Customer Reviews

Versus (Director's Cut)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Zombies. Escaped convicts. Mobsters. An ancient battle between two men. And a forest that seemingly grants eternal life... one way or another.

More questions than answers are raised in the oblique, shifting storyline of the cult hit "Versus," since director Ryûhei Kitamura seems intent on winding eerie, bizarre plot twists all around the seemingly simple plot. It has plenty of gore, fighting and a brilliant debut performance by Tak Sakaguchi -- as well as a timeless battle between good and evil that apparently lasts throughout multiple reincarnated lives. And we're not quite sure which is which.

According to the movie, there are 666 portals concealed in this world, which connect to the "other side." One of these is in Japan, called the Forest of Resurrection -- which apparently is connected to a long ago priest and samurai's fight.

Present day: Prisoner KSC2-303 (Sakaguchi) and his fellow escapee are met near the Forest by a gang of mobsters, but the already-tense atmosphere rapidly degenerates into a bloody war. And then dead bodies start getting up and savagely attacking people. The prisoner escapes with a mysterious girl (Chieko Misaka) whom the mobsters had been ordered to bring there -- he's compelled to protect her, and she seems strangely familiar to him.

The mobsters pursue the girl and the prisoner into the Forest, intending to kill them both -- but the prisoner and their crazy leader both cause even more deaths... and more gun-toting bloodthirsty zombies. So what exactly is going on here? Apparently a neverending battle throughout the centuries in this very Forest, over a young woman with a mysterious power -- and it brings Prisoner KSC2-303 up against an ancient enemy (Hideo Sakaki) whom he's fought in endless prior incarnations.

"Versus" is one of those movies you should watch at least twice -- a lot of its cryptic twists and eerie explanations fly over your head on the first viewing, and you're likely to not really understand the underlying plot. While it's a cool horror/action flick on the surface, it becomes even more than that as the story of the Man versus the Prisoner is slowly unpeeled like the layers of an onion. Flashbacks, hints of familiarity, and a brilliant twist ending that turns everything upside down.

If there's a problem with "Versus," it's that many of the questions raised are left unanswered -- while some are best left to the imagination, others are just headscratchers.

And Ryûhei Kitamura does a great job directing, with lots of gritty action, circling cameras and sharp jagged cuts from down on the ground. He also liberally slathers the entire movie in vast gushers of blood, dismembered body parts (Sakaguchi bisects a guy in the first scene), and savage fights with guns, swords and fists.Tak Sakaguchi spins through the movie with savage grace like a blood-spattered ballet dancer, and he manages to make constant mayhem and destruction look easy and uncomplicated.

And Kitamura gives the whole movie a certain gruesome sense of humor -- there's a knife-swinging mobster who is absolutely cackling-bugnuts, and the zombies produce plenty of over-the-top gore. And Sakaguchi has a brilliantly tongue-in-cheek scene where he strips off a dead man's clothes, and poses coolly in a long sweeping leather coat (while the girl tells him, "You're crazy!").

This was only Sakaguchi's first movie role, but the gorgeous guy handles it beautifully -- he's all cool, sharp-eyed intensity, and manages to hint that there's something strange underneath the callous criminal exterior. Sakaki has an equally dangerous, lean vibe as the mysterious Man who serves as the prisoner's counterpart, and Misaka holds her own as a psychic damsel who is trying to stay afloat in a situation where nobody can be fully trusted.

"Versus" is a brilliantly layered, twisting tale with plenty of gore, dismemberment and razor-sharp action scenes -- and if it didn't leave some of its questions unanswered, it would be the perfect cult flick. Definitely catch this one.

I basically bought this movie 'cause I thought the front cover was pretty cool (I even have a T-shirt with that logo on it). I read the reviews here, and figured I'd give it a shot.

First thing "Versus" started up, I was already groaning. The film quality was retro "my neighbor's camcorder", the acting was REALLY bad and it wasn't really living up to anything special. The music was okay, but I have a history of liking some strange music... also, sometimes the music is loud enough to where it's kind of hard to hear what is being said clearly.

