I guess September was planned as something of a return of various subjects or actors, and in this case, also directors.

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema. I guess when I programmed what September was going to feature on the blog, I was thinking about a lot of things I hadn’t done in a bit. I had Red Letter Media come back, another killer primate movie, and some blaxploitation. So I guess it’s only fair to bring Charles Bronson, J. Lee Thompson, and Cannon Films. This week, we’re gonna learn about Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects.

Cannon is all over this blog. So much so, there’s a whole tag for Cannon Films. There are so many, I bet I have forgotten to tag some with that. Shit, I almost forgot to tag THIS review with Cannon Films. Charles Bronson, surprisingly, has not been covered as much here on B-Movie Enema. Maybe I’m worried his ghost will come back, ask me if I believe in Jesus, because I’m gonna meet ’em. I’ve only covered two of his movies before, Assassination waaaaay back in 2018, and then 10 to Midnight back in the summer of 2024. One of those movies is far better than the other. The other is a Cannon production.

I don’t know really what exactly I can say about Bronson that I hadn’t before. He was a legitimate movie star for about 40 years. Sure, his later work with Cannon was largely lower-end work, but it was paying the bills and it was consistent, constant work. He did a lot of work in the 50s and 60s as a guest star on a lot of popular TV shows, including some of the biggest stuff on the boob tube like The Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and The Fugitive. He really was more of a movie guy. He had high profile roles in a lot of high profile movies, including The Dirty Dozen and The Great Escape, but in the 70s, he transitioned into a no-nonsense tough guy leading man. This is when he’s doing movies like Mr. Majestyk, Telefon, St. Ives, and, of course, Death Wish.

Death Wish would be the movie that would really cement the rest of Bronson’s career and life. It was part exploitation, part revenge fantasy, part crime thriller. He’d return as Paul Kersey four more times over the course of 20 years. And, yes, someday I will pull that trigger at a Kino Lorber sale and get that box set so I can finally bring it to B-Movie Enema.

But a guy who worked quite often with Bronson is the director of this film and of several films I’ve covered before – J. Lee Thompson. Thompson worked with Bronson, starting with 1976’s St. Ives, all the way to this movie in 1989, totaling nine films. It’s only fitting that we cover the final film of their partnership first. Anyway, this is far from the first time we’ve seen Thompson on this site. I’ve covered Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, King Solomon’s Mines, Firewalker, and, of course, 10 to Midnight. However, there are a couple of extremely popular movies that Thompson made that are far more highly regarded than any of the movies I’ve covered of his here. These movies were released in back-to-back years – 1961’s The Guns of Navarone and 1962’s Cape Fear. These movies featured guys that Thompson often worked with, like Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, and Robert Mitchum.

But let’s find out what Kinjite is and what these Forbidden Subjects are all about.

Now, as I typed that about wanting to find out about what these “forbidden subjects” were, I kinda knew the answer already. I knew this movie had to do with something with Japanese businessmen, sex, prostitution, pimping, BDSM stuff, and the so forth. I figured, since this movie was 1) a Cannon production, 2) a Charles Bronson thriller, and 3) still an 80s movie, this movie was likely pointing at different cultures and subcultures through a lens of “see how strange non-American and (presumably because of Golan and Globus) non-Israeli culture is? Seeeee?”

Well, the credits don’t disappoint. A guy has a briefcase full of sex shit – vaseline, a strip of silk to tie a woman in her panties to a bed, a whip, and a dildo. Oh yeah, detectives find a dead naked chick too. So, yup… weird sex shit that doesn’t jibe with our purely apple pie, white American values.

Nosiree… Never have I ever found anything this movie is doing sexy. Nope. Never. I prefer my women to be flat on their back, watching the clock on the wall, and hoping this is over as soon as possible. That’s real American sex.

The girl in her panties getting tied up was DeeDee. The man she was with was Pimp King (the words of the movie and of Wikipedia, not mine), Duke. Charles Bronson, playing Lt. Crowe, immediately pegs the couple as two things. First, Duke is scum. Second, DeeDee is underage.

