This is kind of a slasher movie mixed with supernatural horror and it really doesn't make much sense. It's filmed in Wisconsin yet our killer is a Samurai who goes around killing people with his sword. Is he a ghost? Well nothing is ever really all that clearly laid out by the movie so good luck figuring it all out. There's also a bunch of ESP stuff going on, people that can shoot glowing cartoon beams thanks to their psychic powers and a gal who orgasms while are killer is snuffing people out. While I can't say this is a great movie I do appreciate when they try something different in a slasher flick and this is about as different as they come.
Despite IMDB claiming this was shot-on-video it was actually shot on 35mm film. It was released straight to video though.
If we want to remember just one scene from this Japanese samurai film(and perhaps the whole Zatoichi series!) it's got to be the epic moment when our hero, Zatoichi, is trying to get busy with a prostitute and is rudely interrupted by some peeping-tom's peeking through some paper windows at him and he responds by letting loose a nice fart right in their faces. Truly a heroic moment if there ever was one! Besides this you get a fairly standard 70s samurai flick with the inclusion of our one-armed Hong Kong hero(played by Jimmy Wang Yu who would also go on to star in the great ONE-ARMED BOXER). Zatoichi definitely came off looking to be the superior fighter in this to me but that's mostly because he's the main focus of the film and this seems more like a Japanese production overall.
An interesting experiment mixing two existing franchises(it's the 22nd Zatoichi film and the 3rd ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN movie with Wang Yu) that's worth a look for Samurai or kung-fu fans.
AKA THE BLIND SWORDSMAN MEETS HIS EQUAL and ZATOICHI MEETS HIS EQUAL
So if you ever wanted to see a movie where samurai take on a platoon of a modern army(or technically a Japanese self-defense force in this case) this is the film for you. Sonny Chiba is our out-of-time squadron leader and while he's always great, even without displaying his karate skills, the 2 hour 20 minute runtime is a bit much. Also I think this group could have most likely taken out most of the samurai fairly easily, given that a modern-day army has vastly superior long-range weaponry, if they just didn't get so close to them. Some expected raping and pillaging takes place. The oddest thing, to me, about this film is that it's technically a sci-fi film but almost none of the science to what has actually happened is explored. Director Keiso Saito(who also gave us the overly long NINJA WARS) was clearly more interested in transposing two completely different eras than time-travel theories. Maybe watch this in 2 sittings for a better time.
The English dubbed version throws in some rock ballads which seem totally out of place. AKA G.I. SAMURAI, TIME SLIP and I WANT TO BE A SDF
Known in France as THE WARRIORS OF THE APOCALYPSE:
This one starts out with a terrible 80s song while the credits role, then it gets boring for a bit while we get the back-story, which is based on some Japanese folklore. From there it's all about a princess and her samurai protectors hiding out from some demons and an old witch lady. This goes a little too much over into the fantasy realm for my liking but there are a few cool elements. Sonny Chiba is always good to see in his tough guy role, there's a few giant killer snakes, a couple of decapitations, naked blood-bathing and one giant centipede monster that supplies some goofy fun. Not my personal fave but if you're into the more cartoony stuff this might be for you.
Also of note is that this was directed by Kinji Fukasaku who gave the world THE GREEN SLIME and BATTLE ROYAL among other great Japanese films so check it out if you're a completist. .
