Golgo 13: Kowloon Assignment: 1977, Japan. Starring Sonny Chiba, Callan Leung, Etsuko Shihomi, Emi Shindo, Elaine Sung, Nick Lam Wai Kei, Jerry Ito, Chi-Chung Lee, Yiu Lam Chan, Shu Tong Wong. Directed by Yukio Noda. Written by Takeshi Matsumoto, Nobuaki Nakajima.

Golgo 13: The Professional: 1983, Japan. Starring Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Tetsuro Sagawa, Goro Naya, Kumiko Takizawa. Directed by Osamu Dezaki, Shichiro Kobayashi, Hirokata Takahashi. Written by Takao Saito. Purchase from Amazon.com.

A thrilling part of Animeighties Month!

I don't know if this is the longest, most unfocused, and rambling review of Golgo 13 ever written, but man, it's gotta be close.

They say that it's important to always understand that what you see in the movies does not reflect reality (especially true in documentary filmmaking). In other words, you may believe a man can fly, but you probably shouldn't try it...or should you? Maybe the people who have tried to fly under their own power and plummeted to their death are just the few freaks in the world who can't fly, and the rest of us can...if only we'd try! Point is, although what you see in the movies doesn't always correspond to real life, sometimes you come across a movie that does, in fact, reflect if not the whole of real life, then at least your life. Sitting down to watch Golgo 13: The Professional for the first time in years, I was shocked by how closely the life of the titular globe-trotting assassin reflects my own. Landing in Malta or some other exotic location, shooting some scumbag, collecting my fat wad of cash for a job well done, then heading to my loft in an undisclosed location to make sweet love to whatever woman caught my eye when I was busy pounding down scotch at some seedy strip club bar where I was telling the other broads trying to grab my attention to, "Hit the bricks, baby" -- man, I've been there.

Since I've not written all that much about anime in the past, I do tend in these reviews to throw out a considerable amount of back story and trivia which I'd previously stated I didn't have at my disposal. Apparently, I was wrong about not having it, and I've collected more useless facts than I realized about certain titles over the years. But only certain titles. I have my tastes, and I've always watched anime based on whether or not the title falls within that range of interest, as opposed to watching something simply because it was anime even though it falls outside of my highbrow taste range. Thus, the vast and popular world of things like romantic comedy anime, sports anime, maid/servant anime -- these things are wastelands into which I never wander. I know nothing about them and, frankly, I don't really want to, no matter how many people tell me I should watch Love Hina. Ain't gonna do it. Does it have bad-ass globe-trotting assassins splattering brains all over a high rise building's penthouse window before wandering off the bed some moaning chick who implores him to "pull her trigger, lovingly and softly?" If not, then I ain't interested. I don't want to watch a bunch of doe-eyed little girls in maid costumes serve tea. I'm a hard fighting, hard drinking, hard loving man, like Golgo 13, and I don't have time to waste on weepy "doily anime."


So while I don't know much about a lot of the anime that gets the kids all fired up, I do apparently know more than I realized about anime that does fall within the scope of my interests, and a lot of it is going to come out in big floods during these reviews, because I have a lot of catching up to do. Plus, I'm sort of taking on the double task of reviewing a movie and also trying to summarize the entire trend of anime business and fandom in the 80s and 90s, so things may dovetail into points that seem to have very little to do with the actual movie title at the top of the page. Think of it all as one big long article, though, as properly understanding these films and my reaction to them requires the stage being set properly. This review, for example, will wander through the murky swamp of marketing 80s anime, the history of Golgo 13, Sonny Chiba, and comments about James Bond before finally getting around to saying that the sleazy Golgo 13 movie is pretty much one of the most bad-ass movies ever made, only I will make this point in much more florid and eloquent fashion than saying "this movie is bad-ass."

Although, really, Golgo 13: The Professional is bad-ass.