DeeDee is played by Nicole Eggert, a girl most people my age had a crush on, thanks to her work on Charles in Charge. She was 16 at the time she was in this movie. The movie does not directly show her face as the woman in the bedroom with Pimp King Duke, buuuut… Knowing how Cannon worked, I’m guessing it probably was, and that is proven one scene later. That’s titillating in one regard if I think about it from my 12-year-old mind, having been crushing on her at the time, but as my near 50-year-old self… Yikes. Add to that, she had allegations against the Charles in Charge lead, Scott Baio, claiming he was inappropriate to her…

Yeah, this is a Cannon Film through and through.

As I said, it is DeeDee who was shown in the credits getting tied to a bed. We learn this because Crowe and his partner, a guy I do not have the character name for, who likely means he’s not long for this movie, decide to bust up the whole thing. They follow DeeDee into the hotel she went into, and after a case of casual 1980s racism toward the Indian fella at the front desk, Crowe finds out which room DeeDee went to. There, she’s about to engage in getting that dildo put somewhere by a typical 1980s businessman. Crowe and his unnamed, not long for this movie, partner are going to arrest both DeeDee and the business guy.

This is where shit gets really funny. The businessman basically tells Charles Bronson to shove that plan up his ass and tries to use a coatrack to fight off Crowe. Crowe beats the shit out of him and then reveals that he was about to “hurt a little kid.” He also wants Crowe to tell the police, in an official statement, that it is Pimp King Duke who delivers the girls to him. He then tells the businessman that he’s going to feel what the little girls he hurts feel because Bronson is not going to shove anything up his own ass…

He’s gonna shove that guy’s dildo up that guy’s asshole.

So that was pure cinema when it comes to an opening scene. I do love that the next time we see Bronson, he’s at home with his wife, and he’s washing his hands. That… That most definitely causes my mind to go to various places. Were his hands filthy with the businessman’s butthole juices while he drove back to the station with his partner? Inquiring minds really do want to kno… Actually, no. My imagination has done quite enough.

He does admit to his wife that he did something stupid tonight that could jeopardize his pension. She tells him that he must have just let that Irish side of his personality out a little too much, and it’s all gonna be cool. She does not know that what he did was shove a dildo up a sex pervert’s asshole. She might have a different take if she knew that.

We transition to Japan. There, we meet businessman Hiroshi Hada. Hada is in a rough patch in his marriage. He’s also working for a company that has American interests in Los Angeles. After his English classes, which also discuss American culture and traditions, he goes out drinking with co-workers and classmates. He gets quite drunk. He comes home to get chewed out by his wife. His daughters have mixed feelings about their parents’ relationship. The older daughter thinks their mother is at fault. The younger daughter thinks maybe he should not be drinking so much and spending money on “spa girls.” We can definitely see which one of these two girls is the more progressive of the two.

Part of the issue between Hada and his wife is their sex life. You see, the title, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, is basically the same title repeated back to back. Kinjite means “forbidden subjects.” He was told that Americans have various subjects that are off-limits. He seems to have some pretty perverted thoughts and is unsatisfied with how his wife doesn’t really have the same sex drive and experimental desire.

Hold that thought for a moment because we gotta transition back to Los Angeles. There, we meet Crowe’s teenage daughter, Rita. Rita is at an age where she’s exploring her own drive and desires. This bothers her father quite a bit. It’s one thing he has to deal with perverts on the reg while doing his cop job on the vice squad. It’s another thing to find boys from school in his living room with his daughter with the lights out.

I mean… There’s something definitely here about how people deal with sex, right? We have a pimp who sells pussy. We have a businessman who wants to explore lots of different flavors of pussy. And we have the vice cop who can only see guy #1 and guy #2 as his daughter starts to blossom into a young woman with her own desire. While the only guy who you can kind of say is the most normal is the exploratory Japanese guy, but that’s kind of ruined by his strict, domineering “culture” that the movie is selling, which makes it seem like Japanese marriages of the 1980s were no different than the 1380s, with the man in charge and the woman to blame for his wandering lust.