I've seen a bunch of these Zatoichi movies over the years but I don't believe I've ever seen this one(only #2 out of 26 in the series) until now. It follows BLIND SWORDSMAN: THE TALE OF ZATOICHI and it's fascinating to watch how they set the mold for the character early on. It's also interesting because we get to meet Zatoichi's brother, who's not a very nice fellow and apparently goes around raping women. If you've seen one of these you probably know what's going to happen but it's all done so well and filmed so artfully that the simplistic plots don't bother me as much as they might some viewers. So if you dig artsy swordplay where a blind dude cleans house give this series a look and start at the beginning because the black and white photography adds a lot. AKA THE TALE OF ZATOICHI CONTINUES and ZATOICHI 2
This one is a bit of a rough one. Starting out with some real war atrocity photos, and a strangely funky score, we then switch to a couple of tales featuring lots of torture, rape and similar feel-bad experiences. The list of barbarism is pretty extensive. You get castration, an ear hacked off, a 12-year-old girl blinded, a lady ripped apart by oxen, decapitation, crucifixion, a foot smashed into a bloody pulp, toes lopped off, gorey spearings and probably a few more things I've blocked from my mind. The first story illustrates how Shogun weren't very fond of Christians and didn't mind showing it and features a really unlikeable warlord who really gets off on torturing his captives and as a bonus raping one unlucky virgin gal. There's really not much of a story to this one and is basically just a highlight reel of some pretty nasty spectacles, especially for 1976. The second yarn concerns a fellow who spends the night at a whorehouse and when he can't pay the charges he's incurred the next morning is basically turned into a slave for some pretty nefarious characters. This part had a few twists and turns to it which made it a bit more interesting and made me feel like a bit less of a ghoul for enjoying it. This film is something gorehounds should definitely track down if they wanna see a bloody mix of a samurai flick with a splatter movie. AKA SHOGUN'S SADISM
I've never seen the first movie in this series, THE JOY OF TORTURE, but supposedly it's more on the classier side of things than this so I might have to check that out when I'm feeling particularly artsy.
One of the funkiest openings to any Japanese movie I've ever seen!:
When I picked up the VHS of this I looked at it quickly and assumed it was some weird re-titled version of SHOGUN ASSASSIN. If I looked closer though I woulda realized that the actor(or actors since I think there's more than one guy) playing the main character, Itto Ogami, isn't the same as in that film. The reason for this is that this is actually an edited-together version of a few episodes of the 70's TV-series LONE WOLF AND CUB. Of course it woulda also helped if I knew that there even was a TV-series. Having never seen the show I can't comment on how good or bad it is but watching it here it doesn't look all that great. This version anyway is like watching a crappier remake with no blood and that was one of the great highlights of the original! The movie also seems to go on forever with lots of talking and familiar scenes. If you've seen SHOGUN ASSASSIN before there really is no reason to sit through this one.
Saw this last night on a double-bill with PEONY LANTERN and they make a good pairing since they're both Japanese ghost-lady flicks. This one doesn't have any of the comedic elements present in that other epic and the ghost herself, known as The Snow Woman, has the more common appearance of one of those long-haired pale spirits. The story has to do with a fellow who's spared from the Snow Woman's curse after she falls in love with him but then has to take a vow to never tell anyone about his meeting her. Needless to say things don't go smoothly for our main character. Most of the film plays out like more of a samurai flick with some shitty warlord-types causing troubles and that sorta thing. It's really only the opening and closing bits that focus heavily on the supernatural elements. While not the most amazingly complex plot ever it's all done with great style and amazing camerawork to tell the story. AKA THE SNOW WOMAN, SNOW GHOST, GHOST STORY OF THE SNOW FAIRY and GHOST STORY OF THE SNOW WITCH
This tale is basically a remake of a story in the earlier ghost anthology KWAIDAN.
The morale of this story seems to be don't fall in love and have sex with beautiful ghost-ladies or you will die. The plot concerns a teacher who does just that and I think there's some political message in there also, luckily I'm not smart enough to decipher it. Overall this is a beautifully-shot Japanese ghost-flick with a little touch of samurai cinema thrown in as a bonus. So far all of these 60's ghost-lady movies I've seen from Japan have been really great with some awesome atmosphere. This one does throw a couple of comedic-relief characters into the film which didn't seem like they totally belonged but I think it worked well enough anyhow. I've stayed away from any of the more modern Asian ghost flicks(RINGU, JU-ON etc.) mostly because they all had horrible Americanized remakes that I'm unfairly judging them on but also because there's so many of these superior 60's examples of the genre to catch up on that I'm not sure I'll ever get around to those more trendy examples. AKA THE BRIDE FROM HADES, A GHOST STORY OF PEONIES AND STONE LANTERNS, GHOST BEAUTY, THE BRIDE FROM HELL(which is also the title of a Shaw Brothers movie) and A TALE OF PEONIES AND LANTERNS
Technically this is a remake of a 50's movie titled PEONIES AND STONE LANTERNS which itself was based on a Kabuki play from 1892 so it's a pretty old tale.
