Released between 1970 and 1976, the Lone Wolf and Cub manga by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima has unleashed a range of spin-offs, and perhaps the most famous is the series of six movies put out by Toho. Four of the six were released in 1972 alone, with an annual release in 1973 and 1974 before the sequence petered out; the series was initially produced by Shintaro Katsu, star of the long-running Zatoichi series which habitually put out several instalments in a year, and on his part it seems to have been his bid to craft a similar regular gig for his elder brother, Tomisaburo Wakayama, who took on the lead role of Itto, the Lone Wolf.
Whereas the Zatoichi sequence ran for over a decade, Lone Wolf and Cub was over within a few years – then again, in the same general timespan Zatoichi also petered to a halt, so perhaps the market was shifting. Either way, it’s the Lone Wolf and Cub movies which have gained more recognition with Western audiences, for reasons I’ll get into towards the end of this article; the Criterion Collection has put out a compilation of Lone Wolf and Cub, in particular. For this review, I’m going to review all seven movies in the six-part series – no, that’s not a typo, you’ll understand by the end…
Oh, and rape is a frequent feature of these stories, so content warning for discussion of that below here.
Sword of Vengeance
We open with Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama) attending to some business with the lord of a noble house, who has been denounced as a traitor. The lord is, alas, a small child – but such are the draconian measures the Tokugawa Shogunate are turning to, along with a network of ninja spies and assassins. Officially, Ogami’s role in the state apparatus is to act as the second of nobles who are performing seppuku, to ensure they can do it properly or to perform the act himself if they cannot (as is the case with this small child). In practice, everyone knows and admits that he is the Shogun’s executioner.
There are those, however, who have decided his usefulness is at an end – shadowy forces gathering power to themselves within the bureaucracy who realise that Ogami is unlikely to be recruitable for their schemes, but is eminently replaceable – simply engineer an incident at his home to prompt an investigation, plant incriminating evidence to conprehensively discredit him, and you open up his position to be co-opted. So it is that ninjas infiltrate his household and kill Ogami’s wife Azami (Keiko Fujita), family, and servants, and soon after Inspector General Bizen Yagyu (Fumio Watanabe) – a senior agent of the conspiracy – shows up to frame Ogami as a traitor intending to assassinate the Shogun.
By the end of the gambit, the Ogami clan is near extinct; only Itto himself and his tiny son Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) have survived, Itto having slain the Inspector. Now the former executioner journeys through the land as a dishevelled ronin, toting Daigoro in a baby cart…
Given that it’s an origin story movie, Sword of Vengeance is mostly concerned with setting up the premise of the overall series, dedicating most of the first half hour or so of its running time (plus some extensive flashback material later on than that) to that task. This does not leave an enormous amount of space for an actual self-contained plot that can be brought to a conclusion within the scope of the movie, but an attempt is made. What isn’t dedicated to backstory here is expended on Itto taking on an assassination job – for that’s how he and Daigoro pay their way, as the elite assassination team called Lone Wolf and Cub (title drop!). Specifically, they’re hired to intervene in a succession crisis: the villainous Kenmotsu intends to eliminate Noriyoku, the sickly but legitimate heir to a backwater noble family, and those who have hired Lone Wolf want to protect the legitimate line of succession by taking out Kenmotsu and his goons at the hot springs where they are currently rendezvousing to prepare an ambush on Noriyoku – thus eliminating the threat well before Noriyoku comes on the scene.
A nice character contrast is establish as the Ogamis journey to the hot springs – Itto has his eyes forward and is by and large determinedly paying attention to his mission, though haunted by his memories of the past. Daigoro, by contrast, is looking around, enjoying the sights and sounds of nature and picking up a song from some children he overhears along the way. Itto, in other words, is jaded and cares little for the world, but Daigoro has retained an innocent sense of wonder, possibly because the slaying of his mother happened way too early for him to fully understand.
Not that his innocence can really last when he’s joined his father on what Itto proclaims the road to hell. Itto is a weird dude from an era whose social mores are not especially modern; in the wake of the attack on the family, before he enters the life of the ronin, Itto lays a ball and a sword before Daigoro, who is too young to speak and probably doesn’t understand the situation at all, and tells him to select the ball or the sword. If he takes the ball, Itto will mercy kill him to spare him a life of hardship and violence on the road; if he takes the sword, Itto will take that as consenting to the ronin way and all the dark deeds that involves.
