10 Gangster Movies That Mess With Your Brain
2. Yakuza Apocalypse (2015)
Last year's Takashi Miike production, Yakuza Apocalypse, more than lives up to the title. Kamuira is a vampire yakuza oyabun who can only feed on the blood of the innocent, passing on his undead might to his most loyal follower Kageyama when he's destroyed by the international syndicate he abandoned years ago.
Kageyama is a wannabe, desperate to be yakuza but allergic to tattoo ink and roundly mocked for it by his peers. Becoming a vampire yakuza lord changes things quite a bit for him, but with great power comes great responsibility - and that means avenging his mentor.
All of which sets him in the path of apocalypse...
Faced with revolt, the foreign cartel summons an unstoppable martial arts monster: a man in a frog mascot costume, the worlds toughest terrorist, who in turn summons an end-of-the-world bringing kaiju monster that looks suspiciously like a much (much) larger version of him.
There's no one better than Takashi Miike in making the sublime ridiculous and vice versa, and this is a throwback to some of his earlier, silly work - just with a veteran's sensibility and a higher budget.
Yakuza Apocalypses' unique, lunatic charm is that it plays the stupidity completely straight, and mercilessly takes the mickey out of the rest. Takashi Miike is still one of a kind.