Plus, you know, it's fun to learn these things so you can use your knowledge of violent 80s anime to impress the gothic Lolitas at the next convention you attend, at least up until the point where they say, "What's Roujin Z?"

I've always handled anime titles less as anime and more just as another example of a certain type of genre of film, mostly because anime is so vast and varied that classifying something as anime and leaving it at that really doesn't give you any idea what to expect -- other than it will probably be animated. During the 1980s, however, and especially in the early 90s, there was a huge push by marketers to sell their newly discovered anime titles as defining the whole of the Japanese animation world. A stock parade of titles were always trotted out as being emblematic of the art form as a whole. Thus an endless procession of "These aren't your father's cartoons!" type of marketing campaigns. It was all wildly misleading of course, nudging one toward presuming that Japanese cartoons were all studies in brain splattering violence and violent tentacle rape (as epitomized by movies like Legend of the Overfiend, Golgo 13, and My Neighbor Totoro). Even a timid foray into anime waters quickly reveals this not to be the case, but you wouldn't know it based on the advertisement. Still, it happened that all the sleazy, gory, disgusting pulp trash was what I loved in both film and literature, so even if I knew there was much more in the world than the evil anime, I was more than happy to reel about in the filth of exploding heads and stony assassins.

This wave of anime was geared largely toward attracting the money of college students, which is an interesting demographic to target considering how much money the average college student has to spend. The hook was, of course, that these were taboo cartoons, crazy shit you wouldn't believe. And frankly, we were happy to buy into it, because a lot of it was crazy shit we couldn't believe. As someone coming from a cult film background peppered with action, horror, and martial arts flicks, much of the zanier anime that was being pushed at the time appealed to me, but it was also obvious that it was by no means a fair sample of the entire anime world. Still, that initial advertising campaign was phenomenally successful in establishing the average American's opinion of what anime (and manga) was: tentacle rape movies. Watching anime made you a pervert. It was dangerous, like listening to Judas Priest records backward.


This was also the first time anime was marketing to U.S. audiences as something distinctly Japanese. Like many my age, I grew up watching Battle of the Planets and Speed Racer, among other shows, as well as live action programs like Ultraman and Space Giants. As a youth, it never once occurred to me that these shows were Japanese. It never even occurred to me for the national origin of entertainment to matter one lick. As far as I knew, all shows and movies fluttered down from a wonderful magical realm built inside the gaseous clouds that enshrouded Venus. All that concerned me was whether or not the shows were fun. I didn't know that they were "different" from other cartoons because I didn't even realize they were "other" from other cartoons, except that they were about cooler things, like spaceships and monsters and karate, and not about lame things, like chubby bears who care about each other and little blue people who never catch on to the fact that Joeky Smurf's presents always explode, but never in a way that causes teeth and eyeballs to fly out in slow motion. And the people who released those shows here went to great lengths to cover up their Japanese origins (as if kids gave a damn -- this persistent idea that kids won't relate to something foreign still baffles me). I don't mean just the dubbing-- one expects that from shows aimed at kids -- but also changing all the names in the credits (because kids are such avid readers of the closing credits for cartoons).

When the big VHS wave hit in the early 90s, there was more of an effort to sell the titles as something strange and exotic and foreign; rather than covering it up, their Japanese origin was exploited and used as something that signified they were different, better, than their American counterparts. The films were often still dubbed, and the original names were often still replaced by American re-dubbers and producers names, but there was no doubt that the fact that these were Japanese cartoons (Japanimation, as they called it) was the big hook. In these early days, one of the pioneers in dumping poorly dubbed "not your father's" cartoons onto the American market was a company called Streamline Pictures.

