KYOSHIRO NEMURI: IN THE SPIDER'S LAIR (1968)

 

Anti-hero ronin Kyoshiro Nemuri (Raizo Ichikawa) confronts one of the most vile bitches in samurai cinema history. (I would call her the "hard C-word" and she would deserve it, but I am too much of a gentleman.)

After decades of hearing it touted as an all-time classic, I finally saw KYOSHIRO NEMURI: IN THE THE SPIDER'S LAIR, and maybe it was due to all the hype, but I have to admit that I was underwhelmed.

Also known as THE HUMAN TARANTULA, this 11th in the "Sleepy Eyes of Death" samurai series pits titular wandering anti-hero Kyoshiro Nemuri (Raizo Ichikawa), the red-haired son of a black mass conducted by Portuguese priests who raped his mother as part of the ritual, against a brother and sister pair of unspeakably sadistic sociopaths who keep a dungeon full of innocent villagers whom they haul out and murder in cruel ways for their amusement. Nemuri is a particularly nihilistic take on the samurai protagonist, as he owes allegiance to no one and basically doesn't give a shit about anyone or anything, so little that he does is noble or heroic. He's a rather unlikable sort, but even he recognizes that the evil siblings need killing, and the path to that ultimate resolution features a very high body count indeed, though not punctuated with spewing gallons of arterial spray like in the LONE WOLF AND CUB or HANZO THE RAZOR flicks. 

The film is well-crafted and acted, but somehow I just could not connect with Nemuri or really care about anything in the narrative, other than seeing the bad guys get what was coming to them, and when they finally do meet their well-earned fates, it was nowhere near as cathartic as their deaths deserved to be. The brother and sister are two of the worst villains in a genre that's packed with utter scumbags for antagonists, so them being as nasty as they are and standing out as exemplars of soulless cruelty as much as they do is really saying something and may be a key element to why this entry is so revered. And make no mistake, Nemuri is a slayer who litters the landscape with bodies, so there's certainly no skimping on the sword-slashing action. It may just be that between the time I first heard about this film and its lofty rep and the present, I have seen perhaps 200 samurai films of wildly varying quality, several of which are all-time favorites that I will eagerly revisit, even the ones that concentrate more on drama than sword fights and gory violence (1960's BENTEN KOZO being a prime example) involved me way more than this one did. For me, it was worth sitting through once, just to see it. 

I have previously seen the first entry in the series, but it was a long time ago and its details have faded from memory, though I do recall finding Nemuri's inaugural adventure to be an interesting character study of a protagonist who is pretty much the antithesis of the heroic ronin ideal. My lukewarm response to IN THE SPIDER’S LAIR notwithstanding, I am quite willing to give the rest of the Kyoshiro Nemuri outings a chance. In fact, I welcome the opportunity.

 

Poster from the original Japanese theatrical release.

SHOGUN ASSASSIN (1980) at the Alamo Drafthouse, Brooklyn

Saw the screening of SHOGUN ASSASSIN at the Alamo and, as I had been afraid might be the case, it was the same mangled veteran-of-grindhouses print that I saw over a decade ago during a Subway Cinema classic martial arts film festival. The print was scratched-up and random seconds were missing here and there, which haphazardly cut off parts of the dialogue and caused some of the important exposition to be lost. The hero's brief underwater battle with the female ninja was entirely missing and — most unforgivable of all — the legendary gout of blood that geysers from the slashed neck of the leader of the Masters of Death immediately after he delivers his poetic/hilarious dying speech about "how the sound of wailing winter winds" is heard when such a magnificent cut is administered? Completely missing due to it having been excised from the print during its long years of service in sleazy 24-hour theaters that once dominated areas like the Deuce.

When I saw the film at that Subway Cinema screening a decade back, the showrunners were aware of the print's horrendous quality, as it was allegedly the only extant 35mm print that could be found, so the show's host told the audience up front what they were in for. (The disappointed hew and cry of the packed-to-capacity audience when the aforementioned neck geyser was missing was one of the greatest displays of simultaneous audience sadness and ire that I have ever witnessed.) The showrunners for tonight's screening were apparently unaware of just how dilapidated this evening's print was, so I'm not going to hold their not informing the audience ahead of time against them.

The damaged print is introduced to an unsuspecting audience.

BOTTOM LINE: SHOGUN ASSASSIN is one of my all-time favorites and it's a hell of a lot of fun, but it's very much a visual piece that needs to be see in pristine condition in order to be properly experienced. Thus I suggest that you avoid 35mm screenings of it, should you see it listed, if there truly is only this one damaged print still available for projection. Criterion has issued it in a gorgeous edition on DVD and BluRay, so go with that instead. Or, better yet, just watch the unedited, full-length, subtitled Japanese originals that Criterion issued as a boxed set (which includes SHOGUN ASSASSIN while simultaneously rendering it superfluous).

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2018-DAY 23: BLIND WOMAN'S CURSE (1970)

The inciting — and unsighting —  incident.

In the wake of a bloody yakuza clan feud during which she accidentally blinds the innocent sister of the Godan gang's leader, Akemi Tachibana (Meiko Kaji), de facto leader  of the Tachibana clan following the death of her father, finds herself in a women's prison and plagued with nightmares involving a black cat that tasted the blood flowing from her victim's eye wounds. Once there, she bares her elaborate back tattoo of a dragon and formally introduces herself to her fellow female prisoners, accepting them as partners and members of her crime family for when they all get released. When her five-year sentence is served, Akemi and her girls are out and when she returns to her family's territory, she finds the area being usurped by the vile Dobashi clan, a pack of assholes who will stoop to the lowest of deeds in order to destroy Akemi's gang and officially take over the town, including pitting the Tachibana against the rival Aozora group in hope that they might wipe each other out. The situation steadily escalates but Akemi, realizing there's more going on than is immediately apparent, refuses to be goaded into retaliatory action, biding her time for the perfect moment in which to exact retribution. As a sign of respect and sisterly solidarity, Akemi's girls all get back tattoos that form a long dragon when they stand side by side, and the dragon tattoo also serves as the identifying "colors" of the Tachibana clan. Into all of this strides Aiko (Hoki Tokuda), a theatrical performer/professional knife-thrower and swordswoman who was the innocent girl blinded by Akemi. She has spent the five years after her blinding "training in the art of killing" and is now more than ready to exact her vengeance for both her brother and herself upon Akemi, so she joins forces with the Dobashi clan and immediately sets to work killing Akemi's girls and flaying them of their dragon tats. It all builds to a head that culminates in a sword-slashing bloodbath that puts paid to all wrongs, with Akemi and Aiko squaring off against one another in single combat, with surprising results, punctuated with the presence of the aforementioned black cat of Akemi's recurring nightmares.