But you know, there’s beautiful nature scenes in this and some carefully reconstructed historical locales and garments and character moments like the sword-or-ball scene, but that’s not what the Lone Wolf and Cub movies are really about. What makes Sword of Vengeance stand out is the utterly blood-drenched fight scenes; clearly high blood pressure was an endemic problem during the era. (There’s also an absolutely badass decapitation at one point.) The other elements enhance matters, contextualise the violence, and help build wider thematic structures, of course, but it’s the martial arts action that is the backbone of the whole thing.
The obvious question arising from the Ogamis’ plight is “how is Itto meant to do badass samurai shit when he’s also handling childcare?”, and this movie starts to answer that questions like the scene where Itto fights a duel with Daigoro strapped to his back: he solves the problem by finding cunning ways for Daigoro to unexpectedly contribute to the fight despite his youth. The big reveal is spared for the end, however, in which it’s revealed that Daigoro’s baby cart has been tricked out with all manner of hidden weapons which Itto can deploy at a moment’s notice, turning the innocent-seeming carriage into a perfect means to smuggle weapons into situations even when Itto is apparently disarmed. This allows for a brief but remarkable fight scene at the conclusion, showcasing what the cart can do, and having a big fight sequence at the very end where the cart really comes into its own would be part of the formula for the movies going forwards.
A less appealing part of the formula is the use of sexual violence as a cheap way to escalate the stakes. There’s a pretty shocking rape/murder scene, I guess to establish that the ne’er-do-wells assembling at the hot springs are seriously bad dudes, and there’s a bit where the bandits decide that the best way to bully Itto a prostitute encountered at the hot springs is to make them have sex while the bandits watch, which is pretty gratuitous; it is possibly a consequence of the hot springs mission being a little underdeveloped, seeing as it is arguably filler material for the sake of getting this to feature film length, rather than just having an entire movie dedicated to the backstory.
The visual aesthetic and sound design of the series are also established here, crafted by director Kenji Misumi, who’d stay in the post for the first three movies of this series. (Shintaro Katsu probably got Misumi in because he inaugurated the Zatoichi series, and was a regular director on that sequence, and so had past form in establishing the ground rules of this sort of sequence.) There’s some interesting use of silence to artistic effect, and the use of music is fairly sparse, in keeping with the judicious use of silent and extremely quiet scenes. The fight scenes are unfailingly compelling to watch, with highlights including the fight in the river where Ogami slays the Chief Inspector, and where first see master manipulator Retsudo Yagyu (Yunosuke Ito), leader of the “shadow clan” that controls the Yagyu clan and seeks total domination of the Shogunate, watching from a bridge. Even wilder are the allegorical shots of Itto carrying Daigoro down a narrow path between raging torrents of water and infernal flames. I’ve not read the manga, but I’d be willing to bet that’s a direct lift from a panel.
In between establishing the premise and testing out the formula for the series, Sword of Vengeance has a lot of tasks on its plate which are necessary for the overall series, but mitigate against it being a particularly compelling story in its own right; it has its virtues, but most of the stuff it does well, later episodes manage to beat or escalate from.
Baby Cart At the River Styx
The second movie opens with a gruesome assassination attempt on Itto, to remind us that the Yagyu Clan are still hunting him. However, thanks to the honour duel that Itto fought in the last movie, the main body of Yagyu men at stationed Edo cannot touch him… but the cadre of Yagyu swordswomen commanded by Sayaka (Kayo Matsuo), based out of Akashi, are not bound by that promise. Thus Ozunu (Akiji Kobayashi), a ninja lackey of Retsudo, brings Sayaka news of the Yagyu members slain by Itto, and a command to eliminate him.
Meanwhile, the Awa Domain engages Itto to prevent a fugitive artisan from being acquired by the Shogunate – Chuzaemon Makuya (Seishiro Hara), who knows the secret of making Awa Indigo, the prized secret that is the basis of Awa’s wealth. To collect Makuya, the Shogunate has sent a trio of three feared martial artists – the infamous BenTenRai brothers, AKA the Monks of Death. Thus, the Awa Domain’s rulers want Itto to infiltrate the passenger vessel the brothers are journeying on, the better to eliminate them before they reach Makuya (there’s the river theme!).
