Now On Blu-ray: SAMURAI COP 2: DEADLY VENGEANCE Is A Movie That Got Made

Amir Shervan's Samurai Cop (1991) was a miracle of modern megalomania.

Shervan's film, the tale of a samurai trained renegade LA cop taking down the yakuza in the USA, is the rarest of beasts. A cult film that earned its cult through the blood, sweat, and tears of a cast and crew that appear to have been completely convinced that they were making a good film. These kid of films of course make for the best kinds of cults, those that can appreciate the blind sincerity that can only come from a full heart and a kind of blind ambition to make something great. The Room had it, Birdemic had it, Miami Connection had it, and Samurai Cop, in spite of its completely ridiculous premise, definitely had it.

A few years ago independent distributor Cinema Epoch harnessed that earnestness and recognized that this kind of cult is something to be cherished and they've done their best to nurture the audience that Samurai Cop has built. At the time, about three years ago, Matt Hannon, the star of Samurai Cop was presumed to have disappeared or died. However, during the summer of 2014, Hannon (or Matt Karedas as he has regressed to using his birth name on screen) posted a video on YouTube declaring himself to be alive and well, and the cult cinema underground went bananas. It wasn't long before Cinema Epoch and their president Greg Hatanaka decided that it was time to make some dreams come true and bring Matt Hannon/Karedas back to the big screen in the long awaited sequel to Samurai Cop.

After a successful KickStarter campaign, Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance went into production and shortly thereafter hit the midnight circuit around the country. Here we are, in early 2016, and the film is out on Blu-ray for the world to see, but is it worthy of its predecessor? That's a trickier question to answer than I might have thought.

Shervan's original Samurai Cop earns buckets of Brownie points for its straight faced approach to ridiculous scenarios and minuscule budget. The sequel, which picks up with the Samurai Cop and his po-faced partner 25 years later is a cyclone of bad decisions that somehow still manage to earn some goodwill from being so unrepentantly self-aware that it's hard to take it too seriously.

I would attempt a synopsis, but even after watching the thing twice, it's hard to understand what's going on. The film is definitely more about the "how" than the "what" anyway, so that's probably a better place to start. Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance ditches the seriousness of it's predecessor right off the bat, and that's probably for the best as that ship has sailed. In its place we get ham-handed dialogue, innumerable winks and in-jokes referring to the original film, and a shit ton of over the hill actors doing their best to inhale the scenery, all the while screaming their insufferably stupid dialogue at a pitch that made my dog run for cover.

With a cast that includes not only our original principles Matt Karedas and Matt Fraser, but also cult film icons Tommy Wiseau (The Room), Bai Ling (The Crow), and numerous other performers, the film is a literal scream fest. Wiseau, as the yakuza scion Linton literally screams every one of his lines, making his performance in his own film look sedated in comparison. Bai Ling can't act her way out of a paper bag, but here she's at least given the excuse that she's supposed to be overacting, and she's never better than when she's allowed to not give a shit about realism, because frankly, she's not that talented. The miracle here is that both performances somehow add to the charm of Hatanaka's homage to Samurai Cop's over the top performances by allowing the performers to do what they do best. Stink up the joint.

As a narrative film, Samurai Cop 2 is a fucking disaster. However, on some deeper, probably subconscious, level it manages to deliver upon the original's promise without attempting to correct any of its mistakes. Matt Karedas as Joe "Samurai Cop" Marshall appears to be just as befuddled by the inanity around him as we are, and that imbues his character with an odd charm that can't be faked. When I stopped attempting to make sense of the film as a continuation of the Samurai Cop story and began to look at it as a film about a regular guy dropped into this world of screaming yakuza bosses, Caucasian underlings who spoke entirely in Japanese verse, and porn stars turned gang enforcers, I had an epiphany.

Samurai Cop 2 is not about Joe Marshall, the Samurai Cop. It's about Matt Karedas, the man who made a bad movie that everyone loved, getting dumped back into the insane world that made him famous, but this time as a 100% self-aware performer attempting to make sense of the insanity around him. You can see it in his eyes in numerous scenes. Karedas/Marshall completely understands why he is in the middle of this clusterfuck, but he has no way out of it, so the only thing he can do is try to be the character. Now, I'm not completely convinced that my meta reading of the film is accurate, but it is the only way I could place this piece of art into a context that made any sense to me, and in this context it works.

Is Samurai Cop 2 a worthy successor to its antecedent? No, but those are impossibly large shoes to fill. Anyone looking for a straight forward sequel should probably just ride on by. However, as an absurdist conceptual performance art piece based around Samurai Cop as an ideal, you could do worse.

The Disc:

The Blu-ray looks like shit, but every flaw is intentional and designed to mimic the odd color-grading choices and other peculiarities of the original film. I'd say that while the film looks incredibly odd on this disc, I'd also wager that it looks exactly the way the director wants it to look, so take that as a recommendation.

In terms of extras, we get a pair of commentaries and some behind the scenes footage, but nothing that's going to blow your socks off. Commentaries by the lead actors and director are separate and some of the behind the scenes footage makes it abundantly clear that everything you see on screen is 100% the director's vision. Performances are allowed and encouraged to go off the reservation over and over again. To call Samurai Cop "camp" would be the understatement of the century, but it's also the best descriptor I can come up with.

I had fun with Samurai Cop 2, but it did take a major re-calibration of my expectations to get fully into the spirit of the film. If you haven't seen Samurai Cop, this film will make no sense at all, so please, do yourself and make it a double feature.

Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance is now out on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Cinema Epoch.