The one and only Meiko Kaji as the cursed Akemi Tachibana.

Director Teruo Ishii, perhaps best known to U.S. audiences for bringing us the black & white Super Giant/Starman superhero films of the 1950's (which ran on American television throughout the 1960's and 1970's), turns in a fun and gorgeous-looking fusion of a female gambler/yakuza genre, Zatoichi-style blind swordsmanship tropes, old school Japanese "pinky" exploitation flavor, and traditional kaidan (ghost/horror story) tropes, and though billed as a horror yarn, the horror elements here turn out to more or less be beside the point. Sure, the spooky lighting and imagery and the black cat that may or may not be the symbolic embodiment of Aiko's "curse" of vengeance upon Akemi in ominous spirit form are intriguing, but don't let those elements fool you into believing this is a straight-up shocker. I've seen a legion of chambara/female gambler movies over the years and BLIND WOMAN'S CURSE falls squarely into that category, mild traditional horror flavors notwithstanding. 

Creepy imagery, yes. Straight-up horror film, not so much.

Akemi and Aiko square off.

It's a very entertaining film, don't get me wrong, but those who try to sell it as a "horror classic," as the DVD back cover copy would have you believe, are either barking up the wrong tree or simply lying their asses off. But I won't grouse too loudly, as its star is the always-welcome Meiko Kaji, who would later go on to screen immortality as the titular LADY SNOWBLOOD (1973) and LADY SNOWBLOOD: LOVE SONG OF VENGEANCE (1974).

Interesting side note: the actress playing Aiko, Hoki Tokuda, was a singer who was married to TROPIC OF CANCER scribe Henry Miller. The details of their relationship are interesting and more than a tad bizarre, so go here to read up on it.

Poster from the Japanese theatrical release.

BLIND SWORDSWOMAN: HELLISH SKIN (1969)

Yoko Matsuyama returns as Blind Oichi, and this time she's in a terrific movie!

Did you ever see a movie that you didn't enjoy and found downright feeble, only to discover it had apparently made enough scratch at the box office to generate at least one sequel, but the sequel shockingly turned out to be everything the first film wished it was and more? I have wracked my brain to come up with a western-made film that was the immediate followup to a cinematic turd that turned out against all odds to be excellent and have come up with bubkes, but such is definitely the case in regard to BLIND SWORDSWOMAN: HELLISH SKIN (originally released in the west as TRAPPED, THE CRIMSON BAT). A vast improvement over the turgid THE BLIND SWORDSWOMAN, this film surprised the hell out of me and came from nowhere to earn a place on my personal list of favorite chambara flicks.

In this second installment (released during the same year as the inaugural entry), Yoko Matsuyama returns as Blind Oichi, the flagrant re-imagined-as-female ripoff of Daiei Pictures' popular Zatoichi, bringing a real script and lively direction with her. With the rote origin story told and her quest for vengeance concluded in the previous film, the new thrust of the character's story is that though she now fills her time as a bounty hunter and she's damned good at it, Oichi's sick of her life of endless misery and slaughter, so she seeks to abandon her blood-spattered existence and find some measure of peace, and as of roughly the middle of the film vows to never again draw her sword. An admirable goal, but this is a chambara flick so you know that her resolve and intentions will be sorely tested during the movie's running time.

When the story opens, Oichi runs afoul of a pack of lowlife yakuza louts who feel cheated when she nabs and kills a wanted man who had a high price on his head, a reward they sought for themselves. Aided by a truly sadistic and hateful woman named Oen (Kikko Matsuoka), a laughing tattooed gambling cheat who wields a blade-tipped whip made from women's hair, the crooks repeatedly attempt to set up Oichi and rip-off or kill her but each attempt ends in impotent failure, which only irks them even further.

The incredibly foul and sadistic Oen (Kikko Matsuoka). If ever there were a villain in sore need of killing, it's this crazy bitch-and-a-half.

Having previously appeared for no real narrative purpose and played by a different actress, only to disappear with no explanation during the first half of the first BLIND SWORDSWOMAN film, Oen's initial thwarting by Oichi leads the psycho bitch to become obsessed with our heroine — thus making her actually interesting this time around — and the two square off in mortal combat on a desolate beach. Oichi defeats Oen and instead of killing her opponent she shows mercy as part of her plan to change her ways, but that move proves to be a mistake as Oen poisons Oichi with a thrown barrage of venomous snakes. (Where she kept the snakes on her person without them biting and killing her is anyone's guess.)

A would-be assailant perishes by Oichi's blade in a pre-LONE WOLF AND CUB display of graphic arterial spewage. This is the kind of cinema that reveals Hollywood as the pussified suck-factory that it is nowadays.

