Review: Atsushi Muroga is a love him or hate him kind of director. One side may loathe his derivative plots and basement thrift productions, but those with a taste for quick-shot, explosive gashopon-size-dose action know they've got a friend in Muroga. Personally, I've enjoyed his other films for what they are: simple, mindless and short fun. JUNK may not have been a zombie masterpiece but I can't say I was bored, and the same goes for SCORE's "haven't I seen this somewhere before?" style. Point blank, Atsushi Muroga is a video cinema fan's director; heavy on guns, explosions, squibs and hot women.

BEYOND THE LAW is the second installment in the GUN CRAZY series, but none of the movies are related so there's no need to check out the first video before popping this one in. Rei Kikukawa plays a lawyer discovering where the law's influence ends and the power of the gun begins. The movie doesn't waste any time getting from point A to point B, there aren't enough pit stops to be classified as boring. Muroga knows that revenge is a dish best served in 70 minutes or less, and with the movie clocking in at just a few hairs over an hour, mission accomplished.

Cases of blanks are shot off and a whole shipment of squibs pop from every vital point of the body. While the action scenes aren't that technical or exciting, they're bloody and effective. For a movie called GUN CRAZY, there better be a hell of a lot of bloodshed, painful grimaces, and knock-kneed pleas to be spared. The movie lives up to its name, most likely because it's over so quick that there's no room to deviate from the "shoot-out/brief dialogue/shoot-out" formula. You're more likely to be talking about how "cool that one head shot was and that one time that one guy died" than about how memorable the plot and characters were, but isn't that the point? If v-cinema was put here for a higher purpose than getting rocks off and fulfilling smoke-clouded and violent desires, I don't want to know about it.

In a world where you can walk into a restaurant, pull out two .45s sans silencers and cap an entire table of goons without fear of arrest, it's doubtful that many of the actors were expecting to be explaining their "motivation" to James Lipton at any point in the future. Rei Kikukawa does her job of looking sexy in a leather coat haphazardly aiming firearms, and everyone else fills the job description of either scowling or smiling; you know, the full range.

The real question on everyone's mind is, what has the Lupin III of the v-cinema world "borrowed" this time? It's no secret that Muroga has mastered the art of peppering movies with Tarantino-style homages (like SCORE's ability to squeeze elements from 4-5 films in the time it takes to whip up a Red Baron). BEYOND THE LAW doesn't disappoint, with a fantastic nod to Tony Scott's TRUE ROMANCE complete with a Drexl-like shady dealer. Some may call Atsushi Muroga a thief, but at least he's honest and has fun with it.