There's also what I think is sort of a remake of this called PEONY LANTERN SEX STORY from the 70's which was one of those Roman porno movies and sounds pretty sweet.
There's really no reason for a sequel to LADY SNOWBLOOD. The first movie is complete and nearly perfect all by itself but being that it was successful in Japan they made another chapter the very next year. And like what they did with the STREET FIGHTER and SISTER STREET FIGHTER series the sequels never measure up to the originals. This one makes the mistake of injecting a bunch of politics into the movie involving some anarchists who want to topple the evil Japanese government and, just like in real life, politics makes everything less fun. There is some eye violence and the black death gets passed around liberally but overall this really pales in comparison to the amazing original film.
The theme here is revenge. In this case it's revenge of a woman who has had her family murdered in front of her eyes and if that wasn't bad enough she also gets raped and beaten over a few days time. Her vehicle for this vengeance is her daughter who is the titular messenger from the underworld trained her whole life for this mission. This is an equally beautiful-looking and super-violent film filled with plenty of sword-fighting, severed limbs and spraying geysers of blood. This was an obvious inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL. He used some of the music and the snowy setting for that film but check out the original for some great Japanese samurai bloodshed cinema.
There was a sequel the next year and there were a couple of remakes of this including one in 1977(BROKEN OATH) and one in 2001(THE PRINCESS BLADE) .
I have this film on a DVD as part of The Pinky Violence Collection set. Now whenever I think of a Pink film I always figure they take place in modern-day(which was actually the 70's for the most part) Japan. This one takes place back in the swords and samurais days so it's really more of a period piece but they do throw in some more typical Pink film themes like rape and attempted abortion. They also feature a couple of ladies who are in a bunch of the Pinky films from these times so I guess that's why they slip into this category. This is also way more violent than your standard Zatoichi film with heads rolling, a hand lopped-off, eye-violence, torture scenes and lots of red stuff flowing. Not as sleazy as I mighta hoped but still worth checking out to fans of the more classic samurai genre with some modern deviance thrown in.
This is actually the 2nd part of a trilogy of LEGENDS OF THE POISONOUS SEDUCTRESS series following OHYAKU: THE FEMALE DEMON and followed by OKATSU THE FUGITIVE. I've never seen any of the others but they don't seem to be direct sequels anyway but more of a thematic thing with similar characters.
This is the first in the 26 film-long series of Zatoichi, The Blind Swordsman samurai movies and it's probably the one I've gone back and re-watched the most. Although slow in many spots, as they build characters and relationships, I find this one an overall worthwhile watch that I never get bored with. I'm not sure if technically you can lump these samurai flicks into the exploitation genre since they all seem way too artistically and seriously made for that but they do have that same sort of aesthetic(with their own unique Asian flavor added to them) that your better made spaghetti-westerns have(not too mention the obvious elements they share with kung fu movies) so I guess they fit in the upper echelon of b-movie's. There's the typical plot of everyone underestimating our hero and trying to take advantage of him before realizing that he kicks ass. There's some beautiful cinematography in this one especially one stand out scene light by a large moon. If your a fan of Akira Kurosawa art films these are definitely worth checking out for similar thrills and artiness.
If I didn't already know this was a giant monster flick before watching it and just happened to stumble across this movie playing somewhere I would think it was just another 60's samurai flick since that's really what it is up until about an hour in when our title character, who's a giant stone warrior statue, comes to life and starts smashing shit up. This was still the 60's so these Japanese kaiju movies were still made seriously enough that you didn't instantly feel like a moron as soon as the movie started and by the time the monster action takes place it plays out like a revenge scene against an evil warlord character and his clan which is what usually happened in these type of films. It's just that this time the revenge is super-sized. A pretty unique entry in a usually pretty dumb genre and not exactly what I expected.