I see you trying to make a statement about how men view and deal with sex (the “forbidden subjects”), but you’re also a Cannon Film, so I expect you to fumble this bag hard. This bag that hangs under the hard rod that Cannon will try to hold on tight to only to fumble it… Oh… yeah…

Ahem… Sorry. This movie finds Pimp King Duke scoping out chicks to kidnap at a sporting event that not many people would have known about in 1989. They are at an Arena Football League game. We had a team here in the 2000s called the Indiana Firebirds. We didn’t have them long, but I went to a few games. They were fun. Anyway, this scene is a Republican’s wet dre… soiled nightma… Soggy nightmare. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Pimp King Duke and his main henchman are scanning the crowd for girls they can sell into sexual slavery. The operative word is GIRLS. Yeah, they are scanning for specifically young girls. They want underage hookers. When they find Rita sitting with her dad, Pimp King Dude wants to do two things. First, he wants that little girl. His goon is practically drooling right away. Second, he wants to fuck with Crowe. He finds Crowe at the concession stand buying hot dogs for Rita and her friend. Pimp King Duke and his goon approach Crowe to razz him about liking young girls because they saw him sitting with a little girl who could bring in $5,000 a week.

Now, I would think that this is a dangerous thing to do, you know? This is Charles fucking Bronson. I don’t think it is a good idea for you to come up to him out of nowhere and try to accuse him of fucking his daughter. Do you know the things that have happened to his daughter in his movies, Pimp King Duke? Yeah… You’re lucky he only smashed his hot dogs into your face and not cut your head off, stuff it in a brown paper bag, and deliver it to a Catholic Priest to be put on a pike as a warning to all the other pimps in Los Angeles.

Oh my god… he cut Pimp King Duke’s head off, stuffed it in a brown paper bag, and delivered it to a Catholic Priest to be put on a pike as a warning to all the other pimps in Los Angeles!!!

Oh wait… That is just some deli lunch for him. He goes to the Catholic Priest in a bit of an exchange deal. The Priest brings in sexually exploited kids who ran away from their johns or their pimps. Crowe brings pictures of missing kids, so that the Priest can be on the lookout for them when he gets fresh transients in the church.

Back in Japan, Hada watches a man grope a woman on a crowded subway. It is not totally clear if the woman likes what the man is doing to her or not. It’s a little bit of a blurred line. I don’t think she likes being violated, but it appears she does have an orgasm. Hada smiles at the interaction between the two strangers. When the man who accosted the woman exits the train, Hada notices the woman, and we see that she seems either ashamed or horrified about what just happened.

That gray area is an interesting thing because the scene does play enough from both sides, but also Hada tells his coworker about what he saw. He says the woman was beautiful. He says that it was obvious she was enjoying it because she had an orgasm. His coworker says he might just be wishing that onto her. He rebukes Hada’s claim that if she didn’t enjoy it, she could have shouted for help by saying that she is likely not some bar girl who knows how to handle a frisky man. She didn’t know how to react because of an internalized shame of being violated.

I will give this movie credit, and I think there are moments this movie should get credit, thanks to Thompson’s ability to direct, the scene Hada, and us as the viewers, witness, is kind of icky. It’s uncomfortable in the regard that every time the woman closes her eyes from what might be perceived as a good feeling that she’s being touched, it is immediately followed by her eyes darting back and forth. In a way, it’s actually a visual representation of Hada’s thoughts of what he’s seeing. He doesn’t push back too hard on his coworker (who I believe is his superior at work) when he says that he might be projecting this onto her. It’s like he is both seeing the intensities of the fantasy of the encounter between two strangers, one of whom is a gorgeous woman, and the reality of the fact that this is a very fucked up thing to happen in a train car loaded with commuters. It’s shot with some ambiguity, and it does play with Hada’s sexual frustration that allows him to see things that are quite icky in both a fantastical, almost Penthouse Forum, sort of way and in a violation way because he either can’t, won’t, or hasn’t yet experimented with his own deviant urges. It’s the first really good (and probably only) attempt at saying something about sex and power dynamics compared to consensual fantasy.