Rescued by kindly farmers, Oichi awakens in their village and decides to begin her life anew, sans bloody violence and with a young local as her husband. Finding the rural life to her liking, Oichi settles in and proves to be a model wife, but she soon discovers that the dirt-poor farmers are being regularly shaken down for rice by the local yakuza scumbags who just so happen to be in league with Oen. It's only a matter of time until Oen susses out that Oichi survived her secret snake attack and embarks on a campaign to end her opponent's life once and for all, just for the fun of it and fully aware that Oichi has vowed never again to draw her sword. What ensues is an escalating series of trials and treachery that inevitably results in Oichi realizing that a life of happiness will forever be denied to her in a world defined by violence and the corrupt, heavily-armed strong preying upon the defenseless weak, and this installment abruptly ends during a final melee in which Oichi gives free rein to her rage, engaging the yakuza scum (about thirty of them) and Oen in a razor-edged, bloody dance of death.

Oichi prepares to mulch some human vermin.

While I outlined the basics of the film's narrative, I left out the details so you can discover BLIND SWORDSWOMAN: HELLISH SKIN's ins and outs for yourself, but believe me when I say it's a gripping confection that's light years better than it has any right to be, especially in the wake of its tits-up dead cat of a predecessor. Matsuyama's performance is so alive in this installment that you'd swear she was practically a different character than that seen in THE BLIND SWORDSWOMAN. We actually care about her here and want to see her impossible goal of achieving a non-violent life of an average woman's happiness come to fruition, so it's like a punch in the guts with each succeeding and insurmountable hurdle in her journey.

Oen merrily shows off her snake tattoo, the "hellish skin" of the title, scaring the living shit out of a roomful of hardened yakuza in the process.

And Kikko Matsuoka's Oen is a classic sociopath whose unhinged and reasonless evil steals and casts a pall over every scene she's in. Her signature weapon, the aforementioned whip made from women's hair, illustrates how she doesn't even give a damn about those of her own gender, and at one point she even engineers an attempted three-against-one gang rape of Oichi and laughs heartily all the while, so you know the bitch is completely fucked-up. By the time the final battle explodes, I was practically foaming at the mouth with desire to see her get what she so richly deserved and I was not disappointed in the least. Women in chambara films of that era pretty much existed to be either victims of rape and other cruelties of life or outright villains whose means of evil were widely varied and often quite imaginative, or you'd occasionally get a woman who was just as fierce with the swordplay as any of the innumerable male slayers who populated the genre. This film gives us all three of those types in the forms of Oichi's sweet femininity fused with sheer badassery, and Oen's jet black evil, so it's a win/win for the viewer.

The bottom line is that I greatly enjoyed BLIND SWORDSWOMAN: HELLISH SKIN and I now want to see the remaining two films in the Blind Oichi series. However, the snag in achieving that objective is that the other two films are only available in shit-quality prints on discs apparently culled from the same Dutch VHS sources as my DVD of the first film. I'm going to try and hold out to see if the company Kurotokagi Gumi gives the remaining entries the same gorgeous treatment they gave to this film, but until then I at least have this excellent entry to tide me over. And I will definitely be returning to it again, and soon!

Packaging image from the Kurotokagi Gumi company's recent DVD release.

THE BLIND SWORDSWOMAN (1969)

One of the hazards of being a fan and collector of the kinds of movies I'm into is the fact that I sometimes get lucky and find a flick I've always been looking for, something hard to find that from all reports should not exist on DVD, and I snap up the film in question, realizing (often correctly) that I will never find that film again. And sometimes, once said film is acquired, knowing that it's in my possession and unlikely to migrate, I put the film aside to watch somewhere at a future date. Consequently I have a decent-sized stack of movies that have been sitting here in the Vault gathering moss for what is in some cases years, and I'm slowly making my way through them. One such case in point is THE BLIND SWORDSWOMAN (aka CRIMSON BAT, THE BLIND SWORDSWOMAN), a DVD that I found over four years ago during my time working at the barbecue joint. I bought it, brought it home and watched maybe ten minutes of it before turning it off to save it for another day because it turned out to be a poor-quality dubbed "gray market" transfer from a somewhat-worn Dutch VHS copy, complete with Dutch subtitles. I've endured films and TV shows whose visual quality was dodgy at best due to their rarity, so I could have handled sitting through THE BLIND SWORDSWOMAN at the time, but I just wasn't in the mood, plus I did not expect to obtain such a shoddy specimen from my favorite wholly-reputable video store. Now, over four years later, I finally sat through it and it frankly was a disappointment. Curiosty and genre completism only goes so far, and even after having been aware of this film for twenty-some-odd years, it just wasn't worth the wait.

THE BLIND SWORDSWOMAN is an old school chambara film from the genre's glory days, cranked out by Shochiku as a blatant cash-in on Daiei Pictures' long-running and highly successful Zatoichi series. In case you aren't up on your classic chambara flicks, the Zatoichi series depicted the adventures of Ichi, a wandering masseur and low-life gambler who possessed sword skills that were staggering in scope and made all the more impressive because the man was utterly blind. In total there are twenty-six films in the original series featuring the character as played by the incomparable Shintaro Katsu (plus a television series), so it was inevitable that someone would eventually rip them off. There have been several such clones since the late-1960's, but to the best of my knowledge THE BLIND SWORDSWOMAN was the first to not only do so with apparently zero trace of shame, but it was also the first to recast the Zatoichi template in female form.

Yoko Matsuyama as the distaff Zatoichi, Blind Oichi.

In the first of four swiftly-made features released from 1969 through 1970, we meet Oichi (Yoko Matsuyama), a poised young woman who was abandoned during childhood by her prostitute mother (who was running away to make a new start with her lover). While searching for her fleeing mother in a terrible rainstorm, lightning strikes a tree near young Oichi, causing a large branch to fall on her and render her unconscious, and when she awakens she is permanently blind. (It is not made clear if she was blinded by the close proximity of the lightning strike or by suffering a head injury from the collapsing branch.) From there the girl is raised by a kindly old man who, unbeknownst to her, was once part of a gang of criminals whose leader has risen to prominence and seeks to eliminate all those who knew him back in the days. The old man raises Oichi until she's around eighteen years of age, at which point the old man is horribly murdered by his former crony and his gang, and Oichi finds herself rescued from them by a kindly ronin who sees in her graceful movements the makings of a natural sword master. The ronin trains Oichi in the ways of the sword for the next two years or so and she reveals herself to be a prodigy, mastering the weapon to a lethal degree and developing an unerring talent with her red-lacquered cane sword. Thus armed, Oichi is ready to embark on the requisite quest for vengeance, and possibly locate her long-absent mother in the process. Oh, and she also falls in love with the ronin, who splits once he's aware of her romantic interest, feeling she'd be better off without him. Needless to say, she's devastated.