Daigoro is a touch more active in this one – he’s getting verbal a little, he’s learning to count, and he can suss out when he’s being patronised by an innkeeper. He also notices when danger is approaching, and knows to get quiet and not distract Itto when that happens – and best of all, he knows how to activate some of the weapons on the baby cart, leaving him far less vulnerable than one might expect. Between this and a segment where Itto is wounded and Daigoro cares for him the best he can, Daigoro ends up being more of a character and less of a plot device this time around, which is a welcome development.
On the whole, the fights here are just a notch wackier than in the first movie, which is a big help – generally speaking, the more flashy and less routine and business-as-usual the fights in Lone Wolf and Cub are, the better. Stylistically, there’s less outright surrealism but still some striking images, like the hat of one of the slain Monks of Death rolling its way through a desert landscape.
Baby Cart At the River Styx is the first instance of the “Itto encounters an unfamiliar warrior, and she’s a chick!” plot point which the series would come back to now and again. (Remember, all this was written back in the 1970s, when you could do something that simplistic and it would still count as a plot.) There’s a great bit where Ozunu expresses concern that the swordswomen might not be equal to the task, so Sayaka arranges a little demonstration of their skills which sees Ozunu’s best ninja dismembered bit by bit. However, her use after this is less capably handled.
In particular, the scene where Itto has himself, Daigoro and Sayaka strip mostly naked and hug to keep their body warmth up after the three of them have been near-drowned is really badly judged. It might have made more sense in the manga (though I doubt it), but here it just comes across as Sayaka initially fearing that Itto is going to rape her, and then deciding not to kill ltto and Daigoro in that moment because Daigoro nudges her nipple (and yes, that’s as weird and uncomfortable as it sounds). At the very end of the movie she decides to abandon the mission to slay Itto altogether – and she’s not in the sequels, which feels like a missed opportunity given that she’s a serious badass prior to this and having her come in as an occasional ally of Itto and Daigoro would seem like a sensible use of the character.
Baby Cart To Hades
We open with Itto and Daigoro catching a ride on a riverboat – well, Itto is in the boat itself, the cart is too large for it so it’s floating along with Daigoro in it tied to the back of the boat. When a lady passenger who is distraught about something drops her bundle of belongings, Diagoro is gallant enough to pluck it out of the water for her. Later, the duo take a room at an inn where the same young woman from the boat happens to be staying – or rather, being held captive by the pimp she was travelling with. (He has the amazing name of Matsu the Whiner.) When he assaults her, she bites off his tongue and he bleeds to death, and she seeks sanctuary in Lone Wolf and Cub’s room. This brings Itto to the attention of the gunslinger Torizo (Yuko Hamada), the yakuza’s brothel manager of the region.
Torizo might be a shameless gangster, but she’s smarter than most of those who go up against Lone Wolf: realising that sending her men after Itto would just see them massacred, Torizo instead offers a deal. If the woman really doesn’t want to be a prostitute, despite the money the yakuza have already put down to procure her services, she can either do one job at an elevated rate to pay off the debt, or undergo torture as punishment for not paying the debt. Itto proposes to undergo the torture in her stead, and Torizo agrees – and once the ordeal proves that Itto has excellent resilience as well as great fighting skill, she decides to make use of him.
The little matter of Matsu’s murder will be forgotten if Itto carries out one little assassination for her – and her father Tatewaki, former chief retainer of the Kakegawa clan, who had a run-in with Itto when Itto had to execute the clan chief, who had reportedly succumbed to mental illness and had done dark deeds as a result. It turns out that the villainous Genba (Isao Yamagata) was responsible for snitching on the late lord of Kakegawa – the first move in a scheme which led to the dissolution of the Kakegawa clan, the death of Torizo’s sister, and Genba becoming overlord of the region. Torizo and Tatewaki have a simple instruction to Lone Wolf: kill Genba!
