“The Sadness” opens with a loving couple in Taiwan, about to go about their day as stories of a new disease splash on the news. Before you know it, a pandemic has turned the residents of Taiwan into bloodthirsty maniacs. These are not your lumbering hulks of Romero or even really the speedy maniacs of Boyle. They’re more homicidal than your typical undead, as if the pandemic unleashed the most horrific, violent, predatory aspects of human nature. The sick go on killing sprees, stabbing, torturing, raping, and turning Taiwan into a nightmare of body parts and horror.

At one point, a zombie has sex with the eye socket of a living woman, and that’s really just the start. One of my notes was simply, “Bloody zombie f**king.” You can’t say you haven’t been warned. And yet “The Sadness” lacks momentum. It begins to feel like a series of episodic gross-outs more than anything with rising action or honest tension. And it feels thin on political or social commentary even though it’s clearly trying. It’s too distracted by one-upping the scene before to ask why.

At least Jabbaz’s film is memorably insane. I can’t say the same about Vicente Amorim’s downright languid “Yakuza Princess.” Based on the graphic novel by Danilo Beyruth, the film takes place in Sao Paulo, which is the largest Japanese diasporic community in the word, home to over 1.6 million Japanese Brazilians. It’s a fascinating place to set an action film, but Amorim does nothing with his setting, choosing to traffic in clichés and stereotypes instead of mining its richness of culture and character.

Masumi, a Japanese-American singer making a flat feature debut, plays Akemi, a woman whose 21st birthday is about to coincide with cascading revelations about her family. She’s trained in martial arts from a master named Chiba (Toshiji Takeshima), but she doesn’t know much about her background outside of some haunting dreams. Across town, a man named Shiro (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, going all in with wide eyes and serious whispers) wakes up in a hospital with no idea who he is or how he got there. But he has a badass sword. A third arc starts in Japan with a Yakuza boss (Tsuyoshi Ihara, who seems to be the only one here who understood the assignment) who learns a secret and heads off to Brazil, ready to collide with Akemi and Shiro. 

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmn52jqba3rcusZp%2BZnqmutLXAZmlpamFit7a6ymafnpmUYsGpsYygqZ6ZpGLGsLfAomSwmaJitLat0Z2gmqajYsGpsYysmJ2mlajAbsXApKyzmV2lv6q6wp6qrA%3D%3D