Anyway, this scene concludes with Hada’s manager delivering the news that Hada will be relocated to Los Angeles for a three-year stint for the company.

Speaking of Los Angeles, there’s a maniac cop on the streets there! Crowe surprises Pimp King Duke by waiting for the scumbag in his car. He threatens him to go to a specific part of the city where they can have a conversation. No cops. No police station. No lawyers. Just the two of them going over what they do for a living. Pimp King Duke sells little kids. Crowe stops people like Pimp King Duke. Pimp King Duke figures he can hand over his fancy watch to buy off Crowe, and they will go their separate ways. Crowe tells Pimp King Duke that he would like to shove that watch up his ass… but he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty.

Um, Chuck? Yeah. Geoff here. Did you forget that other time? I definitely screen-grabbed it for posterity. You know, that other time you shoved something up a pervert’s butt? What… What was that? You even washed your hands in the very next scene. Look… I saw, and heard, you do this…

No comment? Okie dokie.

Crowe shoves the watch into Pimp King Duke’s mouth. He tells him he’s gonna eat that or he’ll blow his brains out. He assures Pimp King Duke that he won’t die, but he will have to shove his head between his legs to tell time. He then shoves a bunch of kindling into the backseat of Pimp King Duke’s car and lights it on fire. He says it isn’t anything personal. He just believes in the morals of the concept that a man shouldn’t be allowed to drive a $20,000 car from money made from little girls on their backs. I concur.

We get a little interlude of Rita at a swim meet. After she wins, the school yearbook/newspaper photographer snaps some triumphant pics of her in various poses that start to make ol’ Crowe uncomfortable. Yeah… This is the type of guy who would 100% crash out online if he thinks a transwoman would be in the bathroom at the same time as someone else’s daughter. You know, because his daughter wouldn’t be in that situation because he’s checking genitals at the door.

Ah, Cannon Films, doing the job Fox News would do 30 years later, but way more stupidly fun.

Alright, so we’re squarely in the part of the movie where an escalation is building between Crowe and Pimp King Duke. You see, Crowe’s actions are going to come back and haunt him a bit. Crowe and his partner are targeted by Pimp King Duke while they grab a bite to eat. Their Captain, Tovar, gives them a lot of grief because innocent people died because they were targeted. Thanks to the omission in the report they filed about why this could be the case, it looks especially bad for them. Crowe fesses up to what he did to Pimp King Duke. Tovar is REALLY not happy to hear about this. He tells Crowe he HAS to follow the law. Bust Pimp King Duke the right way, not some vigilante bullshit way.

Elsewhere, Hada goes out late after work. He’s with American bar girls and wants to get touchy-feely with them, but that’s not so much allowed here in America. Again, he’s drunk and gets on a bus to go home. He decides he wants to do the thing the guy he saw in Japan did to a woman when the bus gets crowded. But bad news for him, the girl he’s going to try it on is Rita Crowe. That means he’s either going to get a dildo in his asshole or an expensive watch in his neckhole from her father.

Unlike Japan, the person accosted in America screams. He gets off the bus as soon as he could, but Rita let her friends and her teacher know that “some oriental guy” touched her “holiest of holies.” This leads to a LOT of Cannon Films aggressive racism. Guys are just finding the closest Asian guys on the street to be identified. Fights break out against anyone vaguely looking Asian. It’s a madhouse. This continues at the police station, where Rita says, in her best white, blonde, and privileged affectation, “How can you tell any of them apart?” when a police officer asks her to at least try to figure out if her attacker was Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or… whatever.

Also, being blonde, white, and privileged, by better fuckin’ believe the manhunt for this Asian fella is going to take top priority in Los Angeles.

Despite the circus caused when Rita told the people in and around the bus what happened to her, Hada is able to get away somewhat scot-free. He was attacked by a mugger, which happened on the sidewalk of another part of the street where little to no attention was being paid. When he got home, his bruised and battered state led to his wife being a little more willing to take part in some sexual activity.

