The first time I saw this I felt that I couldn’t quite connect with it because I hadn’t seen SUKEBAN DEKA III, the tv series this is a film for.
Well, I now have seen SDIII, the story of Yui Kazama moving to the big city where she and her sisters investigate the secrets of their ninja clan. I ended up loving that series, and now that I’ve revisited the film, I see that I really wasn’t missing any context,…
Pure exploitation nonsense from Kazuo Koike and Teruo Ishii. Shoutout to Goro Ibuki, looking great in a sea shell eyepatch!
Tetsuro Tamba plays a nihilistic ronin taken in by the villainous Bohachi, a clan proud of their vicious methods. They’ve got a sex trafficking thing going on, and want to use Tamba’s might to take down the competition around town.
Tamba’s fine in this. I have similar gripes to his blankly dead performance that I do to LONE WOLF AND…
Tomu Uchida hasn’t let me down yet! This, THE MAD FOX, and BLOODY SPEAR AT MOUNT FUJI have all been excellent.
This film reminds me of Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW. Long swaths of the movie are police procedural, where the focus isn’t on the mystery of who did it, but around the details of the suspect and how the police are going to nail him. And the film wanders from protagonist to protagonist as we follow the fugitive himself, a…
I couldn’t help but watch this in the context of it being part of Radiance’s launch, their debut Japanese title, and a rare English release of a ninkyo ‘chivalry’ film. And what a choice! This one’s a whopper!
It’s a great example of the genre with a lot of its key players at the top of their game. Of course you’ve got the stoic Koji Tsuruta in the lead role, the lovely Sumiko Fuji, Nobuo Kaneko being a hateful weasel,…
