I hadn't seen any of Kinji Fukasaku's work from the 1960s so I thought BLACK LIZARD would be a good place to check it out. It's a lively adaptation of an old detective novel by Edogawa Rampa, although being made in the late '60s it has more than a touch of Bond to it with a super villain, an island lair, and some hotel hijinks. The detective doesn't feature too much here, the brunt of the narrative being given over to the Black Lizard character, a female nightclub owner played by a guy in drag. It's a highly stylised and frankly bizarre little film that labours some of the plotting, but it has some interesting surrealist touches to make it worth a look.
Review of Black Lizard
