Best known as the
director of the Heisei Gamera trilogy and Godzilla,
Mothra & King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out
Attack (2001), Shusuke Kaneko was interested
in science fiction, particularly Godzilla films,
from a young age. He joined Nikkatsu Studios after
graduating college and acted as an assistant director
for numerous "roman porno" films. He
directed his first movie, Koichiro Uno's Wet
and Shooting, in 1984. His first film to
achieve critical success, both in Japan and outside,
would be his 1988 film Summer Vacation: 1999.
After creating the fun vampire flick My
Soul is Slashed in 1991, Kaneko, working
for the first time in America, directed a segment
of the horror anthology Necronomicon.
He then got the chance to direct Gamera:
Guardian of the Universe (1995), the
first entry in the Heisei Gamera series. It was
a huge critical success and led to a sequel: Gamera
2: Advent of Legion (1996), which was
as critically acclaimed, if not more so, than
the first film. Kaneko then went all out for the
third and final film in the trilogy: Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999), creating
a film which many fans, in both Japan and the
West, believe rivals Ishiro Honda's original Godzilla.
He then directed the horror film Pyrokinesis
(2000) before returning to the kaiju genre for
Godzilla,
Mothra & King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out
Attack (2001), a film which many Godzilla
fans consider to easily be the finest entry in
the Millennium series. In 2005, he directed the
sequel to Ryuhei Kitamura's sword film Azumi:
Azumi
2: Death or Love and his next film, a
horror flick entitled God's Left Hand, Devil's
Right Hand will released in Japan in June,
2006.
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