| I will start this review off
with this statement, yes, Seven
Samurai (1954) is probably the best samurai
film ever made, but is it my favorite? No. My
favorite is Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at
the River Styx. Why Baby Cart at the
River Styx? It's simple, Baby Cart
is more fun to watch, for one thing. It's an absolutely
wild film, with loads of intense violence and
bloodshed (so intense in fact, that the Shogun
Assassin reedit of film was branded a "video
nasty" and banned in England for years) and
actually doesn't feel all that "Japanese"
in it's style, feeling far more akin to the ultraviolent
Westerns of Sam Peckinpah and the bloody Shaw
Brothers films of Chang Cheh than to the more
typically Japanese films of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Oshima
and company. Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart
at the River Styx is also relentlessly entertaining
and is easily The Empire Strikes Back
of the Lone Wolf and Cub series.
Ogami Ito and his young son Daigoro
are on the run. Their hunters: the Shadow Yagyu
Clan. The treacherous Yagyu Retsudo, still obsessed
with killing Ogami and his son, enlists a group
of female ninjas, headed by Yagyu Sayaka, to hunt
down and kill them. Ogami, meanwhile, is hired
by the Awa clan to protect the secret of their
secret blue dye which has kept them wealthy for
many years by killing a defector named Makuya
who plans on giving the secret to the Shogunate.
However, to kill Makuya, Ogami must first take
on the Hidari Brothers, better known as the Gods
of Death, a trio of mercenaries hired by Yagyu
clan to protect Makuya at all costs.
From frame one, right after the
Toho and Katsu Productions logos come up, the
film leaps right into action, with Ogami Ito and
Daigoro being attacked by a pair of ninjas, who
are then dispatched in a rather gruesome fashion,
with one of them getting a sword through his skullcap.
While not even close to a chambara version of
say, Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, the
film is quite hyper violent, with sliced off limbs,
fountains of gushing blood (Kill Bill
allegedly stole that verbatim from the Lone
Wolf and Cub films), heads sliced open through
the middle and most memorably, a sequence where
the Yagyu ninja women demonstrate their skill
to a doubting Kurokawa clansman by literally slicing
up one of his ninjas like a turkey. Those with
weak stomachs had best stay away from this film
and the film also contains a fair amount of nudity
and sexuality (as do the rest of the Lone
Wolf and Cubs, however). In terms of the
filmmaking quality, the film is truly stellar.
Kenji Misumi is a director who started off working
for Daiei and made more or less nothing but period
pieces, his best known pre-Lone Wolf and Cub
film being Wrath of Daimajin (aka Return
of the Giant Majin), which is actually, in
my opinion, the most flatly directed and uninteresting
film in the trilogy. However, his direction in
Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River
Styx, while not as off the wall as Buichi
Sato's in Lone
Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril (1972),
a later entry, is anything but flat and uninteresting,
resembling that of a Sergio Leone film mixed with
Shaw Brothers-like camera work with loads of truly
impressive shots and set ups that really put you
into the action, with the blood actually getting
ON the camera at some points. Chishi Makiura's
cinematography is highly impressive as well, resembling,
in many ways, an Asiatic equivalent of Tonino
Delli Colli's breathtaking cinematography for
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once
Upon A Time in the West and the editing by
Toshio Taniguchi is absolutely top notch. The
music by Hideaki Sakurai is okay, the film actually
doesn't feature a whole lot of music, at least
in it's original Japanese cut, so it's really
hard to judge. It works fine for the film, but
as a standalone listening experience it pales
in comparison to the music in the film's Shogun
Assassin reedit (see below).
The film's acting is ranges from
decent to excellent. Tomisaburo Wakayama, as Ogami
Ito, is one word: badass. As Daigoro, Akihiro
Tomikawa gives an amazing performance for someone
so young. He has next to no dialogue but the expressions
on his face are absolutely priceless. Kayo Matsuo,
as Sayaka, head of the Yagyu ninja women, is quite
decent and Akiji Kobayashi (best known as Captain
Muramatsu in Ultraman), Minoru Oki and
Shin Kishida (best known for playing the Dracula
role in the latter two entries in Michio Yamamoto's
Dracula trilogy) are appropriately intimidating
as the supremely badass villains the Gods of Death.
Given that the film is very action oriented, the
film is not particularly character driven, though
there is some character development. Ogami and
Daigoro's father-son relationship deepens throughout
the movie, with both saving each other's lives
before the end. Also, in the final sequence of
the film, Ogami Ito and Yagyu Sayaka cannot bring
themselves to kill each other, instead going their
separate paths.
In 1980, Roger Corman's New World
Pictures bought the rights to both Sword of
Vengeance and Baby Cart at the River
Styx and employed future documentarian Robert
Houston who reedited them both into one film,
using most of River Styx and about 10
minutes of Sword of Vengeance as exposition.
The result was Shogun Assassin, a dubbed,
86 minute orgy of screen violence. It actually
is not only perhaps the best Americaninzation
of a Japanese or Asian film in history but is
in some ways even better than the original version!
The dubbing, with talent such as Lamont Johnson
and Sandra Bernhard, is actually done, for once,
with exquisite care. The film also adds a whole
new score, which basically sounds like what would
happen if the Italian rock group Goblin (who scored
many Dario Argento films such as Suspiria and
George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead)
were to try to attempt music with an Asian motif,
which I personally much prefer to the original.
Shogun Assassin also makes another major
improvement over Baby Cart at the River Styx,
it adds a narration track by Daigoro, courtesy
of one Gibran Evans. The narration track really
adds a whole new level to the movie, it's best
usage being during a scene where Daigoro talks
about how he likes to keep track of all the ninja
that his father kills so he'll know just how many
souls to pray for, at the start of the scene,
it stands at 342, by the end of the scene, it's
345. There is actually only one single bit of
gore that was cut of the film, a shot of a ninja
woman's breasts being sliced open, apparently
at the insistence of the MPAA. That said, the
plot has been rather watered down, apparently
Houston thought Americans wouldn't be able to
fully comprehend the idea of the Shogunate being
manipulated by the shady Shadow Yagyu clan, so
Yagyu Retsudo was turned into the Shogun himself.
The film also ends with the defeat of the Gods
(in this case, Masters) of Death and not with
Yagyu Sayaka and Ogami Ito's final confrontation.
Those minor gripes aside, while I like River
Styx better as a piece of filmmaking, Shogun
Assassin is, to me, a better piece of entertainment.
I often give Sin City
or Batman Begins the title of my favorite
comic book movie, but then I remember that the
Lone Wolf and Cub films are, in fact,
adaptations of Kazuo Koike's lurid manga and thus
qualify completely. So yeah, Lone Wolf and
Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx and its
reedit Shogun Assassin are simultaneously
my favorite samurai films, comic book films and
yes, films in general. If you're a fan of samurai
films, gore films, exploitation films or are,
like myself, a fan of all three, you really owe
it to yourself to check this out. You will not
be disappointed, though it is, as I said, an acquired
taste to others.
|
(4.5/5)