Interwoven with this is the story of Itto’s interactions with another fallen samurai. In between the boat ride and the night at the inn, we are shown a trio of sleazy mercenaries in the service of Lord Mizuno. A fourth mercenary among them, Master Kanbei (Go Kato), is a former samurai fallen on hard times, and holds himself apart from their revelry. When the trio slink off and attempt to rape two women they see passing by, they create a situation where Kanbei believes he must act to protect his employer’s honour from being associated with their misdeeds. So he slays the women and their bodyguard, and forces the trio of rapists to draw lots to select which of them must die to create a cover story of a lone troublemaker being responsible for the murders and being dispatched by the other mercenaries. Unfortunately, Itto wanders into the scene and witnesses this, prompting Kanbei to propose a duel – for if he lets Itto live, the cover story isn’t secure. Yet Itto agrees only to sheathe his sword and declare the duel a draw before a blow is struck, shaming Kanbei. In the wake of Genba’s death, Kanbei returns to demand another duel…
One suspects that the structure of this one came about as a result of wanting to adapt two storylines from the manga, but neither of them quite having enough meat to fill a feature-length film. It feels like the Kanbei plot could have been better interwoven into the wider story – not for the first time, I start to wonder whether this would have worked better as a TV series, since you could do one 45 minute episode to cover the Genba story, and one episode to cover Kanbei’s tale, and perhaps do better justice to each. Indeed, come 1973 a Lone Wolf and Cub series would hit Japanese television screens, eventually running for some three seasons.
This movie double-dips on the sexual assault. First, there’s the rape scene to establish that the mercenaries working under Kanbei, who we have only just seen established as bad dudes are, in fact, bad dudes – sure, it’s plot-essential, but there’s no need for the scene to go as far as it goes to perform that function, and it feels sustained in a pretty sordid manner. There’s another scene later where the prostitute is assaulted at the inn, but that seems more proportionate by comparison, and I suppose thematically vile actions are to be expected if the idea is that this movie finds Itto and Daigoro reaching the nadir of their path, entering a world dominated by people’s baser instincts and motives.
That idea finds further support in the fact that Lone Wolf is working for the yakuza this time around. His jobs have become increasingly shady over the course of the series – first intervening in a succession dispute on behalf of the legitimate heir, then intervening to allow a powerful clan to maintain a business monopoly in the second movie, and now helping a yakuza kingpin and her dad to get gruesome revenge on the person that snitched on their lord to the Shogunate, prompting Itto’s intervention in the first place. Sure, this Genba fellow did it in order to engineer the dissolution of the clan and his establishment as the new overlord of the region, but at the same time the lord he snitched on was, by the admission of Torizo’s own father, a multiple murderer. We won’t see Itto work for organised crime in later instalments of the movie series, so perhaps this is meant to be where he hits rock bottom.
Itto offering a draw to Kanbei would also be kind of heelish, given what Kanbei has done, but admittedly a plausible and likely intended reading is that Itto only witnessed the slaying of the mercenary for the coverup, not what came before it. (That said, Itto is well-established as the sort of person who has acute senses and notices little details, so one could speculate that he was able to infer more of what happened than he was directly shown.) In contrast, the idea that Daigoro is a naturally virtuous little chap is emphasised here – he saves the woman’s luggage, he makes sure to tidy away rice that falls from his plate, and so on. This builds on the way he tends for the wounded Itto in the previous movie (which includes an adorable bit where he reverently provides some his clothes to a Buddha statue as an offering before taking the food others have left, so he isn’t just stealing).
In terms of the visuals, outright unrealistic images like the path between water and fire from Sword of Vengeance is off the menu, bar for a scene with the duo walking into a garishly unrealistic sunset, which is more or less the last flourish of that for the series. Once again, it’s the fights which are the load-bearing pillars, and this time around we get some great ones. The last battle is great – what with guns and rifles being used against them, Lone Wolf and Cub end up deploying an absolutely absurd (and totally anachronistic) upgrade to the baby carriage. It’s very, very silly, but it’s so audacious you have to love it, particularly since it’s in the context of the biggest and most elaborate fight scene the series has attempted up to this point.
Baby Cart In Peril
What is going on with these titles? If the baby cart has already gone beyond the Styx to Hades, it’s been in peril for a good long while, come on.
