DEATH RIDE TO OSAKA

Jennifer Jason Leigh stars in this early '80s TV-movie brainbomb directed by the great Jonathan Kaplan (OVER THE EDGE, TRUCK TURNER). This shocking, sleazy cheese snack reads like a worn paperback, and premiered as an NBC movie-of-the-week on a Monday night (minus the nudity.) We can’t imagine the network execs’ thought processes! This jauntiest of white-slavery new wave musicals finds Jennifer giving gullible-teen-in-over-her-head without resorting to cringeworthy melodrama. She travels to Japan with hopes of breaking into showbiz on her own terms, but is instead held captive by the local yakuza to perform in their nightclub. The ersatz Ghislane Maxwell is extra creepy, the house band is on-point, co-star Ann Jillian wouldn’t be out of place in a hazy ’40s noir, and the John Carpenter-esque score is from Brad Fiedel (THE TERMINATOR).