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In the mid 90s, I saw this black-and-white Japanese noir film that I really loved - The Most Terrible Time in My Life (Waga Jinsei Saiaku no Toki). The detective protagonist is named Maiku Hama (obviously a spin on the Mickey Spillane character) and has his office above a movie theatre. You can literally see and hear the movie projector while in his office. The theatre is playing "The Best Years of Our Lives" and for the title sequence they do this cool thing where several of the Japanese characters spin on the marquee to change the title of the movie that's showing to the title of the movie you're watching. On the surface, the story might seem to suffer from the hero not being proactive enough. He's sort of caught in the middle of this gang war between involving two Taiwanese immigrant brothers and doesn't solve a lot of mysteries or problems. I really think that's not an issue. While Maiku is indeed very reactionary throughout the film and gets beaten up by just about everyone, that's kind of the point. I mean, this is an art film and it's certainly fitting to the title to have all of this stuff dumped on the hero. The movie ends by bleeding directly into a preview for the next "Maiku Hama" film in the series Stairway to the Distant Past (Harukana Jidai no Kaidan). Again, they do something cool, where Maiku has a sign on his door that says "Maiku Hama - Out." He limps up the stairs and turns the sign to the other side which says "To Be Continued..." All of a sudden, things are in color and you're seeing scenes from the next movie.

I wasn't expecting to see the trailer, but as soon as I did, I wanted to see the film. Unfortunately, it never was released in America. I soon began to search on the internet, which, as always, yeilded interesting information. There was a third film in the series, The Trap (Wana) as well as a 12 episode TV Series, with each episode being helmed by a different acclaimed director. The second and third movies as well as the TV show was/is available on DVD through Japanese outlets. While I do have a multi-region DVD player that could handle these discs, it appears that there is no English subtitle track. As visually impressive as the first film is and as the second film appears to be from the trailer, I would suspect that a veiwing without understanding most of the dialogue would be a lacking experience.  I therefore began to hope that "Maiku Hama" would be brought over through translated DVDs at one point.

And then, only a few weeks ago, "The Most Terrible Time in My Life" was released in the States by Kino International. I rented it immediately and began to hope that I might be able to see the sequels. I contacted Kino through their website.  Again, I'm always amazed at how wonderful the internet can be at gathering info.  I got a response in ten minutes. The fact that I was getting such specialized and quick information did not suggest that Kino was doing such amazing business that they had to focus on importing a ton of new titles. My fears were confirmed as I opened the email.

"Hello Mr. Franck,

We're sorry, but we have no plans of releasing the sequels. The original hasn't performed as well as we hoped, so we've decided to stay away from the sequels for now.

We did release the DEAD OR ALIVE trilogy, but the first part of that film was very successful and we already owned part three, so acquiring part made all the sense in the world.

In this case we only acquired the rights for the first one with a package of 8 other films, we had no idea that there were sequels and we've heard that they're not as good as the original."

Looks like it might be time for me to start taking Japanese again!