Streamline, through a deal they arranged with Satan himself, managed to snag most of the high-profile anime titles that came out during the 80s and 90s -- or if they got something low profile, the marketing machine kicked in gear and made it high profile. Streamline was famous for making anime available in the United States, and infamous for providing some of the worst dubbing jobs this side of the Vietamese dub of A Chinese Ghost Story II I once watched, where you could hear conversations in the background, people eating lunch, sneezing, and at one point one of the dubbers yawning when no one was yawning on screen. Streamline's dubs were always technically proficient and artistically dubious, even at their best. For one, they had a tendency to make wholesale changes to the scripts if the mood suited them. For another thing, they tended to make awful acting decisions. Witness, for example, probably their most reviled dub: that of the original American release of Akira, which made some major changes to the story that made it even more convoluted than it already was, and also assumed that all Japanese biker punks would speak with thick Brooklyn accents.

Streamline was truly a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they got a hold of many of the best titles and made them widely available in the United States. On the other hand -- man, Brooklyn accents? And they seemed committed to never releasing anything subtitled, where as other fledgling companies like U.S. Manga, AnimEgo, and Viz would often release a dubbed and a subtitled version. So for many of us, the first time we ever experienced films like Akira and Golgo 13 was via the laughably bad dubbed Streamline editions.

Such was the case for me when I first watched Golgo 13, a feature film adaptation of a long-running Japanese comic book that was aimed primarily at bitter guys in dead-end salaryman jobs who harbored daydreams of being tough-as-nails murderous sex machines but, in reality, were just nerdy guys reading a comic book on the train before they started a day full of kissing their boss's ass and shouting out the company cheer (much like me, except we don't have a company cheer, and I'm reading 60s spy novels). The Golgo 13 comics were created by an enterprising writer named Takao Saito, who got his big break in the business doing manga adaptations of the James Bond stories. Saito's Bond comics were fully licensed components of the James Bond world, but they played fast and loose with the original books, often having very little to do with them other than the title and some character names (basically the same as what would happen to the movies). Under Saito, James Bond became a radically different character in some respects, including being a master of disguise when the Ian Fleming books go to great lengths to point out that Bond absolutely refuses to use disguises.

Regardless of the lack of faithfulness to the Fleming novels, the comics were wildly popular and generally well-received by the average fan. However, the series eventually got canned in 1967 after covering Thunderball, Man with the Golden Gun, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and Live and Let Die. It has been postulated that the fact that the comics were so radically different from the original stories from which they took their name was one of the main reasons for the cancellation -- this would have been shortly before or right around the same time as You Only Live Twice was released as a movie, which was the first Bond film to really differ dramatically from the original novel (Casino Royale doesn't count). More than likely, however, the comics were considered to be original James Bond stories, and after the death of Ian Fleming, his widow was keen to see that no one else continued writing new, original James Bond adventures (we see how well that worked out for her).

Saito's reaction to the cancellation of his Bond series was to keep on writing it anyway, but change the character's name to Duke Togo, aka Golgo 13, a stone cold killer who will off anyone for the right price. Guilty or innocent, male or female, young or old, it didn't matter at all to Golgo 13. Saito's James Bond was drawn to look like Sean Connery (more or less), and anyone who has seen Saito's James Bond will instantly recognize it as being pretty much the same as his design for the mysterious assassin Golgo 13. Over the years, the Golgo 13 stories would get much more explicit than they ever could have under the banner of James Bond, but it's obvious that Golgo 13 is a direct outgrowth of the James Bond stories (with a dash of LUpin III thrown in from time to time), albeit one that's filtered through a gleeful willingness to embrace the increasingly permissive environment of the 1970s.


Free of the shackles of conforming to the Bond character, Saito was able to indulge his every whim and extreme and finally show the people that he, as a writer, was completely insane. Not quite as insane as Kazuo Koike (creator of Crying Freeman and Lone Wolf and Cub, among others), but still plenty nuts. The world of Golgo 13 quickly plumbed the twisted depths of pulp storytelling, serving up a steady stream of wildly popular action stories dripping with gratuitous sex and violence, which as I've said before and will no doubt say again, are the best types of sex and violence. Golgo 13 worked as a throwback to the hardboiled detective fiction of writers like Hammett and Chandler (who often wrote stories that are still surprisingly surreal and twisted) married with the gritty sex and violence of 1970s pop culture. It was pulp trash, through and through, but deliriously cracked in the head and unique in its approach, as opposed to being a simple regurgitation of pulp tropes. It was obvious that Saito had become some sort of sick, mad genius, the comic book creating equivalent of one of his James Bond villains.

