Thursday, June 23, 2011

A trio of Japanese cult favorites hits the TIFF Bell Lightbox in July

by Chris MaGee

It's not just the Shinsedai Cinema Festival and Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival that will be offering up great films from Japan next month. If you live in Toronto you will want to make sure to check out a trio of Japanese cult classics care of the folks at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

As part of their summer programming TIFF has asked Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes to pull together a summer's worth of screenings dubbed The Best of Midnight Madness. This new recurring series offers fans of cult, horror, exploitation and just plain crazy cinema the chance to play catch up on some of the best films offered by Geddes in the Midnight Madness programme of the Toronto International Film Festival over the past 15 years. Of course this can't be done without some of the biggest names in Japanese cult moviedom. Which names, you may ask? How about Shinya Tsukamoto, Tetsuro Takeuchi and Takashi Miike.

Starting on Saturday, July 16th at 11:00PM Japanese film fans will be able to catch Tsukamoto's "Testuo the Iron Man" (trailer below), followed by Takeuchi 's "Wild Zero" on Saturday, July 23rd at 11:00PM, and finally Miike's "Ichi the Killer" on Saturday, July 30th at 11:00PM. I wonder if they'll give out vomit bags to that last screening like they did for the film's original Toronto premiere?

For a full look at TIFF's Best of Midnight Madness programme this summer head to their website here.

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