Releasing Films Almost Nobody's Heard Of: Adam Torel on Rescuing Chusei Sone's Lost 80s Youth Films
With the upcoming Blu-ray release of Japanese film director Chusei Son's two films that explore youth culture and delinquency in 80's Japan, SCARS OF THE SUN and BLOW THE NIGHT, we asked Adam Torel at Third Window Films to tell us more about these films as this director hadn't been on our radar until now.
Here's what he had to say.
Releasing films almost nobody has ever heard of is not a very good business strategy to be honest.
Even so, I feel it’s a necessity to preserve lost eras of filmmaking and putting these films onto a physical format puts them into people’s homes all over the world, keeping them “alive” in a way the people who worked on them probably never expected.
Scars of the Sun is up there with one of the most obscure titles I’ve put out.
Up recently when until a few people who worked on the release and some critics chimed in, it literally had 2 watches and 0 reviews on Letterboxd, and on Filmarks (the Japanese version of Letterboxd) there are only 31 watches and 7 reviews.
Yes, it’s not a stone-cold classic masterpiece, but it’s a very good piece of cinema which showcases a different side of Chusei Sone, who is most well-known for his work on the Angel Guts series as well as tons of Roman Porno films.
In fact, it could be said that his work on films after his Roman Porno era are probably some of the ones he wanted to do the most, and therefore more personal. With Scars of the Sun, he worked with Toei to adapt the Shintaro Ishihara book Crazed Fruit (which was made into the famous film by Kō Nakahira) in a project that took years to develop.
Despite being on a double-bill will Jackie Chan’s Shaolin Wooden Men (I have the film pamphlet which brings the two films together into one booklet), Scars of the Sun was not a hit and since its 1981 theatrical release has not been available on any physical format in Japan until a belated DVD release in 2025. So lost for almost 45 years…
Soon after Scars of the Sun, Chusei Sone went even more independent by setting up his own production company called Film Workers alongside Mamoru Watanabe (director of Women Hell Song, from our Pink Films series). The first film from that company was 1983’s Blow the Night, which is not anywhere near as obscure as Scars of the Sun, despite it never being screened or released in any format overseas before. In Japan it was a success on its initial run, due to the topic of glue-sniffing youth gangs being very much a “hot topic” of the time. Yet, despite the film’s domestic success, film companies setup by directors (ala the Directors Company) don’t tend to last long and after making just 1 more film (the Mamoru Watanabe directed Serial Killer: Coldblooded) the company folded.
Like my work on the Directors Company films, it’s not easy sorting out rights and masters from bankrupt 80s Japanese production companies, yet lucky for me this time Blow the Night was actually bought out by Nikkatsu in the mid 2010’s and it got its first ever physical release on a Japanese DVD in 2018.
Unfortunately for me though, as with many of Nikkatsu titles of the 80s, when they initially scanned the prints they only made 60i data (some Japanese studios seem to only prioritize putting films onto TV or VOD) and could provide no other formats to get the feature data from.
Yet, as with the Angel Guts titles which had the same 60i masters, it’s not really obvious and they’re very good looking masters nonetheless.
In any case, this is the first time that either film has been released in Blu-ray (or even HD), so I hope you can enjoy delving into this very interesting, fun and obscure era of Chusei Sone and Japanese cinema in general.