The first movie adaptation of Golgo 13 came to us courtesy of a 1977 live action film starring a perfectly cast (in my opinion, anyway) Sonny Chiba and directed by Yukio Noda, who brought the world the 1974 pinky violence exploitation "classic" Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (which later begat that horribly boring series of DTV Zero Woman movies in the 1990s). I shouldn't have to summarize who Sonny Chiba is. If you don't know, that's because you're a new jack chump with no action movie street cred. Get out and watch yourself those Street Fighter films, some Battles Without Honor and Humanity, and maybe some of his samurai movies. Less important is rushing out and grabbing Golgo 13: The Kowloon Assignment, which is pretty much the opposite of the action-packed, gore-crazed sexfest that was the animated Golgo 13 that came out a few years later. Kowloon Assignment is the movie to watch if you want to see what it's like when Golgo 13 just sort of sits around.

The story is pretty basic, as all good Golgo 13 stories should be: Golgo 13 is hired to kill someone, and the Hong Kong police department tries to stop him even though the guy he's killing is sort of a dick.

Sonny Chiba does look a lot like Golgo 13 in many shots, though sometimes it looks like the humidity is turning his coif into a frizzy fro. The film was shot on location in Japan and Hong Kong, and one would hope that means a lot of primo Hong Kong kungfu talent would be showing up. Unfortunately, it looks like the production skimped on hiring locals for the Hong Kong sequences, so instead of potentially cool team-ups like Sonny Chiba versus Ti Lung, we get Sonny Chiba casually evading a string of ham 'n' eggers like Callan Leung. Who the hell is Callan Leung? Surely Sonny Chiba had David Chiang or Lo Lieh's telephone number and could ring them up for a cameo. He does bring Chiba movie staple Etsuko Shiomi with him, and she always looks fabulous in action, even if she's only in the movie long enough for one fight scene before she gets offed. Still, one Sue Shiomi fight scene and a lot of Sonny Chiba walking down the street don't make for edge-of-your-seat cinema.

I guess there wouldn't have been much point to hiring top notch Hong Kong talent for the action scenes since there are hardly any action scenes anyway. Japanese live action cinema was pretty zany in 1977. Lots of weirdness all over the place, and yet somehow Kowloon Assignment, based on such crazed material, is incredibly tame and dull. The bloodshed is minimal, there's a naked boob ortwo, the fights are few and far between, and Golgo 13 isn't nearly as cool as he should be, possibly because that sort of stone-faced killer is more dynamic as a drawn piece of art than as an actual guy. All in all, a major disappointment on all fronts.

However, it'd seem unlikely that the Golgo 13 comic wasn't an influence on better, more successful Sonny Chiba films, and that more successful Chiba films would likewise prove to be influences on Saito's writing (or his stable of writers, as he was one of the few popular manga writers who doled responsibilities out to a team rather than doing all the work himself). In particular, there are some pretty significant parallels to be drawn between Golgo 13 and Sonny Chiba's Street Fighter anti-hero, Terry Tsuruga, a merciless killing machine who will take anyone out if the price is right, and kidnap your sister and sell her into prostitution if you can't pay. In fact, the original Street Fighter was the first to use a little gimmick where someone gets punched and the movie cuts to an X-Ray showing crushing bones and whatnot -- a technique that is repeated during the finale of the Golgo 13 animated film. It's too bad that the venomous mean spirit, nasty violence, and all-around sickness of The Street Fighter isn't evident in Kowloon Asignment. It would have been a much better movie if that had been the case.

