"killing the killers." simultaneously playful and gruesome yakuza update on Yojimbo with a very stylish focus on the con; the intense theatrics (expressed here by suzuki in wild camera moves and striking compositions layered with colors and depth) of playing both sides until you don't know which way is up and now there are a bunch of bodies on the ground.

Not as many twists and turns as I was maybe hoping for, but this is another tight yakuza crime movie. The colours instantly set it apart from many others around the same time, even is sometimes it seems like they are a little over saturated. There is a jazzy score that keeps Youth of the Beast moving at an enjoyable, and sometimes chaotic, pace.

“A promise to you is nothing”. Yojimbo in a world where there’s no trace of honor left, even our ronin instigator is nothing but another thug. Suzuki at his most blunt and angry. There’s no victims here, just more and more violence.

Suzuki's first prank? my favorite shot is a woman being whipped, the wounds on her back the same deep red as the lush carpet she's prostrate on, as if the color was bleeding right through her.

Suzuki's constant technical progress and controlled cinematic techniques along with Jô Shishido's imposing, self-controlled and yet undeniably badass machismo attitude constitute one of the most aggressive, entertaining and relentlessly violent crime films of the 1960s in the middle of both the Japanese New Wave and the director's improving career. With amazing action sequences, longer-lasting camera shots, Wes Anderson-like camera movements (even if I dislike the director), and effectively complimentary dramatic subplots and a morally empathizing story, the film successfully plays the Yojimbo card and takes all events and revelations to the mandatory identification card of the director: a culminating climax which explosiveness and aftermath could be even considered a worthy predecessor of John Woo's Cantonese gunmageddons (particularly, A Better Tomorrow II [1987] came to mind).

93/100

Man Suzuki straight up speedran the back to back "jazziest, lightest, and straight up fucking coolest movie of all time" world record from the previous title holder (which is this) to Tokyo Drifter in a matter of only three years. It’s no wonder that guys like Refn and Lanthimos worship Suzuki because for making movies where style IS substance, he’s the best that’s ever done it.

Obviously a lot of directors have taken after Suzuki’s maximalism (Sono, Woo, Tarantino, my main man Kaizô Hayashi), but few of them feel touched with the same arch sense of playfulness (at least, not to quite the same degree). Here it feels like he’s picking up where Nick Ray’s 50’s works left off and not only amplifying everything to fever pitch but also applying the avant-melodrama form to an action film (I mean, the man named a movie “Pistol Opera” for god’s sake). The opening 20 minutes feel like flexing even by Suzukian standards. I miss Jo Shishido like you wouldn’t believe!

"All I care about is guns." A deconstruction of the yakuza genre avant la lettre, tossing arbitrary and self-flattering codes of honor out the window and replaces them with complete brutality. The only operating procedure here is that the highest bidder wins, at least until you tear through him for an extra buck as well. Radiant colors and precise framing make spellbinding images in every shot (I was especially taken with one of two men standing water's edge in a heavy rainstorm, small flashes of yellow on barbed wire fence poles marking the only real color save for the blaze of lighting that gives the otherwise inky shot a hazy, radioactive glow). Suzuki is already making plot scattered and hard to follow, but in this case it's all to keep focus on the unpredictable, capricious violence erupting at all times between thugs. The seed for all of Takashi Miike's yakuza movies, a brutal grotesque.

Triple-crosses, soundproof rooms, screeching junkies, ill-fitting hats, venetian razors, psychedelic interludes, kittycat make-outs, mobsters in pantyhose, insecure yakuza, and many, many cigarettes. This is action-stuffed, bizarrely funny and as slick as 1963 crime flicks come. In a better world, Joe Shishido would be up on collegiate assholes' dorm room walls right alongside Scarface.

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Too high to follow plot but I had a great time

Beautiful, beautiful stuff. But it is so much more than just a collection of beautiful images. Seijun Suzuki did for film what Oakly Hall did for the modern novel: essentially create the Urtext for all that came after. Did Arthur Penn see this film? I'd like to think so. Did Jean Pierre Melville? Of that, I have no doubt. I hadn't noticed that the last scene reflects off that final image from The Searchers where John Wayne walks out of a dark room into a bright doorway. It's almost replicated here, and that is just so fiitting.

The bad guy makes out with a cat

Jō Shishido’s cheeks are in danger of being sliced into Venetian blinds! 

Very excited about the Criterion Channel’s Japanese noir collection.

More than a little silly, featuring the altered cheeks of Joe Shishido and a Japanese Lyle Lovett, Youth of the Beast has a lot of fun with a standard yakuza setup, where a young hot head ex cop looks for revenge. This film pops with color, squirm-worthy violence, and a really good cat.

cheeked-up weirdo convinces self & others that he's acting real slick, but either 1) fucks up every plan, 2) gets beat to shit, or 3) suffers both after causing an ugly amount of bloodshed. Grim yakuza comedy that walks the fine line of groovy fetishization & down'n'out debasement, coming out the other end a dynamic piece of nastiness; whole lotta pointless violence by the oafish self-proclaimed heads of society, surrounding civilians practically walking over their corpses like decomposing rats underneath a subway grate, out of sight, out of mind.

yo don't make me get really into 60s yakuza cinema, i fuckin will, don't tempt me motherfucker.

I would very much like to make a film like Seijun Suzuki does

Not as many twists and turns as I was maybe hoping for, but this is another tight yakuza crime movie. The colours instantly set it apart from many others around the same time, even is sometimes it seems like they are a little over saturated. There is a jazzy score that keeps Youth of the Beast moving at an enjoyable, and sometimes chaotic, pace.

This is now my favorite Seijun Suzuki film...

60s Suzuki is aces, man.
One day I'd like to watch a Joe Shishido film and not be focused on his cheeks the entire time.