The rest of the film is about as rote as one from this genre can be and its plot points are enacted with as little genuine interest for the viewer as possible. The narrative also leaps back and forth in time to establish much of the back-story, but it's accomplished in such a confusing way that it at times seems as though the film's reels have been strung together at random by an editor who's necked far too much saké. When the film's several plot threads are finally resolved, the results just aren't that interesting and when the identity of the main villain is revealed, we have no idea who the guy is anyway, so we just don't care. And, as previously mentioned, the film's chief goal was to ape the Zatoichi films, going so far as to re-stage tropes common to that series and even have a stumbling blind masseur show up to be abused by assorted yakuza assholes in a seedy gambling parlor. It's actually quite embarrassing. Scenes of Zatoichi getting the upper hand on crooked gamblers by using his heightened senses and slashing the shit out of all and sundry turn up in damned near every film the character's in, so the use of that trope in this outright ripoff is truly egregious and an example of the film's overall bankruptcy of originality.

Yoko Matsuyama is rather bland as Oichi and her face remains expressionless throughout the majority of the narrative, giving her a doll-like demeanor that makes her quite hard to empathize with. The film's dubbing also does no favors for the story, and I wish I'd been able to see it in the original Japanese with subtitles. The voices in the dub that I saw were all recognizable as actors familiar to anyone who's seen the many Shaw Brothers kung fu flicks dubbed for U.S. distribution in the west from the beginning of the "chopsocky" boom of the 1970's 'til it fizzled out in the early-1980's, when those films found a second life as part of World Northal's syndicated DRIVE-IN MOVIE television package, and their rather exaggerated delivery did not work for a film as typically Japanese-style somber as this one.

Of real interest only to chambara completists and even then not really recommended, I suggest that those who are interested in THE BLIND SWORDSWOMAN wait until a company like Kurotokagi Gumi issues a remastered version with subtitles. They recently put out a gorgeous edition of the series' second installment, BLIND SWORDSWOMAN: HELLISH SKIN, and that is a film worth seeing. (More on that shortly.)

ADDENDUM-4/7/2017:  

What a difference a good print makes! I'm watching a crisp subtitled widescreen DVD of CRIMSON BAT, THE BLIND SWORDSWOMAN (1969) and am enjoying it very much. The previous copy I saw six years ago was a rather dodgy transfer from a Dutch VHS release, complete with Dutch subtitles that could not be turned off, and the dubbing was among the worst I'd ever encountered. Those factors led me to pan the film when I reviewed it for my blog, but I made sure to note that I'd like to see it in its adulterated form because that had to be better than what I had. Turns out I was right, and I'll have to write a new, positive review.

QUICK-DRAW OKATSU (1969)

I love me a good "woman warrior" movie, and this one delivers strongly in both story and hard-earned ass-kicking. No two ways about it, dear readers, this one came from out of nowhere to earn a place among my all-time favorite samurai flicks.

This second in the LEGENDS OF THE POISONOUS SEDUCTRESS series is not a sequel to 1968's FEMALE DEMON OHYAKU, instead starting fresh but once more starring Junko Miyazono in the lead. This time around she plays Okatsu, the adopted daughter of a master swordsman and next in line to inherit the head position in her dad's hardcore dojo, easily edging out her disappointment of a brother. (As you may know, back in the feudal days Japanese women weren't given much respect, so Okatsu's publicly-stated status speaks volumes for her prowess before we even see her kill anybody.) The incredibly classy Okatsu looks like every geisha fantasy come to life and her demeanor is that of a proper Japanese lady, so it's only a matter of time before an ambitious magistrate/balls-out-evil asshole takes a shine to her. Taking time out from his heinous abuse of the local peasants and farmers, the douchebag approaches Okatsu's dad about wanting her hand in marriage, but, knowing full well what a bastard the magistrate is, dad turns him down flat, thereby setting in motion an escalating series of exceedingly tragic events that inevitably force Okatsu to drop the geisha-cutie bullshit and get down the business of serious killing. Aided by the mysterious wanderer Rui (Reiko Oshida), Okatsu's journey of vengeance is a painful one, and the resulting film is a classic of the genre.

QUICK-DRAW OKATSU takes its time in setting up all of its characters and situations, so when the story really gets going the viewer is emotionally invested in Okatsu's plight, something helped immeasurably by star Junko Miyazono. Her poise and "normal person" good looks sell Okatsu's believability and I don't know if she's a trained kendoka, but she handles a sword with commanding presence and deceptive ease.

Junko Miyazono as Okatsu: charming and girly as hell...until you fuck with her.

Equally good is Reiko Oshida as Rui, the more visually-archetypal of the two swordswomen, looking somewhat butch in her shabby traveler's garb and resembling Sanpei Shurato's classic manga hero, the apostate ninja Kamui.

Rui and Okatsu survey their handiwork.

But before you rush off to rent this flick I think it's only fair to warn you that this is one of the films that formed the template for the genre that would become known as "Pink" or "Pinky Violence" flicks, basically softcore porn that displayed acres of skin — but no bushola back in those days — and reveled in torture and cruelty, more often than not directed at the female characters. They eventually grew to become quite bloody, sadistic, and downright distastefully misogynistic in their obligatory rape sequences (an element that also mars many of the samurai flicks of the period), but as QUICK-DRAW OKATSU was one of the prototypes, things don't go so stomach-turningly out of control here. Yes, there's the requisite rape and torture — a scene in which some villains attempt to perform a crude abortion on one character against her will will have you wanting to dive into the screen and kick ass yourself — but there's no nudity shown and the swordplay bloodshed doesn't even come close to the arterial excesses found in the LONE WOLF AND CUB series (what does?). Oh, and did I mention that none other than Lone Wolf himself, the exquisite Tomisaburo Wakayama, turns up as a quirky bounty hunter? (He did a lot of fun character parts before gaining screen immortality as the "Babycart Assassin.")

