Director: Kinji
Fukasaku
Notable Cast: Bunta
Sugawara, Tomisaburo Wakayama, Reiko Ike, Nobuo Kaneko, Sanae Nakahara, Kunie
Tanaka, Shingo Yamashiro, Jo Shishido
Kinji Fukasaku’s intense and impressively crafted original Battles Without Honor and Humanity
series was perhaps the epic highlight of his career with dense character
builds, massive gangster plotting, and gritty execution of striking effectiveness.
It was also notably popular with theater goers in the mid-1970s that pulled in
some serious box office revenue. So it’s perhaps not all that surprising that
Toei would eventually want to keep it running. By eventually, I mean that the
first entry of the New Battles Without
Honor and Humanity trilogy would be released the same year as the fifth
installment of the original series. Toei and Fukasaku didn’t waste any time, I
suppose. This new chapter of the series, with no connection to the original
five, would see the director and new writers Fumio Konami and Misao Arai start
to take the franchise in a new direction with three unconnected stories using
many of the same principal cast members from the original series as new
characters with new stories to tell under the banner. The results, while
intriguing, are mixed and don’t nearly hold a candle to the original run. The
first film of the series has its merits and stands on its own decently well,
but considering some of the phenomenal films that Fukasaku released in this
period it does seem to be a step back in quality which should be noted even if
fans are certain to find plenty of enjoyment out of them.