Event

THE TRAP

Dir. Kaizô Hayashi, 1996
106 mins. Japan.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

Movies-wise, Mike Hammer - the hard-boiled private dick antihero created by master pulpist Mickey Spillane - was most memorably rendered by Ralph Meeker in Robert Aldrichs atomic-anxiety noir classic KISS ME DEADLY. There was also I, THE JURY two years prior (starring Biff Elliot) and the ill-advised Armand Assante remake three decades later. But less famous is Japanese auteur Kaizô Hayashi's surrogate Maiku Hama, hardheaded as ever but occasionally lacking one in the chamber - running his office out of an ancient movie palace, where clients have to buy a ticket (no exceptions!) to get in. This March, Spectacle is pleased to present three unsung classics of Japanese neo-noir: this is MAIKU HAMA, #1 PRIVATE EYE, embodied immortally by the rubber-faced Masatoshi Nagase (most famous for his starring turn in Jim Jarmusch's MYSTERY TRAIN), who would reprise the character in a made-for-TV followup decades later.

(Special thanks to Film Detective Pictures.)

Hayashi would give his fans a pulse-pounding, breathtaking surprise in 1996's THE TRAP - a film whose macabre bleakness flies in the face of the go-for-broke goofiness of the trilogy's first 2/3rds. Making a decent living and finding himself in love for the first time, Maiku Hama would appear to have turned a corner - until a murderer goes on a streak poisoning innocent women, and leaving Hama's fingerprints behind. The same duo of annoying police detectives are following him, but they've been privy to his shenanigans before; Hama is a doofus, not a serial killer. Hayashi uses a straightforward descent-into-hell scenario to indulge in narrative detours both surreal and faux verite; THE TRAP appears to embody a few different movies at once, a perfect analog for Hama's queasy, uncertain headspace as he gets further down the trail of the killer.