So TRUST YER BUNCHE and give this one a look. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

The same shot from the DVD cover art, as seen in the actual film.

WICKED PRIEST (1968)

I finally got around to checking out the first in the GOKUAKU BOZU (“Wicked Priest”) series of chambara (“swordfighting”) flicks and was not disappointed in the least, thanks in no small part to the performance of my man Tomisaburo Wakayama in the title role. For those not in the know, Wakayama was the intensely stoic actor who played Itto Ogami in the LONE WOLF AND CUB films, and if you’ve seen those you know that the guy was one hell of an actor and absolutely the very last guy you would ever think about engaging in sword combat.

Portrait of a complete and utter badass: the late, great Tomisaburo Wakayama in his signature role of Itto Ogami in the LONE WOLF AND CUB series (1972-1974).

Wakayama’s swordsmanship is a thing of beauty to behold, on the level of Baryshnikov or Bruce Lee in terms of physical wonder, as is that of his equally talented younger brother, Shintaro Katsu, aka Zatoichi, but I’m veering quite a bit off topic. The LONE WOLF AND CUB and Zatoichi films are more than worthy of their own discussions, so I’ll just leave you with a recommendation to see them and get back to the Wicked Priest.

The GOKUAKU BOZU films preceded Wakayama’s work as Lone Wolf and will come as a bit of a surprise to those who know him only from his later, ultra-gory Itto Ogami movies because, although quite the capable badass, the protagonist of the GOKUAKU BOZU series is an all-around fun guy who thoroughly enjoys life, in other words the polar opposite of Ogami. Here Wakayama portrays Shinkai, a Buddhist monk in the Japan of the 1920’s who ends up getting booted from his order on a bullshit charge and is relegated to a one-year probationary exile to some backwater town’s temple. Cut to five years later and Shinkai is seen having a blast engaging in all the stuff an observant Buddhist monk is not supposed to be doing, namely gambling, drinking, merrily frequenting whorehouses, getting into karate/jiu jitsu fights in which he is clearly the baddest motherfucker in the room (even when faced with firearms), and seducing married female temple-goers.

Pussy and saké: two great things that go great together!

He’s a lovable and fun guy who performs his duties as the town’s monk (always for an expected fee, er, “donation”), but his lust for life only earns him the bitter hatred and disgust of the rather corrupt priests in his former order, a pack of total assholes who get up to all kinds of shit while putting out a public front of piety and respectability. Their abbot, however, is a decent guy who raised our hero and has a tolerant and avuncular relationship with Shinkai, and as a result looks the other way at the so-called wicked priest’s transgressions, an attitude that fosters plots for the abbot’s ousting in the face of disgrace under threat of blackmail for past indiscretions.

The main plot follows Shinkai’s bitchin’ and utterly shameless lifestyle and brings him into the path of young Kentaro, a rather ineffectual would-be yakuza tough guy who makes his questionable living by luring innocent young girls to his slimy boss’ whorehouse, where they are either forced into prostitution or sold into sex slavery in Shanghai. Kentaro cares nothing for the innocents whose lives he destroys, but his heart belongs to Kogiku, a sweet girl who is nearing the end of her three-year prostitution contract at the whorehouse, and the two intend to get married when her time is up. Kentaro meets Shinkai when the monk prevents him from luring yet another innocent, and the lad has his attitude seriously adjusted after Shinkai kicks his ass (twice) and those of his goofy accomplices. You see, although he’s a rampant womanizer who enjoys the pleasures of women, Shinkai genuinely likes women as people — a breath of fresh air in this misogyny-laden genre — and will brook no mistreatment of the fair sex, so he seeks to stop Kentaro’s foul ways before the boy is beyond redemption (too late if you ask me, but I didn’t write the script). Learning from Shinkai’s example — to say nothing of the aforementioned pair of back-to-back bitch-slapped beatdowns — Kentaro tries to get his act together for when he and Kogiku get married, but his refusal to further deceive innocent women for purposes of exploiting them does not sit well with his scumbag boss, so what follows is a tragic tale of escalating cruelties that sees the abuse and death of assorted innocent people that finally galvanizes Shinkai to hand down some much-deserved death to bad guys who seriously need to be removed from the face of the earth. (NOTE: unlike what is depicted on the film’s poster/DVD box art, at no point does Shinkai personally engage in any swordfighting, so Lone Wolf fans, caveat emptor.)

While this synopsis may make the film sound action-packed, the truth of the matter is that it’s more of a study of the fun-loving Shinkai and the peripheral characters than the swords-a-slashin’ bloodbath one usually expects (and gets) from this kind of flick, and the film is all the better for that. Chambara cinema is rife with drama and tragedy and could be fairly described as soap operas for men, and to a certain extent that’s exactly what this first GOKUAKU BOZU film is. There are highly emotional subplots involving single-parenthood and the stigma that falls upon the women who selflessly raise their bastard kids in the face of social ostracism, bitter daddy issues from the perspective of now-grown abandoned children, political intrigue within the monastic order, sympathy for the plight of whores, and a whole bunch of other stuff, so if you decide to check this out, be prepared for more plot than action, but also keep in mind that you will not be bored. It’s not a classic or anything, but it is solidly entertaining from start to finish.