About twenty minutes in (do try to last that long), the mood changes and it becomes more bearable, and then the story kind of comes together. It starts becoming interesting (which until then, I felt I had just wasted thirty bucks to see this movie).

The main character emerges (first twenty minutes will leave you going "uhh... who am I suppose to be rooting for here?") and they begin to develop what personality he has.

I really feel that this movie would have been better left in Japanese with subtitles. The voice-overs, where-as they match up okay were fairly annoying in general (the bad guy and the good guy were done pretty well, but everyone else sounds like the old Hong Kong flicks from the 70s with the whiny voices)

What I had envisioned was kind of a dark-souled samurai fighting the undead... What it ended up being was more of good/evil battle with the zombies being more of an excuse to fire off a bunch of bullets and to explain later events. Also, don't hold your breath for the sword-fighting, it comes kind of late in the film.

The ending was fairly thought provoking, and aside from the fact blood is applied with a fire-hose, and none of the zombies are really "zombie-ish" (they're live people with a lot of blood on 'em and it shows) Versus really wasn't that bad.

I'd probably suggest renting it, if you can find it at your local video store. This film is more for your die-hard martial arts/horror B-movie fan...

The story is good but the way they filmed it sucked. Starts off in the past and is very cool with costuming and plot then...well basically after that it's slap stick humor and a bunch of fighting in the woods which is not very good, especially after you see the same fight over and over again with 3 different charachters...booorrring...

I rented this, based on the quote on the front cover from Moriarty of Ain't it Cool News. This "film" is unbelievably bad. There's no plot, and it looks like the efforts of a couple of teenagers with a video camera trying to shoot a "cool, violent" movie. The characters posture pathetically, and it's about as stylistically interesting as...a bunch of teenagers shooting a home movie. The dubbing is atrocious (and like everything else, sounds like the efforts of...a bunch of teenagers shooting a home movie), but subtitles wouldn't have saved it.

After watching it I thought there was no way Moriarty could have liked it, so I searched Ain't it Cool News for that quote. It turns out the quote was from someone writing in to the site. Moriarty prefaced the comment by basically saying he couldn't stand the movie. It might be great as a Mystery Science Theater 3000 film, were that still around, but aside from that, stay away.

I wanna open by saying that I was torn regarding the star rating. I'd say this is a 5 star action movie, but only a 4 star movie overall. And since it's Kcin's policy to give just about everything 5 stars, I went with the 5 star rating.

I first heard about this movie some time ago, and I can't help but wonder why I didn't see it sooner. The plot synopsis alone seemed a virtual guarantee that it would be entertaining, whether or not it was good or bad. It turned out remarkably well considering it had absolutely no budget. Thus, production values suffer, and the acting is frequently a bit amateurish. (but still generally fairly appealing) But if you are even looking at this film you probably aren't the sort who can't live with the natural concessions that come with a low-budget films, and this probably won't bother you too much.

The Evil Dead is the film that seems to come up the most when discussing this movie. This is a bit confusing and deceptive, as although I would be absolutely shocked if the makers of this film weren't highly familiar with Raimi's ouevre, it's primarily just a modern action-martial arts film. Which naturally leads to the question, is the action any good? Personally, I thought it was thoroughly entertaining, from beginning to end. It's got a great volume of action, and mixes up the styles, starting with gun violence and zombies moving to hand to hand fighting concluding with sword fighting. They do it all well, though I like the hand to hand fighting best.(The sword fight at the end is quite sweet as well, though it's hurt a bit by the use of wacky future swords.) Also, although they use some interesting visual and editing styles in the film, they don't over do it on the action scenes and actually let us see what's going on. The action here probably isn't all that different from what you've seen in a lots of the movies, though you probably haven't seen all this type of action in a single movie before, which is worth something. It's got lots of frequently silly and exaggerated gore as well, which makes the already odd film all the more surreal. This once again reveals the low budget, but it seems as if they wouldn't have wanted more realistic gore anyway, even if they could afford it, so it works out alright. The zombies are perhaps a bit primitive, but I really like 'em, particuarly the samurai zombies from the opening scene. Too bad they didn't bring the regular zombies back later in the film, but oh well.

