1999 • Japan • Directed by Takashi Miike
Beginning with an explosive, six-minute montage of sex, drugs and violence, and ending with a phallus-headed battle robot taking flight, Takashi Miike's unforgettable Dead or Alive Trilogy features many of the director's most outrageous moments set alongside some of his most dramatically moving scenes. Made between 1999 and 2002, the Dead or Alive films cemented Miike's reputation overseas as one of the most provocative enfants terrible of Japanese cinema, yet also one of its most talented and innovative filmmakers.In Dead or Alive, tough gangster Ryuichi (Riki Takeuchi) and his ethnically Chinese gang make a play to take over the drug trade in Tokyo's Shinjuku district by massacring the competition. But he meets his match in detective Jojima (Show Aikawa), who will do everything to stop them.
Up Next in The Miike Collection
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Dead or Alive 2: Tôbôsha
2000 • Japan • Directed by Takashi Miike
Dead or Alive 2: Birds casts Aikawa and Takeuchi together again, but as new characters, a pair of rival yakuza assassins who turn out to be childhood friends; after a botched hit, they flee together to the island where they grew up, and decide to devote t...
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Dead or Alive: Final
2002 • Japan • Directed by Takashi Miike
In Dead or Alive: Final, Takeuchi and Aikawa are catapulted into a future Yokohama ruled by multilingual gangs and cyborg soldiers, where they once again butt heads in the action-packed and cyberpunk-tinged finale to the trilogy.
As a side note, Dead or...
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Shinjuku Triad Society
1995 • Japan • Directed by Takashi Miike
The first entry in Takashi Miike’s “Black Society Trilogy,” Shinjuku Triad Society burst into cinemas in Japan in 1995 - and announced the birth of a radical new artist in the world of genre filmmaking. Although he had made his debut in 1991, Miike had wo...