From what I could determine in my admittedly brief research on it, there are apparently five films in the GOKUAKU BOZU series and I am eager to sit through the rest of them. I picked up four of them when I came across them a while back, but the one I’m missing is the second one in the sequence, so I’m going to hold off until I can find it and then continue, While not all chambara series continue directly from one film to another, there are many that do, so I’ll err on the side of patience and wait to experience some more cinema of Wakayama that I have not yet seen. He’s one of my all-time favorite actors and ass-kickers, so I’m perfectly happy to endure the wait.

LADY SNOWBLOOD AT THE JAPAN SOCIETY

A study in lethal elegance: Meiko Kaji as the vengeful Yuki.

Last night I went to Manhattan's Japan Society to see a rare screening of LADY SNOWBLOOD (1973), and while the movie was excellent and remains one of my favorite chambara films, I was once more reminded of why I fucking hate seeing just about any Asian film in a festival setting with a New York audience.

A page from the original manga, illustrated by Kazuo Kimamura.

Based on an early-1970's manga series written by LONE WOLF AND CUB scribe Kazuo Koike and illustrator Kazuo Kimamura, LADY SNOWBLOOD is the grim tale of Yuki (the haunting Meiko Kaji), a woman literally born to avenge the heinous murders of her father and older brother, as well as the serial rape of her mother by one of the killers. Upon stabbing her rapist to death, Yuki's mother is sentenced to life in prison, where the woman proceeds to indiscriminately have sex with every available male guard in the place, earning her the hatred of the other female prisoners and a reputation as "a bitch in heat," in hope of giving birth to a strong son who can carry out her wished-for vengeance. Instead of a son, she gives birth to Yuki and dies shortly thereafter, and the baby is entrusted to another prisoner who, upon the completion of her sentence, raises the girl with a retired master swordsman who is now a monk. From early childhood, poor Yuki is forged into a stoic engine of her dead mother's vendetta, trained without mercy in various skills, but most importantly as a swift and utterly deadly swordswoman who conceals her blade in her parasol. Upon turning twenty, Yuki — now operating under the nom de revenge "Lady Snowblood" — embarks on a bloody trail of retribution as she seeks out the three remaining villains who have gone unpunished for the past two decades, slashing her way through all comers in the process.

As is typical of chambara films of the period, LADY SNOWBLOOD is drenched in spewing arterial spray that looks a lot like thinned-out red paint and is over-the-top along the lines of the Black Knight sequence in MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975), but while the Python flick played its graphic violence to stunning and hilarious comedic effect, the gore in LADY SNOWBLOOD has the exact opposite intention and its excesses serve to punctuate a story that's already as serious and depressing as a heart attack. Which brings me to the point where I start bitching and moaning.

One of the things that drives fans of Asian cinema in general and Japanese film in particular crazy is seeing screenings of Eastern movies among festival audiences composed of curiosity seekers who are unfamiliar with styles of filmmaking other than what they run into every week at their local multiplex. These moviegoers may have read or heard about Asian movies in some article extolling the perceived hipster virtues of getting into such stuff, and so off they go to an Asian film festival and collide head-on with another culture's style of film craft, often with zero grounding in how that culture tells stories, or what those storytelling tropes mean within that rich cultural context. While filmmakers like Kurosawa strove toward and achieved stunning results with a realistic approach, many of the makers of Japanese film sought to appeal to an audience raised on centuries-old traditions of unabashed melodrama, stories marked with sometimes broad and over-wrought emoting and lashings of sanguinary displays that straddle the line between intentionally excessive narrative punctuation and seemingly pointless gratuitousness. When it comes to their storytelling, the Japanese tend to milk a narrative for all that it's worth, bringing audiences heroes who are practically superhuman in terms of their skills, focus and virtues, villains who are vile in ways that make you want to leap onto the screen and kill them yourself, and sequences of action that take things to completely insane levels of carnage, all in the name of keeping the paying theater-goers entertained. In that respect, Japanese cinema has a hell of a lot in common with our own home-grown efforts, but the difference lies in cultural aesthetics, and that's where the problems can start.

While watching LADY SNOWBLOOD, in an audience containing a large percentage of Japanese attendees, the majority of the Westerners in the theater laughed heartily at the melodrama of the piece, despite the fact that the movie contains not one shred of anything that could be considered comedy. As you can gather from my brief synopsis, the story is one very dark motherfucker, yet many in the audience cracked up repeatedly, offering up interjections of "Sweet!" or "Nice!" during moments of raw emotion and terrible violence. The one gory image that did not elicit would-be-ironic comment from the hipster Peanut Gallery was a stark flashback shot of Yuki's perhaps eight-year-old brother laying dead by the side of a river after the killers bashed his brains in, immediately after which we are treated to the (thankfully) non-explicit rape of Yuki's mother as the criminals turn the violation into drunken entertainment (one of their number is even a woman who takes obvious enjoyment in watching the proceedings).

While I'm a big fan of LADY SNOWBLOOD, I'm the first to note that, though compelling, it's a very depressing affair for a number of reasons, and even given the cross-cultural disconnect of Eastern versus Western sensibilities, I was appalled at anyone finding the tragedy that played out onscreen as funny. LADY SNOWBLOOD's melodrama was roundly mocked by an amused audience that could most likely watch American soap operas and not crack jokes about the over-the-top emotional torments endured by the characters, and it just brought me down. Would they have found the very same elements laughable if they had been presented in the context of a Clint Eastwood western? I kinda doubt it. Then again, I've heard reliable reports from people who were in the audience when the infamous and ultra-graphic to the point of being nigh-unwatchable gang-rape landmark I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE played theatrically, and they said that several members of that audience cat-called and guffawed as actress Camille Keaton (Buster Keaton's grand-niece, by the way) was put through abuses that would have offended the most hardened of regular grindhouse patrons, so I guess such inappropriate and disheartening reactions are nothing new.

Poster from the original Japanese theatrical release.