If we think a girl saying, “Some oriental touched my holiest of holies!” caused some excitement and INSTANT hatred of “orientals,” you best fuckin’ believe that her father is going to declare war against a whole-ass portion of the world, nationality be damned! He tells his partner that he has every right to be pissed off because some “sleazy oriental” groped his little girl. Add to that, he better fuckin’ open those goddamn eyes of his because the Japanese are buying up all sorts of land and taking over! He’s mad that they bust their asses at work, and they are at the bottom of the barrel because those goddamn Japs are rich! Goddammit!

And, yes, he creates a scene. Again, if you think what Rita said, and the resulting street fight, caused a race war on the spot, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Okay, check it out… Some stories are starting to collide big time. We have the business between Hada and Rita. That connects Hada to Crowe because he’s on the prowl for some “sleazy oriental” who molested his little girl. Now, Hada is about to be connected to Pimp King Duke. While on recess from her school for the Japanese families now living in the States, Hada’s daughter, Fumiko, is approached by Pimp King Duke. It’s like he’s wherever EVERY kid in Los Angeles is. It’s kinda crazy. Anyway, he tricks her into thinking he’s got an appointment with her school’s headmistress. She gets in the car to show him where her school is and ends up at his apartment, in his bedroom, with the door closed.

Captain Tovar assigns Crowe and his partner to go to the school and investigate this missing juvenile girl. Tovar thinks it could go either way between being a serious thing or nothing at all. Crowe requests to be replaced over what happened with his daughter and his lack of sympathy for the “orientals.” Tovar tells him to get fucked and do his job. Captain Tovar, Woke Warrior.

While Crowe and Rios (I finally learned the partner’s name!) interview the principal of the school and Hada, Pimp King Duke’s guys basically go into the bedroom one after another for Fumiko. It’s pretty damn gross. It doesn’t help that Crowe is aggressively dickish toward Hada. Okay, yes, I know Hada is the guy who wanted to re-enact the train scene on the bus with Rita, but he doesn’t know that. He’s just being a dick to a distressed father just because he’s got them funny eyes…

To prove Crowe is not like the Woke Warrior that Captain Tovar is, he tells Rios that he’s glad they left Hada’s place. He can’t deal with all that damn crying and emotion. He thought the Japanese were tough as shit and ready to fall on the sword for the Emperor and all that shit. But crying?!? Fuck that. But good news, though… Fumiko has been spotted at a hotel. Rios and Crowe arrive and bust into a porno shoot where they get jumped by the guys shooting the movie and kick their asses.

The twist? Well, Crowe and Rios get a little bit of understanding that Rita didn’t have. The tip that brought them to the porno shoot was made because a woman who was identified as Fumiko was just another Asian woman. It’s just that same ol’ “all orientals look the same” thing that Rita was saying when she was being interviewed by the police over her assault.

In truth, Fumiko has been carted around the city by Pimp King Duke all day. She’s been sold to old white guys who were probably, like, the local leader of the Republican Party. She’s been sold to a lesbian because homos are scary, or something.

The good news on the “good guys” front is that the priest who finds wayward kids and shelters them after they’ve been abandoned or run away from their pimps has someone who knows how to find Pimp King Duke – DeeDee. She is hesitant at first to give Crowe any information. She has a kind of twisted love for Pimp King Duke. She says that there is no way for Crowe to know that Fumiko didn’t want to be with Pimp King Duke. After all, Pimp King Duke didn’t make DeeDee into a prostitute; her own stepfather did. He may have made her dependent on drugs, but if not him, someone else would have anyway.

She tells Crowe that Pimp King Duke is probably on the run, hiding, or flat-out moved to another location. That said, he does like to dress nicely. He has a very specific place he goes to get his pants tailored. Crowe is on his way to stake that place out with Rios.

Later that night, DeeDee sneaks to the phone to call the shop to warn them that Crowe is going to be staking out the place. Crowe and Rios follow Pimp King Duke to his apartment. When the guard at the front of the building won’t give a straight answer, Crowe tosses a statue through his window until he says which apartment Pimp King Duke lives in. Crowe and Rios get to the apartment, but not before Pimp King Duke escapes with some of his bitches. One of his goons is still there, but won’t say where his boss went.

