Search - Kinjite - Forbidden Subjects on DVD

This is the BEST MOVIE EVER -- We need more Charles Bronsons

_Amazon_Customer | NC, USA | 11/13/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I'm sure that the subject disturbs a lot of men whom, well, would rather see it legalized to have relations with kids. But as a victim of child molestation, this movie always gave me a wonderful feeling of peace... justice... the long overdue retribution criminals deserve.

I give it 100 times 100 stars. Society needs more positive messages like the one Charles Bronson sent out to the criminals."

Rising sun: The Archie Bunker Version

Trevor Willsmer | London, England | 01/18/2009

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Offering a killer combo of terrible writing, terrible acting and terrible direction, it's a tossup whether Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects is offensively bad or just hilariously bad. It's almost as if someone ran a competition to make the sleaziest, seediest Cannon film. As if a glance at a cast list including characters like 'Lesbian Pedophile,' 'Perverted Gentleman,' 'Porno Actress' weren't enough, it's your only chance to see Charles Bronson's cop throw a lowlife on a bed and grab a sex toy - but don't worry, it's okay, as the offscreen screams make clear he's only torturing him for information. After all, even if he is a bit overprotective of his nice Catholic daughter, he's a nice Catholic cop who regularly brings local Catholic priest William O'Connell a packed lunch and who believes in poetic justice - or at least ensuring that the bad guys end up in the slammer with the horniest inmates maximum security can provide to give them a taste of their own medicine. But then that's what you get for telling him "Look, I think you're a little bit unstable." Still, when later offered a bribe, he may snarl "I'd like to shove this up your a**, but I don't want to get my hands dirty," he's clearly learned where to draw the line: instead, he just makes him eat a $25,000 watch and sets fire to his Cadillac. The anal obsession even follows through to the film's title: despite the poster featuring a naked Japanese girl on a porn film set, the film's only direct example of Kinjite/forbidden subjects, as Alex Hyde White's English teacher explains to a group of Japanese businessmen, is, er talking about your bowel movements in polite society.

Bronson isn't just too old for this, as the opening fight makes only too clear, he's too old for love interest Peggy Lipton, and she looks old enough to have grown-up kids. A better actor than he ever got the credit for when given the right material, here's he's given less a properly thought out character than a series of outrageous reactionary quirks. When he's not widening the circles of suspects he's accidentally dropping them to their death off the sides of buildings. He's definitely not a P.C. copper, with a special loathing for the Japanese - as if it wasn't bad enough that they're buying up American businesses, what's worse, they double-park on a public thoroughfare! No racial minority goes unassaulted, be they black pimp or Pakistani hotel clerk, no cop cliché unrecycled, be it a boss who bangs his fist on the table or a dead meat partner (Perry Lopez and his spectacularly bad hair dye that's so prominent it deserves screen billing all its own). The twin plot strands - Bronson's L.A. cop trying to take down Juan Hernandez's pimp who deals in underage girls and James Pax's porn-obsessed Japanese businessman - take forever to intertwine, and then in the most unlikely of ways: after copping a feel of Bronson's daughter on a bus ("Some Oriental guy touched my holy of holies!"), in the film's idea of poetic justice Pax finds his own daughter kidnapped by Hernandez. You half expect the writer to pop his head round the corner of the screen and say, "How d'ya like them apples?"

Somewhere underneath all the laziness is the germ of a good idea even if it is too muddily developed to ever be clear quite what that idea really is, but the execution is pure Rising Sun: the Archie Bunker Version, shot like out-takes from an R-rated 80s music video with an outrageous and rather lazy dockside shoot-'em-up-and-blow'em-up finale that sees a small army of machine-gunning sidekicks suddenly appear to up the gratuitous body count. The last of Bronson's mostly bad to indifferent collaborations with J. Lee Thompson - and sadly Thompson's last film as director - it's a poor signoff for two undervalued players who increasingly never seemed to be that discerning about what pictures they said yes to.

An indifferent transfer with only a brief trailer as an extra."