Anyway, my experience last night was very much off-putting and on several occasions I wanted to stand up and scream "What the fuck are you people finding so goddamned funny? Does human suffering amuse you?" I had not attended an Asian film festival since the mid-1990's and after last night I plan on resuming that stance, unless there's a decent marathon of Toho's giant monster flicks or a run of the LONE WOLF AND CUB films. I just wish those shit-for-brains sunsabitches would stick to their multiplexes and showings of TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN and suchlike...

Oh, and for a more clinical overview of exactly what LADY SNOWBLOOD is all about, check out the excellent review found here.

SEX & FURY (1973)

In recent years I've often asked myself whether or not the bona fide exploitation film, as we once knew it, is an extinct breed. I look at the output of the majority of moviemakers of the past two decades or so and am pretty much forced to admit that such appears to be the case. The grindhouses that once inhabited the seamier parts of the nation's cities are nearly all gone and Hollywood certainly no longer has the balls to provide us with anything even remotely like the over-the-top violent, gory, and nudity-saturated fun that so many of us grew up on and still hold dear —GRINDHOUSE and the most recent RAMBO being rare exceptions — so I'm thankful that DVD is there to make up for the loss. Watching sleazy crap in one's home is nowhere near as fun as sharing the experience with an audience reminiscent of the rampaging Zulu nation on amphetamines while worrying about the borderline-condemned theater collapsing on top of you, but I guess it'll have to do. It's a state that saddens me, though, because SEX & FURY is exactly the kind of movie that would have gone over quite well at the late, lamented Norwalk Theater.

SEX & FURY comes from the glorious period in the early 1970's when it appeared that many Japanese filmmakers had either completely lost their minds or imbibed a two-liter helping of Tennessee sippin '-whiskey, and the exploitation flicks resulting from that crazed state of mind were marvelous examples of sex and violence that often put our own homegrown efforts to shame. There are many who laud SEX & FURY with such descriptions as "the best exploitation movie ever made" and suchlike, and I'm the first to admit it's entertaining as a motherfucker, but it is by no means perfect...

Reiko Ike as Inoshika Ocho, one of the best of Japanese cinema's legion of badassed chicks.

Starring the cooler-than-cool Reiko Ike as the wandering gambler/pickpocket Inoshika Ocho, this flick takes place in 1905 and follows her adventures through Japan's Meiji period's underbelly as she searches for those responsible for the murder of her detective father some twenty years previous. During the course of her wanderings, Ocho calls "bullshit" on the cheating of a dealer in a yakuza-run card game, something a veteran gambler like herself would notice, and watches in shocked horror as the dealer is immediately killed in order to preserve his boss' reputation (although the boss secretly ordered the dealer to cheat). As the man dies in her arms, he tasks Ocho with giving his sister a sum of cash that will buy her out of prostitution, but the evil yakuza boss decides to have Ocho killed before that can happen and sends his men to murder her as she luxuriates in a hot tub. What follows is a spectacular fusion of sex and violence as Ocho leaps from the tub, stark naked, grabs a short sword and proceeds to kill every man in sight. This takes place about eleven minutes into the movie and is one of the few fight sequences in any film where the slow motion employed throughout in no way hurts the flow of the action, plus it allows us to see how a naked woman's bits are affected by gravity and motion as she swordfights like some demon straight out of Hell. Both awesome and educational!

Ocho's hot tub massacre: the scene that made this movie a classic.

By the time the sequence is over, Ocho's covered from head to toe with blood and has made her way outside into the gambling house's snowy courtyard, a location that will look familiar to anyone who's seen QuentinTarantino's KILL BILL VOL. 1 (or 1973's LADY SNOWBLOOD, for that matter).

Anyway, Ocho goes off in search of the dead guy's sister, and her search coincidentally brings her into contact with two of the three tattooed miscreants responsible for her father's assassination, and those two scumbags used information obtained from Ocho's dad to build political careers for themselves, positions from which they got up to all kinds of corrupt doings. Ocho's path also brings her into contact with Christina (the awesome Swedish cutie Christina Lindberg of THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE and ANITA fame), a former celebrated dancer who now works as a professional gambler and spy for the British government; the sad-eyed Christina accepted the spy gig as a way to get to travel to Japan to once more see her lover, Shunosuke (Masataka Naruse ), who is himself in direct conflict with the corrupt government officials as a radical leftist. Poor Christina finds herself a pawn in the machinations of her superior, Guinness (the atrociously bad actor Mark Darling), who seeks to set up an opium operation, and to facilitate that he gives Christina to one of the corrupt officials, which of course leads to a lesbian scene that swiftly evolves into a three-way that leads to the revelation of...

Aw, who cares? By this point in the story any attempt at a plot recap is kind of pointless since the plots all converge in kind of a narrative train wreck, but it all ends in an ever-escalating cavalcade of depravity, debauchery, gory violence, nudity, switchblade-wielding nuns who show up from out of nowhere,

and the indelible image of Christina Lindberg clad in anachronistic hippie/Injun fringy buckskins, applying a bullwhip to a trussed-up Ocho in an underground dungeon decorated with huge stained glass images of Christ and a psychedelic light show.

SEX & FURY doesn't always make a whole lot of sense, but it is undeniably fun and entertaining. However, it does get bogged down by how convoluted the plot gets about two thirds of the way in, to say nothing of the mostly uninvolving romantic subplot about Christina and Shunosuke. Yeah, it's great to have Lindberg around, but her delivery of English is stilted at best, and although she's supposed to be playing a Brit she nonetheless speaks with a thick Swedish accent (the guy playing her superior's far worse and has none of her soulfulness, so I'll happily cut her some slack). And when she and Shunosuke are briefly reunited, what's supposed to be a tender sequence instead becomes an embarrassing display of two actors who don't speak English being asked to do just that, and it's truly agonizing to watch.

