Tokyo Dragon Chef

My friends at Terracotta Distribution have released the entertaining, quirky and downright crazy Tokyo Dragon Chef from maverick Japanese director and special effects guru, Yoshihiro Nishimura, best known for creating his unique style of extreme, comic-strip violence in films like Tokyo Gore Police and Helldriver. It’s worth remembering these titles, among many others, were a key part of the cult DVD market in the early 2000’s. In fact, I mislaid my copy of Tokyo Gore Police because I lost track of who was borrowing it!

Nishimura’s new film is very different, however, and far more lighthearted, slapstick and quirky, but if you’re a fan of madcap cinema which falls well outside genre norms, you’re encouraged to give it a look.

Dubbed Tampopo meets The Blues Brothers, the eccentric plot of Tokyo Dragon Chef begins with two retired Yakuza gangsters, Ryu (Yasukaze Motomiya) and Tatsu (Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi), opening a ramen restaurant and becoming an overnight social media sensation, thanks to the unique and delicious recipe they developed while still in prison.

Meanwhile, a mysterious upstart gang is taking down every Yakuza family, one by one. The chefs come out of retirement one last time to mount an attack and stop this new gang from gaining total domination over the whole of Tokyo.

While being a fan of hardline genre cinema which sticks to its guns and doesn’t deviate, I do regularly turn to those unusual films which avoid formulaic convention. Relevant side note, I’m a major fan of “Beat” Takeshi Kitano’s hard-boiled Yakuza films, but I love his quirky comedies too, which I was actually surprised to discover aren’t for everyone. So, I love Violent Cop and Hana-bi, but Getting Any? is a cult classic! There’s a playful, slapstick silliness which I’m fully onboard with.

So if you appreciate oddball comedy, or don’t ming going into something half-blind while having your horizons expanded (or ripped apart altogether), this is for you. Particularly from a filmmaker like Nishimura, who is best-known for popularising a certain kind of pulpy action-horror, you may be surprised - and hopefully pleasantly so. At its heart, his new film has the core ingredients of guns and gangsters, but wrapped in eccentric comedy, cooking, social media satire and several musical numbers. Admittedly not every moment hits the mark, but it feels enjoyable and entertaining, which is more than can be said for a lot of undemanding, by-the-numbers action cinema, so I’m all for a break from convention.

If it’s not to your taste, that’s totally fine. However, as I’ve become older I feel more in tune with artists and stories that stand apart, rather than rehashing the same old thing, whether that’s action, horror, or comedy. And even if it doesn’t always work, at least there’s a uniqueness. You won’t soon forget it.

I also recently joined the easternKicks podcast to discuss this one in more detail, plus another new Japanese film, Tak Sakaguchi’s Crazy Samurai: 400 x 1, aka Crazy Samurai Musashi. Tak Sakaguchi, or Tak (as he’s often abbreviated) is also a frequent collaborator with Nishimura and plays a short cameo in this, so that second discussion threaded in nicely. If you’re interested, you can listen to the easternKicks podcast episode 22 here and get on board for some crazy, comedic fun.

In the meantime, check out Tokyo Dragon Chef for an entertaining, inventive dose of zany musical comedy.

Tokyo Dragon Chef is out now from Terracotta Distribution