In 1983, it was high time someone brought the Golgo 13 stories to life as an animated feature and, hopefully, did them right. This task fell upon the shoulders of directors Osamu Dezaki, Shichiro Kobayashi, and Hirokata Takahashi. It was a really bizarre trio of men to direct a movie packed to the gills with blood, gore, and sex. Shichiro and Hirokata both worked on Miyazaki's Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro film. Shichiro is best known for his work on the Urusei Yatsura series, while Hirokata dabbled in Rainbow Brite. Osamu Dezaki was, at the time, best known for The Rose of Versailles, a flowery shojo (girly) anime that is every bit as emotional and melodramatic as Golgo 13 is mean and violent. Dezaki's trademark is a unique style of playing with the artwork, using split screens and freeze frames (all fairly common nowadays) that would become richly detailed still drawings that helped tie anime to its manga roots. All three men worked on Space Adventure Cobra in 1982, which must have prepped them for their work on the over-the-top macho Golgo 13 a year later.


Needless to say, anyone following Dezaki into Golgo 13 thinking the babe-bangin' assassin was suddenly going to have big girly eyelashes and find himself walking through spontaneous clouds of flowers while writing poetry and weeping gently as Vivaldi played in the background was going to find themselves somewhat out of their element. Working on original stories from Saito, Golgo 13 the movie is a shamelessly over-the-top work of grindhouse theater exploitation; an endless and welcome parade of cold-blooded murder, grim-faced psychopaths, statuesque naked women, and wanton acts of depravity, all of which revolve tornado-style around the central character, Golgo 13, who even after 40 years of comic book stories, has never revealed anything about his past. He is eternally thirty-something, with no home, no family, and no name. "Duke Togo" is just another pseudonym, since you can't sign into hotels under the name Golgo 13 -- don't think I haven't tried. Anyway, you should never confuse Duke Togo for Dick Togo, though they'd make a decent team if they ever decided to pair up.

What we do know about Golgo 13 (whose name is derived from the hill upon which Christ was crucified, as the Japanese love Biblical reference non-sequiters) is that his life consists of killing and sex. He is an expert marksman who prefers a modified M-16 but is at home with just about any weapon. He's an expert at karate, speaks just about every language known to man (even the clicking language of the Kalahari bushmen, I bet), a trained medic, and can instantly become a master of any other discipline if the plot requires it of him. And frankly, that's all you need to know about him. Golgo 13 operates within the arena of pulp fiction, which means it relies on audiences recognizing a series of archetypal stock characters who are what they are because that's what the story says they are. Golgo 13 is a master assassin, and that's all we need to know about him. Whatever expectations that character type has associated with it are expected to already be known by the reader or viewer. There is no call for complicated back story, or any back story at all, because pulp fiction doesn't dwell on such things. Whatever history you think of when you hear a brief description of Golgo 13 is probably right.

The movie wastes no time jumping immediately into the action. We meet Golgo 13 (voiced by relative newcomer Tetsuro Sagawa in the original Japanese, Greg Snegoff in the dub, who has a couple noteworthy Eurocult movie appearances to his name) as he is wrapping up one assignment and taking on another -- the assassination of a billionaire industrialist's only son, who is being primed to take over his father's empire. Enraged by the murder, industrialist Leonard Dawson (Goro Naya -- who has a lengthy list of voice acting and regular acting credits to his name, including Lupin, Peacock King, Vampire Princess Miyu, various incarnations of Kamen Rider, and both the live action and anime versions of Casshern) swears bloody revenge upon the wily assassin, even if it destroys everything he's built, and even if it means sacrificing his daughter-in-law to the perverse whims of disgusting hitmen.