So, Crowe and Rios hang the goon off the balcony to make him talk.

He doesn’t give them anything, especially because his shoes slip off his feet, and he falls to his death in the pool below. The good news is that Fumiko locked herself in the bedroom, so she didn’t leave with Pimp King Duke. Crowe and Rios return Fumiko to the Hadas.

They arrive later with gifts for Crowe for his work. Unfortunately, this means that Rita and Hada are face-to-face, which allows Rita to possibly recognize Hada. Fumiko wrote a poem to Crowe about harbors and boats. Her mother explains that Fumiko believes Crowe would know what that means. As the Hadas leave, Crowe tells his wife that he only wishes they had found Fumiko sooner. Meanwhile, back at the Hada residence, Fumiko commits suicide by injecting herself with… morphine? Something else? Whatever it is, her experience with Pimp King Duke affected her pretty terribly.

Rios helps figure out what Fumiko’s poem meant. It’s a boat that Pimp King Duke uses to hide. Pimp King Duke has laid a trap for the cops. A crane grabs their car, the hook crashes in and impales Rios, killing him. I should note that Rios was doomed for two reasons. First, it took WAAAAY too long to learn his name. Second, when they started out to find Pimp King Duke, he told Crowe he was on the path to retirement, and he didn’t want to go too far outside the law to bring in the bad guy. I knew this shit was going to happen right when he mentioned retirement.

While Pimp King Duke believes Crowe has perished when the crane drops his car to the ground, Crowe actually climbed out and was shooting from the hook on the crane, killing Pimp King Duke’s goons. There are three goons with machine guns that Crowe kills in the most awesome way ever – he shoots some gasoline that ignites and runs over to barrels the goons are standing behind and explodes the goons because they were just too stupid to not use barrels of flammable, and highly explosive, shit as cover in a gunfight.

Crowe uses the crane to knock Pimp King Duke into the harbor. Turns out the Pimp King can’t swim. Crowe considers leaving the villain to drown, but decides to do things the lawful way and pulls him out of the water. He arranges some poetic justice for Pimp King Duke. He’s put in the part of the prison reserved for sexually aggressive inmates.

There, Danny Trejo and some even bigger inmates are waiting to give him something “big and long…”

Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects is not particularly good. While it doesn’t have anything exceptionally wrong with the plot or the concept, it just… doesn’t do anything particularly well. I don’t want to downplay the racist elements. I mean, it was an 80s Cannon Films movie. There was definitely going to be some kind of white, Anglo, Judeo-Christian supremacy going on here. I’m a little surprised by how racist it got toward “orientals.” There’s no reason to have made Rita nearly unlikable because she went monolithic over Asians all looking the same, and seemingly kind of got a little snotty over how she answered the questions at the police station. I know, I know… She was a victim, and she was processing shit. Yes, I agree that she was dealing with some bad shit. However, the way Amy Hathaway was responding to the cops’ questions really came off snotty. It was either direction or how she acted it that felt… bad.

And, yeah… things feeling bad is a big part of how I ultimately feel about the movie. I just felt icky and bad. It’s an exploitation flick, and not the fun kind of sleaze. It feels like this movie only wanted to shock people into instantly thinking that some non-white guy is going to be on the prowl for your daughters, and they are all deviants in some way. It just feels bad, man. Like, seriously, the good guys and the bad guys were divided along racial lines. Excluding Hada’s wife and daughters, he, a Japanese character, attempted to molest Rita. Pimp King Duke is a Hispanic man. His primary lieutenants were black. As much as I like to think I’m a pretty good progressive leftist, I didn’t have to look for this in the movie to criticize it. It’s there on purpose. Golan and Globus were known to be that way. They especially hated Arabs, but all these guys and their various races will do the trick for a 1989 Los Angeles-set movie.