On the plus side, we have some truly vile villains who are in sore need of slaying, and the terrific presence of Reiko Ike as Ocho, who just plain exudes tough-gal confidence and single-mindedness throughout. She's a joy to watch and deserves all the kudos she receives for this performance, especially during the butt-nekkid fight sequence. She's totally comfortable with running around nude and slashing deserving rat-bastards, something not many exploitation movie actresses would have been, maybe not even Pam Grier during her prime, and she's amazing to watch. The scene's nudity is not exactly what I'd call gratuitous or sexy, instead being a matter-of-fact look at what would most likely happen if some badassed woman were attacked as she was bathing and then took the fight to her utterly surprised assailants. The one question I have about the scene is just how they were able to shoot a four-minute slow motion sequence where the protagonist is both head-to-toe nude and in constant motion, but at no point do we see a trace of her bush. It's a masterpiece of camera placement, the actress hitting her marks, choreography, and, above all, some of the tightest film editing I've ever seen.

So I say definitely check out the many sleazy charms on display in SEX & FURY. It may not be all it's been hyped up as, but it's a damned fun way to spend an hour and a half.

Reiko Ike and Christina Lindberg: what more could you ask for?

OKATSU THE FUGITIVE (1969)

This third installment in the LEGENDS OF THE POISONOUS SEDUCTRESS series is a major disappointment after the excellence of its predecessor, QUICK-DRAW OKATSU . It's pretty much a remake of the previous film, even starring Junko Miyazono as a master swordswoman named Okatsu, but not the same character she played before (?); at the end of QUICK-DRAW OKATSU our heroine was a wanted fugitive, so wouldn't you expect a film entitled OKATSU THE FUGITIVE to be a direct sequel, especially since the film that came before it was a hit and the Japanese are not by any means sequel shy?

This new Okatsu is again the blade-proficient daughter of a swordsman, and when her father threatens to expose the vicious corruption of a local magistrate he's tortured in an attempt to get him to reveal the whereabouts of a written document of the magistrate's offenses. When he won't talk, his wife and daughter are hauled in by the bad guys and the wife is thrown to six hardened criminals for a bit of gang rape (which thankfully doesn't occur, but she does get alarmingly manhandled), and after that moment of extreme bad taste dad kills his wife and then himself. Unfortunately Okatsu then falls victim to the evil magistrate and is raped, then thrown into a basement dungeon. With the aid of her sleazy fiancee, she escapes — killing several swordsmen in the process — with the document hidden in her mother's elaborate (and very pointy) hairpin and sets out to avenge her parents, not realizing her fiancee is in league with the bad guys. After that the film becomes a lackluster and very much by the numbers samurai revenge flick that could have been written with little or no effort by anyone who's ever seen one of these things, and ends up a staggeringly generic item that will be forgotten about five minutes after the title that reads "The End." That's a real shame because the level of quality found in QUICK-DRAW OKATSU lead me to expect a hell of a lot more from all involved, and after this I can see why the series stalled out. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

FEMALE DEMON OHYAKU (1968)

After having seen QUICK-DRAW OKATSU and OKATSU THE FUGITIVE (both from 1969), I finally got around to the movie that launched the LEGENDS OF THE POISONOUS SEDUCTRESS trilogy and it was certainly worth the wait.

Junko Miyazono stars as Ohyaku, an entertainer who performs for the drunken dregs of society when not scamming rich men with her possibly gay M.C. pal. Ohyaku’s position as a denizen of the seedy borderline underworld was ensured when her prostitute mother committed suicide and Ohyaku fell into the care of a manager/pimp who whored her out as she grew up. But now she’s an adult and has had enough of being used by all and sundry, and finds love with a rebellious and sensitive young ronin who plans to rob the local mint as a “fuck you” to the rich assholes who don’t care about the poor.

But, as often happens in chambara flicks, the ronin is betrayed and tortured into revealing the whereabouts of the gold and once that secret is divulged the ronin is beheaded in an impressive black-and-white display of grand guignol-style gore. As a preamble to this, Ohyaku is raped by the requisite evil magistrate, but when she refuses to be his concubine he sentences her to hard labor on a penal colony/gold mine, making her the only female on an island of very hardened and very horny thieves and murderers. But it could have been worse; Ohyaku catches the eye of the warden’s bisexual tattoo artist wife, and, after a failed lesbian pass, the artist instead expresses her lusts and passion by inking a huge demon’s head on Ohyaku’s back (which eventually leads to a fairly tame lesbian scene).

After that, it’s a symphony of underhanded strategy as Ohyaku uses her feminine wiles to pit several of the characters against each other — including a vile official who wants the tattoo artist to use her needle skills to kill Ohyaku via a secret pressure point technique so he can fuck her corpse (!!!) — and escape back to the mainland so she can avenge her lover.

Aided by a kindly gang boss (Tomisaburo Wakayama, about three years away from kicking more ass than is humanly countable as Lone Wolf in the “Babycart” series) and a couple of loyal helpers, Ohyaku metes out horrible retribution upon the asshole magistrate in a scene of surprising cruelty, involving the magistrate’s completely innocent girlfriend getting used as a by-the-hair counterweight to a huge guillotine blade.

I really enjoyed this one and was surprised to see how little it relied on swordplay to keep the viewer involved. Miyazono is one of the most three-dimensional heroines ever to grace a samurai picture, and you feel for Ohyaku’s plight from the moment she hits the screen. Unlike the women Miyazono essays in the sequels, Ohyaku is not a trained warrior, but is instead able to draw on a well of strength forged by a lifetime of misery and living by her skills and wits. Sure, she picks up a couple of bladed weapons when the story calls for it, but Ohyaku exhibits the kind of deadliness found in a majorly pissed-off woman who’s been fucked over by an abusive husband and has picked up the nearest sharp object so she can take care of business, rather than the martial superiority on display in the immediate followup, QUICK-DRAW OKATSU. The whole thing’s believable, engrossing, and heart wrenching, so TRUST YER BUNCHE and shake up your next chick-flick get-together with an actually classy exploitation offering.

The original 1968 theatrical release poster.