And that's the plot. From there on out, Golgo 13 kills people, and people try to kill him. When he's not killing people, it's because he's having sex. Golgo 13 is a heady showcase of all the excesses that made the 1980s one of Japan's most infamously decadent decades. There's a lot of nudity and a lot of blood. People die in slow motion, with blood spurting brightly from gory knife and bullet wounds as their faces contort into that bug-eyed, twisted-jaw mask of death that is familiar to so many fans of 80s anime. No one gets shot once when they can get shot a dozen times, and no woman goes very long before coming out of her clothes, either by choice or by force. Golgo 13 even shoves a grenade in a guy's mouth and we get to watch the flaming body run around directionless while the surprised, fire-engulfed head tumbles to the ground in slow motion -- never mind that that's not how grenades work). Everyone, Golgo 13 included, is present merely to be abused in the most merciless fashion imaginable.

So it should be fairly obvious that I embrace the seedy excesses of Golgo 13 with unabashed enthusiasm. It plays the source material perfectly in that it never once goes for the ironic wink, nudge, or comedic interlude. Everyone is completely dead serious about even the most outlandish scenarios (like Golgo 13 killing a Nazi war criminal in the middle of an orgy by climbing a building and shooting all the way through another building to hit the Nazi in the third building right in the middle of the head), which really puts Golgo 13 among the ranks of the poliziotteschi from the 1970s, like Violent Rome and Violent Naples, which handled similarly outrageous sequences with the same sense of gravity (and also indulged in gratuitous perversity that would have been totally at home in Golgo 13). In fact, Golgo 13 the movie is equal parts poliziotteschi and Eurospy film, drawing on the aesthetic and amoral thematic climate of both genres (right down to Golgo's wardrobe, which wavers between the turtle neck and slim suit look of sixties spies and the safari jacket and ascot look of the 70s). Although released in 1983 and rightly considered "80s anime," Golgo 13 definitely maintains a blend of that and the previous decade.

Dezaki's approach to the artwork in the film is incredible. He makes wonderful use of his trademark split screens and other bizarre framing devices. The quality of the art is superb, achieving a raw and heavy gritty feeling that succeeds remarkably well at mimicking the shadowy noir look of old films, grafted onto the glam and neon of the 1980s -- sort of like an animated Michael Mann film, in a way. Golgo 13 isn't nearly as sleek looking as something like Odin (it's also not as boring), relying less on intricate backdrops and more on shading and mood, but the rougher approach suits the material perfectly. You'll find a similar though slightly more polished approach in Wicked City, albeit with the added bonus of a woman whose vagina is a giant, drooling, fanged spider mouth.


So that's the traditional cel artwork. Unfortunately, you can't really talk about the artwork in Golgo 13 without mentioning the ill-conceived and thoroughly abysmal CGI helicopter sequence. Dezaki and Shichiro worked together on something called 3-D Animated Homeless Child Remi, which sounds like something you really want to rush out and look for. I'm guessing this 1977 collaboration sparked their interest in the early days of CGI animation, and against all better judgment, they were hell-bent on cramming some into Golgo 13 at some point. And so we get the infamous helicopter attack sequence, in which the movie abruptly shifts from the richly realized cel animation to crudely rendered, jerky CGI completely devoid of detail. It looks like something you'd see in a real estate company demo at a county fair's expo hall. It's just so insanely bad that I can't even express how truly bad it is. The entire sequence only lasts a minute or so, but it seems like an eternity, because everything that has been so good up to this point grinds to a whiplash stop so Dezaki and Shichiro can fart around with their Amiga or whatever they used to cough up this sequence.

OK, you can't fault them for trying, but surely someone somewhere looked at it and said, "Fellas, this looks pathetic. I mean, this looks astoundingly awful. I'm not putting this in the movie." But somehow, the CGI animation made it into the finished project, along with some crude CGI during the opening credits, which is a lot less offensive because it's just during the credits and not integrated into the rest of the animation. Plus, that animation is of a skeleton with a Smith & Wesson, so that's all right.

