limiting details, particularly in the shadows, and there is a washed out look a lot of the time. The image is also rarely all that sharp, with only an above-average amount of detail.

There’s a modest amount of grain and it’s rendered fairly well, though the image can still have a slight digital look to it at times. Impressively the restoration has been quite thorough I thought, and damage popping up isn’t all that common.

It looks okay, certainly better than DVD (at least the DVD here, which utilizes the same master), but it would be nice if Arrow could work their own magic on these titles.

Audio 6/10

The film comes with a lossless linear PCM 1.0 Japanese monaural track. It is what it is and gets the job done fine enough. It’s not terribly dynamic and comes off flat, but dialogue sounds clear and the sound effects, though maybe a bit tinny at times, sound fine enough.

(Notes open the film indicating that at around the 53-minute mark there is a line of dialogue, apparently involving a slur against Koreans, that has been edited it. It also says all known copies of the film contain this edit. It is noticeable since there is a very obvious gap in one character’s spoken lines but it’s not all that big a deal.)

Extras 3/10

Arrow spreads special features over the three films in the box set. New Battles without Honor and Humanity only comes with one significant feature, an introduction by Fukasaku biographer Sadao Yamane. For less than 10-minute Yamane talks a little about what led to this film after Fukasaku finished the original five film series (basically the other films made so much money Toei wanted the series to continue). But Fukasaku went in a bit of a different direction with the new trilogy, creating three films that didn’t have anything to do with one another. I still haven’t seen the original films (I missed out on the original set now going for ridiculous prices) so this was a nice little primer, and it was a relief to discover I didn’t need to see the original films to enjoy these ones (though I did learn that only one actor reprised their role from the original series, linking them in at least a minor way).

The disc then closes with the teaser trailer and the theatrical trailer, which both feature a lot of shooting.

It offers an okay introduction to the series but that’s about it.

Closing

Not a stellar looking or sounding presentation but it will do.

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