The celebrated Battles Without Honour and Humanity series continues with its second episode, Hiroshima Death Match, setting aside part one protagonist Shôzô Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) to follow a side story showcasing genre icons Sonny Chiba (The Street Fighter) and Meiko Kaji (Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion). Hiroshima, 1950. Demobilised kamikaze pilot Shôji Yamanaka (Kinya Kitaôji) is released from prison and finds himself hungry and broke. Following a bust up with a local gang, he earns the psychotic wrath of local underboss Ôtomo (Chiba), but Yamanaka’s suicidal impulses are soon put to good use as a hitman for another gang, befriending series hero Shôzô Hirono in the process. Despite a budding but forbidden romance with the boss’s niece (Kaji), Yamanaka’s instability and recklessness soon begin to make him a dangerous liability. Taking an even more fatalistic turn than the series’ original entry, Hiroshima Death Match tells the story of the ultimate loser, based on a true story uncovered by screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara while interviewing real-life Hiroshima yakuza for part one. A prosperous era may be dawning for the protagonists, but one with new characters and new grudges to draw them more deeply into its world of blood and betrayal.
Up Next in Yakuza
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Battles Without Honor and Humanity: P...
Moving beyond the true stories dramatized in the first two episodes of the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series, director Kinji Fukasaku and screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara embark on their most complex narrative yet in Proxy War, a multi-character web of alliances and betrayals set against the ...
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Battles Without Honor and Humanity: P...
Continuing the storyline begun in episode three of the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series, Police Tactics sees director Kinji Fukasaku and screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara further depicting the life-and-death struggle of the gangsters of Hiroshima and Kure, even as the rest of Japan is beginni...
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Battles Without Honor and Humanity: F...
The Final Episode of the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series brought a new, more contemporary mood to the film and its characters. The yakuza may be starting to resemble a legitimate business, but director Kinji Fukasaku, working with new screenwriter Kôji Takada, never lets the audience f...