The acting in the Japanese version of the movie is pretty much as good as you expect it to be. Watching it for this review was the firts time I'd heard the original actors. Normally, I just ignore English language dubs since I prefer the original language, however reviewing the English dub of Golgo 13 is worthwhile for a number of reasons. First, because it's a Streamline dub, and this is how people saw the film for years. Second, Golgo 13 is only in Japanese because the people who made it speak Japanese. Most of the characters are American, with a couple Italians thrown in. So it's legitimate to say that while Japanese is the language by which you should judge the film since that's what the original actors speak, it could just as easily be in English. Third, the Streamline English dub is just flat out hilarious even though it plays the material completely straight and resists the urge to "funny it up," the way other dubs often did with material this absurd.

Simply put, the Streamline dub is uneven. Most of the male actors are all right, but that's because they're either icy cold assassins or blustering psychos, and both of those are pretty easy to communicate. The women are less successful, speaking mostly in monotone run-on sentences. The script sticks relatively close to the original dialogue, but then why not? When the original gives you lines like, "Pull my trigger, softly and lovingly," why not stick with it? Playing it straight-faced only makes it sound that much funnier. The dub also peppers the conversations with a bit more profanity, but that seems suitable. After all, if it had originally been written in English, these characters would have cursed up a storm.


Streamline honcho Carl Macek wasn't hiring brand name actors, but his usual stock players weren't entirely inexperienced. Greg Snegoff, for instance, voices Golgo 13 and previously appeared in a few of our favorite bad Italian action films -- Last Hunter, Lucio Fulci's Contraband, and the post-apocalyptic She. Michael McConnohie is pretty good as the voice of Leonard Dawson, and he has more credits as a voice actor than a sane person would count. All in all, it’s not the best dub, but it's adequate for the style of storytelling. Certainly it's less scandalous than the old Akira dub with all its, "Dat peabwain?" nonsense.

Like many people, I refer to Golgo 13 as being pulp entertainment, but I should explain a little something about rampant abuse of the term "pulp," especially since it's going to come up a lot here seeing as how so much anime in the 1980s was inspired by old pulp style storytelling. Technically, when I say, "pulp," I should be referring to a very specific set of stories -- in other words, serialized fiction that appeared in pulp magazines covering a wide range of "lowbrow" genres like science fiction, crime, espionage, romance, and Westerns. Odin is a perfect example of the sort of pulp storytelling you get from a 40s or 50s sci-fi magazine.

Of course, pulp isn't so narrowly defined a word these days, thanks in no small part to Quentin Tarantino adopting it to describe the grindhouse cinema of the 60s and 70s, which definitely boasted some pulp story sensibilities. But it also includes the deluge of cheap spy novels that came out in the wake of Ian Fleming's James Bond. I've called these books pulp fiction, simply because it's something that conjures up a specific feel for most people that accurately reflects the books, but any true pulp fan would write (and they have) to correct me. Those books aren't technically pulp. Potboilers, maybe. But not pulp.

Golgo 13 adheres more to post-Bond definition of pulp. It has roots firmly planted in the sensationalist action-adventure fiction of the sixties and seventies, as well as in the gritty sleaze of 1970s grindhouse cinema which now falls under the banner of pulp fiction to many people.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that so more people don't write me to explain what pulp fiction actually is versus what it's known as today. I get it -- but I still think it's valid for the term to have evolved from its original meaning. And that said, Golgo 13 is hardcore grindhouse insanity. It's brash, offensive, mean, and so completely absurd that there's no real way for a rational being to find it truly offensive. It's cheerfully perverse and delightfully violent. It didn't make all that big an impact upon it's release in America, and despite the enduring popularity of the comics, Golgo 13 only found his way to the screen once more, in the lackluster Golgo 13: Queen Bee released some years later. Since then, the Golgo 13 anime has sort of fallen through the cracks, which is a shame because it's a spectacular and totally irredeemable piece of movie making, packed end to end with action and insanity. Without a doubt, it's one of my favorite titles from the 1980s.

Labels: Action: Yakuza, Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Espionage, Stars: Sonny Chiba, Year: 1983