Critic's of this film frequently say something like, 'I don't know how anyone could take this movie seriously'. Well, I gotta tell you, I don't think you're really supposed to take this all that seriously. It's not self-parody, but it's got a ton of conventional humor, along with some gore-related humor.(which is always a dead give away that a film isn't all that serious) Surprisingly, most of the humor comes off well. The stuff with 2 police officers is generally pretty good, albeit not all that varied. Panicky Guy and Crazy Yakuza guy are both fairly entertaining as well, though I can't tell how seriously we are supposed to take the latter. He's still amusingly overdone, whether it's intentional or not. The protagonist is merely okay. He doesn't have much personality, but I don't really care. The main villain is better. He doesn't have much personality either, but he's real cool, to put it vaguely.

Even the non-action scenes are passably interesting. They never go on for too long with out having any fighting, so they at least don't get in the way. There's no dialogue I'm gonna be quoting or reflecting on anytime soon, but it moves the plot along anyway, and, as I said before, never really bored me. The only time they falter seriously is in the scene where they introduce the Yakuza guys. It's trying too hard to be cool and they can't pull it off, so it just comes off pretty cheesy. This tendency to overdo it comes up every once in a while, adding packets of cheese infrequently throughout the film, but as I said before, it's not all that serious anyway, so it doesn't disrupt the mood too much.

Well, this review is pretty crappy so I better wrap it up. In summary, it's got a low budget, lots of cool violence, zombies and martial arts, is pretty funny at times and really never gets boring, although it isn't much for character development or plot and is occasionally a bit cheesy. What can I say, I liked it. A lot.

Watch out for the R rated Version, Why it exist? I have no idea seeing that the gore is just the same as Evil Dead, Riky Oh, or Army of darkness, it's funny. I rented the R rated version (not knowing) and it was cut.Scenes were badly clipped. It was so noticeable that it looked like a bad edited movie, thus I did not enjoy it to much. Let them shove the R rated version and avoid it!

They tried hard (a little too hard in places) to be artsy and dramatic. What I liked most was that everything about it reminded me of a japanimation film-the characters especially, but also the storyline. My main complaint would be the english overdubs.

A lot of people didn't like it from the reviews I read. If they were anime fans, however, I bet they would. The Japanese have a style all their own. It takes an open mind to appreciate that in spite of our spoiled hollywood conditioning.

This is a very fun and enjoyable movie. This is the type of movie that you put in the DVD player after feeling depressed after watching Schindlers List or if your having a tough time in your life. It moves fast and you don't have to put a lot of emotions into it. Just sit back and prepare to laugh at the violence that is thrown across the screen. Watching this movie reminds me of Riki-Oh or Meet the Feebles in the way that you can just relax and let all your troubles leave your mind for awhile and just let the greatness of this movie take you over.

A more accurate title for this film would have been "The Blair Matrix Project." It really brings up some serious issues and makes you think..."Could I have made this movie in my backyard with some friends when I was in highschool?" That being said if you can sit through the almost endless (and sometimes pointless) encounters of the main characters and make it to the final scene the movie becomes quite interesting.

"This movie is simply 2 hours of 10 skinny guys doing silly Kung Fu fighting in a haunted forrest."

Thus spake another reviewer. And it is. So why haven't you rented it yet? How can you resist a tag line like that?

There's more, though. For one thing, some girls go kung-fu, too. It's also got Matrix zombies with guns. And a crazy gangster in a sharp black suit. So watch it, why dontcha! It's still better than half the movies Hollywood will release in 2004!