Take Aim at the Police Van

I've been mentioning pretty much every time I do a post on a foreign film recently that I've got a bunch of them on my DVR, which is why they've been showing up as blog posts more often. My most recent foreign film watch was actually a move selected by Eddie Muller for Noir Alley that I'd never heard of, Take Aim at the Police Van.

Thankfully, the movie opens up with someone taking aim at the titular police van, which is more like a bus, but that's not the point. On a road in a place that looks deserted enough that it's got to be someplace outside of Tokyo, prisoners are being transported when the transport van gets in a run-in with a truck. This is of course a ruse to get the bus stopped. Not so somebody can free prisoners which would normally be the case, but instead to shoot some of them. The shoot is successful, in that two men wind up dead.

Tamon was the guard on the transport responsible for the safety of the prisoners. Even though there wasn't really anything he could do to prevent the shooting, he's still responsible, so his superiors suspend him for six months. On the one hand, that sucks, but on the other hand, this gives him the chance to do some investigation of his own. One the bus, one of the prisoners had been writing the name "Aki" in the fog on the window, so Tamon goes looking for this man, Goro, to see if he has any clues. Goro, however, still seems to be wanted by someone else, so even though Tamon finds him, Goro immediately goes on the run.

Tamon's search also brings him into contact with an employment agency that presumptively provides masseuses and the like, but it's really providing them for the happy endings. They've provided women to a hotel in a seaside spa town, so it's there that Tamon goes. And just before he can interview the woman he wants to, she gets shot with an arrow right through the breast!

Tamon talks to Yuko Hamajima, who is currently running the agency in place of her father, who's in hospital. She has obvious reasons to distrust Tamon, but wouldn't you know it, she seems to be falling in love with him. And what does all of this have to do with the two people who were shot on the prison bus, anyway?

Take Aim at the Police Van has a convoluted plot, as even Eddie Muller himself would admit. As such, it's the sort of foreign film that would probably work better if you're actually fluent enough in Japanese that you don't need subtitles. I'm not, so I felt as though there was a lot that I was missing. I do have to say, however, that the movie was extremely visually stylish, and that covers up for a lot of the film's messy plot.