Beast to Die, The (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Aug 26, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Tōru MurakawaRelease Date(s)
1980 (July 22, 2025)Studio(s)
Kadokawa Haruki Jimusho/Toei Company (Radiance Films)- Film/Program Grade: B-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: A
Review
Despite a number of interestingly-staged scenes and, for Japan, an unusual subject matter, The Beast to Die (Yaju shisubeshi, 1980) is both overwrought and superficial, the kind of film that confidently believes itself way better than it actually is. Faintly similar in some ways to Taxi Driver (with a dash of another De Niro, The Deer Hunter), and not unlike the later Falling Down, it revolves around an ex-photojournalist (cult actor Yusaku Matsuda) unhinged by the brutality of the wars he’s covered and mangled bodies he’s photographed. Haunted by images of the dead, embarks on a killing spree and bloody bank heist.
The film, a loose remake of a 1959 production that starred Tatsuya Nakadai and was directed by Eizo Sugawa, opens with Kunihiko Date (Matsuda) inexplicably fatally stabbing a police officer. He then uses the dead cop’s gun to murder a trio of gangsters at an illegal gambling den. Date returns to his very un-Japanese-like home, with its castle-like stone walls and where Date wears his shoes indoors—the film has a peculiar obsession with deck shoes—while he zones out on classical music LPs.
At a classical record store, he runs into Reiko Hanada (Asami Kobayashi), a very early ‘80s sad-faced, doe-eyed heroine, whom he coincidentally sat next to at a recent concert. For no clear reason she falls for the reticent—boy, is he ever—loner who does nothing at all to encourage this budding romance. At a college reunion dinner party, Date becomes fascinated with Sanada, an uneducated, surly waiter (Takeshi Kaga), who beats up one of Date’s former classmates after being insulted. Wild-eyed Sanada, with even more loose screws than Date, it’s implied, is the product of an early-postwar relationship between a Japanese woman and black American soldier and, no doubt, has endured a lifetime of racist discrimination.
Though Sanada is profoundly volatile and unstable, Date recruits him for a daring, late-afternoon Tokyo bank heist, but police detective Hideyuki Kashiwagi (Hideo Murota) suspects Date of the originally killings, is doggedly on his trail.
The Beast to Die has an audacious approach not unlike Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s brilliant The Man Who Stole the Sun, released almost exactly one year prior. Both pictures revolve around highly intelligent loners haunted by the specter of unimaginable violence, nuclear annihilation in the case of Hasegawa’s film, and both commit a series of increasingly outrageous crimes. But where Hasegawa expresses obvious empathy toward his film’s protagonist, and explores with much depth his motivations, Date in The Beast to Die is just a nutter with dead eyes and a walking corpse-like manner, except for the occasional meaningless outburst. He saw unimaginable things on the front lines and lost his mind is the extent Shoichi Maruyama’s screenplay allows; it’s unknown to this writer whether Haruhiko Oyabu’s novel delves deeper than the film does, nor have I seen Sugawa’s original film version. This type of character was relatively new in Japan—unlike the U.S., postwar Japan didn’t send troops to endless wars, after all—but his was already a cliché in the west: thriller about unhinged Vietnam vets were already a cliché, fodder even for episodes of TV shows like The Streets of San Francisco and Hawaii Five-O.
While perhaps not directly imitative of The Man Who Stole the Sun, director Murakawa’s similarly audacious style lacks the carefully-considered, striking but intelligent stylishness of Hasegawa’s film. In staging the first murder, for instance, Murakawa opts to show this in an interesting long shot, the violence held at arm’s length. This is a visually interesting idea, but the fight, done in the typically overdone flailing-about style of Japanese crime films, goes on forever. The bloody, chaotic bank robbery impresses, its two crazies shooting everyone in sight, but that sequence’s climax, with hapless Reiko a coincidental customer during the crime, Murakawa attempts an operatic level of tragedy that only comes off as ridiculous. A later set piece shamelessly imitates the Russian roulette horrors from The Deer Hunter but isn’t done one-quarter as well.
Matsuda and Kaga deliver indulgent, over-the-top portrayals, but Hideo Murota is wonderful as the wily, world-weary detective on their trail, the veteran character actor, too often saddled with minor second banana parts, here playing the kind of character that, decades earlier, might have been essayed by Takashi Shimura or Chishu Ryu.
Radiance Films presents The Beast to Die in its original 1.85:1 “VistaVision size” widescreen format, derived from a 4K transfer produced by Kadokawa Corp. It’s a good transfer with accurate color, contrast, and detail. The uncompressed mono PCM audio is excellent, as are the optional English subtitles on this Region “A”/“B” disc limited to 3,000 copies.
Supplements consist of a new interview (20 minutes) with director Murakawa; a new interview (23 minutes) with screenwriter Maruyama; and an appreciation of the film by novelist Jordan Harper (12 minutes). Also included is a full-color booklet featuring essays by Tatsuya Masuto and Tom Mes (an excellent piece on Matsuda).
Audiences seem divided on The Beast to Die; some find it brilliant, others hate it. Neither great nor terrible, it’s worth seeing as some aspects of the film are imaginatively done but, overall, it’s a disappointment.
- Stuart Galbraith IV