NEW BATTLES WITHOUT HONOUR AND HUMANITY is yet another in an endless wave of brutal yet stylish yakuza epics from director Kinji Fukasaku. It shares much of the cast with his original five-part series and retains Bunta Sugawara in the lead role. He plays a small-time assassin whose time in prison coincides with a rival crime boss deciding to take over the family. Said boss is played by the great Tomisaburo Wakayama, of LONE WOLF & CUB fame. Really, this film is indistinguishable from Fukasaku's other yakuza stories, featuring shocking and garish violence, lots of plotting, characters enjoying themselves, and general outrageous behaviour. It's a film that ably depicts a sense of time and place and is a nice counterpart to modern detailing of the same subject matter such as Beat Takeshi's OUTRAGE trilogy. Two sequels followed.
