Recently seeing the superb 1972 Drama/Thriller The Rendezvous,I asked fellow IMDber ManFromPlanetX for recs of other Japanese films.Getting shown a sparkling still from the title by PlanetX,I got set to join the killers on parade.View on the film:Whirling Naozumi Yamamoto's bouncing Jazz score into the criss-cross singing of the opening credits, auteur director Masahiro Shinoda & cinematographer Masao Kosugi use the freedom from the Japan New Wave to frame each scene like a living Comic-Book, with Shinoda showing a masterful eye for using the edges of the frame to place the killers,and obscuring objects shaping the shots into Comic-Book panels. Giving each killer an extremely animated appearance, Shinoda and Kosugi cover them in lush Pop-Art colours which vividly draws the quirks,and the fumbling manner they each have.Playing on the Spy and Crime genres, the screenplay by Shûji Terayama fires at both of them with a wickedly broad satirical Comedy,which smoothly links in Shinoda's directing style with the wacky doctor who is a part-time hit man. Sending all of the hit men out for one target, Terayama loads each of them up with cracking Film Noir-smoked dialogue,that is brilliantly underlined by their comedic hopelessness from the killers going on parade.

This is a very polarizing film and currently the only review of it on this site is a negative one, so here's a different take on this wacky 1961 early work by Masahiro Shinoda, a versatile director who has dipped his toe in many genres over the course of his career. This one, for instance, is a fast-paced, surreal blunt spoof of film noir.It was scripted by Shûji Terayama, one of the most prolific Japanese artists from the 20th century, but it's not really characteristic of his style. Well, there are horse races in this film, and Terayama loved horse racing, but apart from that, you'd never tell. It's a straight- forward story, utterly typical for a crime film, given a different spin by Shinoda's outrageous stylistic choices.The upbeat jazzy music throughout the film is awesome and very catchy, and the pop-art opening sequence is very zany and enjoyable. There also some creative color combos and some peculiar montage techniques. Also, the entire thing really does play out like the campy Batman TV-show from the '60s, except this pre-dates it. The comic book villains, corny shootouts and all. It can be quite wild.The movie is far from perfect in my eyes, though. Despite the brisk runtime, the joke does get stale at a few points where dry conversations take over the stylistic exercise, and it's not a polished film at all. At times it feels like a bunch of ideas thrown in for the sake of being different, without filtering some stuff out. The final product is therefore uneven in its execution, but I quite liked it. It has lots of charm and it sure is entertaining.

Jean-Luc Godard once described a Jerry Lewis movie as the "acme of stupidity." But that description might fit this movie better. Killer on Parade is a farce so broad that it cannot be called called a comedy, as it is so far from any human experience that there aren't any laughs in it. A spoof of gangster and spy movies, it is so absurd that it's closest analogy is the Batman television series that came a few years later, but only without that show's irony. The movie's plot (such as it is) is about a gang of assassins and the problems they encounter when an assignment they covet is assigned to another. Just describing the assassins can give an idea of how "wacky" this movie is: one is actually a doctor (who carries a black bag that helpfully has the English word Doctor stenciled on it), another is a former athlete who still wears his college football uniform, another is a country bumpkin who carries her pet goat, etc. It's hard to believe the studio thought any adults would be interested in this; it comes across like it was adapted from a bad grade school boy's manga. The only redeeming feature of this movie are its color scheme and sets; the cinematography is riot of color. But other than that, the movie is pretty much a waste of time.