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Since Friday there’s been nothing in the movie theatres but Twilight: Breaking Dawn, and that sucks on every possible level. Theatre owners complain that attendance is down and the industry is dying, so their solution is to take away our power to choose what we want to see. Brilliant. That’ll get us back into the movie houses.

Fortunately we don’t have to put up with their crap. We are not powerless; this is the 21st century and we have lots of options. Sure we prefer to watch our movies on the big screen while stuffing our faces with popcorn and drinking gallons of soda, but not if it means having our brains sucked out by emo vampires. We want more out of cinema than a choice between bestiality and necrophilia. For starters, we want Cinema.

So we’re going to have our own film festival at home.

Our opening film is 13 Assassins by the extremely prolific Takashi Miike, who seems to pop out a movie every month. All the ones we’ve seen are enjoyable, many of them are brilliant, and this one is masterful.

We met the Japanese director a few years ago at the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy. He was not at all what we’d expected, but then we were expecting a cackling lunatic wearing platform shoes and a dress covered in blood and entrails so it was probably for the best.

Miike’s movies are hilariously horrifying and horrifyingly hilarious. They are violent, perverse, gruesome and wonderful. 13 Assassins is the atypical Miike project: classic filmmaking that lifts you out of your seat.

Feudal Japan is enjoying an era of peace; it is so peaceful that the samurai have nothing to do. Some of their best spend their time drinking, gambling, whoring. Fortunately for them, unfortunately for the populace, the Shogun’s half-brother starts making trouble. He is only the vilest, most depraved, vicious shit to walk the shogunate, the kind of villain who massacres innocent peasants and leaves only one survivor—with no limbs. The following year Lord Shithead is going to sit in the Shogun’s Council, which is bad news for everybody.

The samurai Shinzaemon Shimada is called upon to rid Japan of this horror. He assembles a group of warriors and they plan an ambush on Lord Shithead on his way to Edo. Meanwhile Shinzaemon’s classmate and friend Hanbei is prepared to defend his boss Lord Shithead with his life. Shinza has 12 men, Hanbei has hundreds. Shinza knows that he will die; Hanbei knows that the world would be a far better place if his boss were separated from his head, but he will do what he must. Both men invoke honor and duty, but differ in their interpretation of loyalty.

On their way to the ambush the 12 samurai encounter a nutty bandit who guides them out of the woods and ends up joining them. The nutty bandit turns out to have a ginormous…sword, and the way he employs it is the Miike signature in this Seven Samurai-style adventure. He also has some very contemporary criticism of the samurai way: “Why are samurai so arrogant? Why can’t they be fun?”

The last 45 minutes contain some of the most spectacular sword battles on film. Gorgeous cinematography and choreography, and it doesn’t even matter if the subtitles on your copy are ungrammatical. 13 Assassins is satisfying, joyous filmmaking that will wipe all the whiny bloodsuckers out of your mind.

Next: As far from battles in feudal Japan as we can manage. An aristocrat and a working man get it on in Edwardian England, and a 12-year-old boy delivers their secret letters.