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SHOGUN ASSASSIN 2: LIGHTNING SWORDS OF DEATH (1972)
Directed by: Kenji Misumi.
Produced by: Shintaro Katsu & Hisaharu Matsubara.
Written by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima.
Released by AnimEigo.
Country of Origin: Japan. 89 min. Rated R.
With: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Go Kato & Yuko Hama. DVD Features: Image gallery. Program notes. Trailers.

Maybe it was out of a sense of curiosity, but I decided to revisit the first Shogun Assassin, which is, like its sequel, an English dub of the Lone Wolf and Cub series from the early 1970s. The original Shogun Assassin was truly one of the bloodiest samurai films ever concocted, a work that was put together in cheap fashion by its American (re)director to include all of the ultra-violent scenes from two of the Lone Wolf and Cub movies for maximum impact. The result is a feat that few films can live up to, where the body count is in the hundreds, and the laughs are just as frequent. In that film, the lead character, Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama), was a wandering samurai betrayed by the head shogun and out to get revenge. He ends up killing everyone in his way except the shogun. It has no artistic value whatsoever, but its purely exploitive intentions make for a rollicking good time, especially with a group of friends. (It even got a brief, uproarious mention in Kill Bill Vol. 2 as a bedtime movie for a child). This is not the case, sad to say, with Shogun Assassin 2: Lightning Swords of Death.

This may be one of the rare cases where the first film is better than the sequel because of American tampering. This follow-up, instead of being a re-edit, is just a re-dub of the Lone Wolf and Cub movie Baby Cart to Hades. Of course, there should be some objective analysis of the sequel on its own terms, as many seeing it may have not seen the original, but even on this front the film proves to be a disappointment. The title indicates that Ogami might be after, chiefly, the shogun, and yet there is never even a mention of the shogun this time around. Here Ogami’s journeys finds him in the crosshairs of a plot to assassinate a governor.

Meanwhile, Ogami (again played by Wakayama) is at times not even really a big part of the plot anyway, or what appears to be the plot. Part of the problem with most cheesy, ultra-violent ‘70s samurai movies is that the storylines are incoherent, but the more wretched aspect to the picture is that it isn’t even tasteless enough to be entertaining; talk precedes almost every showdown between Ogami and his adversaries. In the climax, Ogami faces off against 40 opponents, like a machine going through the motion to music that reminds one of the early Nintendo video games, which may be enough to satisfy only some fans. What could have been a follow-up to the classic finale from Kurosawa’s Sanjuro between two master swordsmen turns into one big joke of prolonged hara-kiri.

The promise on the DVD cover of “rivers of blood” is a letdown. That, and the really bland dubbing, alongside the few measly samurai movie trailers, didn’t help much at all to make the disc a guilty pleasure, but a slog with moments of excitement and amusement, with lots of head-scratching at what is just a fairly average, nothing-to-write-home-about genre picture. Jack Gattanella
April 2, 2007