Amoeba Music

When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired. Branded to Kill tells the ecstatically bent story of a yakuza assassin with a fetish for sniffing steamed rice (the chipmunk-cheeked superstar Joe Shishido) who botches a job and ends up a target himself. This is Suzuki at his most extreme—the flabbergasting pinnacle of his sixties pop-art aesthetic.

Special Features:

• Video piece featuring new interviews with director Seijun Suzuki and assistant director Masami Kuzuu
• Interview with Suzuki from 1997
• New interview with actor Joe Shishido
• Original theatrical trailer
• New and improved English subtitle translation
• A booklet featuring an essay by critic and historian Tony Rayns, author of Branded to Thrill: The Delirious Cinema of Suzuki Seijun, and a state­ment by the film's art director, Sukezo Kawahara