There were two sequels to this which were all filmed at the same time to cut costs and released a year apart. I guess they were pretty confident that this was gonna be a popular movie with the Japanese people. There's also a fairly recent TV series starring the stone-faced people-squisher.
AKA THE GIANT MAJIN and MAJIN THE HIDEOUS IDOL
Rounding out the trilogy is this final installment in the Hanzo saga. This time our big-dicked samurai-cop starts right out beating-up his meat then decides he really would enjoy banging a lady ghost, some ninjas get offed in a bloody fashion and from there it goes down pretty much the same path as the first two movies. He pisses off a bunch of important people and helps out the common man while performing sex acts on nonparticipating ladies. I would say part 2 is definitely the highlight but they all are fun watches as long as you don't take the whole rape thing too seriously since these movies are not super serious in any way and I think this one in particular has the most comedic feel of the 3.
I gotta say this sequel to the 1st Hanzo flick is even better since they up the blood-spraying content and the perversion content. The most remarkable scene to me is where our hero rapes a woman just because she's nervous that she might get raped. Amazingly this calms her right down due to the magical power of Hanzo's mighty meat. It's not hard to see why some of the more feminist-leaning people I know are not fans of the Pinku-style of Japanese cinema after watching something like this but personally I found it all quite entertaining in it's obvious over-the-top sleaziness. You also get an insane abortion-performing lady, a Buddhist priestess who gets tortured and then raped, some bondage & discipline and some of the more typical trappings of a samurai-type film thrown in there. Also there's a strong anti-authoritarian streak that runs throughout these films which I find pretty atypical of Asian cinema for the most part. Can't wait to watch part 3.
Even back in the rape-filled days of the 1970's I can't imagine there was an American movie where the hero of the film is a guy who went around raping women. Even if he did it in the name of truth and justice and only to get vital information for a case like our Japanese cop Hanzo here I don't imagine it woulda went over very well. It just goes to show how far ahead of us in crazy-ass cinema Japan has been for a long time now.
In what's probably one of the most memorable scenes Mr. Hanzo goes through a vigorous workout to keep his cock(his "sword of justice"?) in tip-top shape. This includes fucking bags of rice and beating his schlong with a big wooden stick. Besides this we also get scenes of sexual assault and a great funky soundtrack that gives everything an extra sleazy blaxploitation-movie feel. On top of that it's also a beautifully shot almost artsy-looking example of something that probably looks extra-awesome on a big screen.
The weirdest aspect to this for me personally is that our main character is played by Shintaro Katsu who I recall mainly from playing Zatoichi The Blind Swordsman in that series of films and it really shows what a great actor that guy was since these two characters are like night and day.
This is the 1st part of a trilogy of Hanzo flicks and I need to check out the rest of the series soon.
This movie is best know to me, and most movie nerds around my age, as the movie that George Lucas borrowed from for his basic outline of STAR WARS. While this movie does have some of the basic elements, a princess who's kingdom has been destroyed, an evil empire, sword-fights which are sorta like light-saber duels, two bumbling characters which you can see inspired C3PO and R2D2, it's also about as different from Lucas' film as GODZILLA is from JAWS and no one would ever call STAR WARS a remake of this. This movie is also really long which is not something I appreciate in most films but you get some beautiful shots(it was Kurosawa's first film shot in widescreen and he makes amazing use of this with some large scale scenes involving tons of people) and as usual with this director there's an interesting enough group of characters to keep you involved in the story without tuning out. Toshiro Mufune as always plays the bad-ass samurai hero who takes no shit which is great. Overall this one doesn't stand up to, and is even sort of dull, when compared to something like THE SEVEN SAMURAI for all-out samurai action but it's still worth checking out if you dig the Japanese classics that Hollywood rummaged through to get ideas for years to come.