The whole thing with Hada and Rita ultimately meant nothing at all. Honestly, what did it do in the long run? There is no good end to their interaction. What he did to her was bad, yes. Her description was charged in a way that some white guys attacked some Asian guys on the street, and vice versa. Crowe’s rant about Japanese people taking over the United States was a direct result of the interaction between Hada and Rita. Again, it was a monolithic situation. Japanese people will buy up all our land and businesses and rape our children.

What did it actually serve the plot? Well, I guess it gave Crowe some sort of strange mini arc that he had to work through. Going from “reassign me, Captain” to “I wish we had found the girl sooner.” Big whoop. Did Rita recognize Hada when he came to their house to give her the gift as an appreciation for finding Fumiko? It seems like she did, but she didn’t say anything. That kind of implicates her as being willing to let his transgression slide for… what exactly? It’s a mirroring, I guess, of sorts, to the thing in the Japanese train car when Hada saw the girl get assaulted, and he projected a fantasy onto her that fit how he felt. Later, he projects a sense of “let me get away with this” to Rita, and she actually accepts it because he went through some rough shit.

So, yeah… It did nothing for the plot. At best, she is complicit in silence, ultimately, possibly, allowing Hada to do this again to someone when his life inevitably spirals out of control now that Fumiko killed herself. At worst, the movie is saying her casual racism toward Asians and being unable to tell them apart made her believe this wasn’t the guy who assaulted her on the bus. There is no good conclusion to that whole plot, so why was it there?

For me, I would have completely cut out all that Japan part of the movie. Hada can just be a guy who is first introduced as a businessman recently relocating to Los Angeles for work, and his daughter is kidnapped. “But Geoff,” exclaims Menahem Golan, “How can we make Japanese people look bad?!?” Well, dipshit… If that must be part of this movie, have Crowe have this prejudice from the start. He hates pimps, and he happens to spout off about Japanese and Chinese people being all over Los Angeles or something. He can then still say he doesn’t want to take the Hada case because he isn’t sympathetic toward Asians. You can reallocate that time spent in Japan getting to know Hada’s kinky bullshit and put it toward a constant battle between Crowe and Rios about the worth of Asians in the country.

And, yes, I know that people in 1989 said the things about how the Japanese businesses were buying everything up and ruining American industries, or what have you. I was there. I heard that rhetoric a lot back in the late 80s and through the 90s. So, it’s not a hard thing to do to just make Crowe a racist against Asians.

Beyond that, it just feels gritty and grimy in ways that just make you uncomfortable. I called it something like a conservative man’s soggy nightmare. This is the type of movie that only wants you to be afraid. It wants to trip those parts of your brain that make you get off on the worst possible thing so you can feel justified in being a weirdo. It’s the type of movie that has the opposite effect of what it is selling. You aren’t learning how to be protective of your teenage daughter’s virtue and virginity. You’re starting to fetishize it by thinking about how it can be taken from her by that guy over there, who doesn’t really look like the people I want her to be with, if you know what I mean…

And I think you do.

No, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects wants to be a dark thriller that exposes the world of child trafficking, but it comes off like a macho fantasy and cartoonish. In a post-Epstein world, we know there is a lot of this stuff happening, but it isn’t some pimp driving around in a limo with tailored pants and $25k watches with diamond faces. It’s powerful people using their power and influence to not only do whatever they want, but also never be held accountable. To think there is some sort of superhero character played by a Charles Bronson that will do whatever it takes to stop these sleezoid creeps is a fantasy.

The only way to stop this sort of heinous shit is to make sure all who partake in the crimes are held accountable.

Speaking of heinous and gritty shit on film, next week begins the annual tradition of October horror films at B-Movie Enema. Next month is dedicated to a man who knows how to put gritty and grimy things on screen that will make you uncomfortable, but in ways different than what Kinjite did. We begin what I’m calling Rob Zombie’s Spookshow! We kick things off with slightly lighter fare when it comes to the comfort level his films will make you feel.

So, in seven days, let’s all meet up on Mockingbird Lane by way of Transylvania when I review 2022’s The Munsters!