Beautiful Beast
Kaori Shimamura is the beautiful beast in this Japanese "breasts and bullets" thriller, playing a Chinese assassin in Japan assigned to take out a yakuza boss and his associates. Along the way she falls in love with the ex-yakuza barman who becomes her guardian angel, bonds with a young Chinese woman trapped in a life of sexual slavery, and finally tracks down the vicious thug who murdered her little sister. Like theZero Womanfilms,Beautiful Beastis directed with a terse, tight, grimly serious style, and a soiled morality and doomed fate underlie the mix of slick violence, hot erotic interludes, and unsettling sadism. It's enough to lift the film above the morass of Japanese feral femme thrillers, if just barely.--Sean Axmaker