Anyway, this one open with the tattooed swordswoman O-Yuki (Michie Azuma) effortlessly killing a bunch of swordsmen, before we cut to Itto accepting an assassination job to take her down. This is a departure – previously we’ve been privy to Itto’s full mission briefings, so we know the details on who his target is and why the client wants them killed, but this time we’re to find that out along the way. As Daigoro interviews Uno, the master tattoo artist that made Yuki’s tattoos, Daigoro wanders off – and in the space when Lone Wolf and Cub are separated, the little chap encounters a mysterious warrior, Gunbei (Yoichi Hayashi), who becomes fascinated by his impassive, stoic nature in the face of danger. “His eyes belong only to those who have killed hundreds of men,” proclaims Gunbei, and you know what? He’s right. And when Daigoro brandishes a stick at Gunbei for being super creepy, Gunbei recognises the stance as belonging to Itto’s distinctive style…
The subplot with Gunbei offers a chance to show a flashback to the tryouts in which Itto won the position of executioner, a dose of backstory which helps keep this episode varied. It also means we get another look at Retsudo, who is theoretically the big bad but in practice we’ve not seen since the first movie. (He’s now played by Tatsuo Endo, so it’s possible some issues came up with getting Yunosuke Ito back to reprise the role and they gave up trying.) It particularly illuminates the roots of the conflict between the Ogami and Yugya clans over the office of executioner, and so is especially useful to include.
As mentioned, there’s a bit early on where Daigoro wanders off to join some kids watching a pair of clowns and then starts tailing the clowns after the show. As well as indicating that he’s much more independently mobile than he was at the start of the series, it’s difficult not to draw a comparison with the women whose similar performance was the start of am assassination attempt in the second movie. Likewise, when he’s coming back, there’s a bit where he hides and covers his ears from a procession of monks ringing their bells – both reminiscent of the Monks of Death from River Styx and the monk who acts as spotter for the ninjas that massacre the Ogami clan in the first movie. All this makes it evident that his experiences are leaving marks on Daigoro’s psyche which, as he ages, he’s becoming all the more able to express.
Then again, if you’d been a bystander to as many highly aesthetically distinctive mass killings as Daigoro has, it’d begin to get to you. The old “if you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him” adage is illustrated via an amazing fight scene involving super-determined ninjas who disguise themselves as Buddha statues to pull off an ambush. Other interesting fights include the duels fought by O-Yuki against the man who wronged her years ago – though alas, once we get to Yuki’s backstory it includes a big dose of sexual assault, because apparently this franchise has a minimum rape per storyline quota it needs to meet.
This movie has a fairly large number of significant plot threads and incidents – Itto investigating O-Yuki, Daigoro getting lost, Gunbei’s duel with Itto, the backstory between Itto and Gunbei and the influence it had on the wider feud, O-Yuki’s backstory, O-Yuki’s revenge on the man who wronged her, and Itto’s slaying of O-Yuki – so it’s wild that it manages to wrap them all up at around the one hour mark, with about 20 minutes left on the clock. Perhaps that’s why it’s so crammed with multiple plotlines and additional incidents to begin with – it’s trying to be a grab-bag of plot points which someone decided must be concluded, but couldn’t sustain a whole movie by themselves. Fortunately, a fun twist is found to eat the remaining time – in which Retsudo manipulates the Owari Domain into sending a force to attack the Gomune commune (a clique of clowns and street performers) which Lone Wolf and Cub have been staying with in the wake of Yuki’s death, and the father and son assassin team must avenge the murdered mayor of clown town.
Except that mission sort of goes awry and the movie ends up with another massed battle, this time with Yugya ninjas that feels like a bit of a rehash of the end of the previous movie. It does at least culminate in a duel between Retsudo and Itto, and given that (spoilers!) they never got around to doing a conclusive version of this duel in the series I kind of think it was a big missed opportunity not to just make this one the final episode and give the sequence a definitive ending (perhaps framing future movies as occurring somewhere in the timeline prior to this story).
Notably, this was directed by Buichi Saito; he would eventually go on to be one of the more frequent directors contributing to the Lone Wolf and Cub television series which began in 1973, so it’s not impossible this was a tryout for that, and the incorporation of a little detective work, Daigoro wandering off and having a little mini-adventure of his own, and so on suggests he had good ideas for what to do with the material, but I’m not sure the plot structure entirely works (though it is possible the production’s hands were tied if they were trying to be very true to the manga); it really feels like the last act is building to a heroic defence of clown town, and I’m kind of disappointed we don’t get that.
Baby Cart In the Land of Demons
This begins with the Ogamis doing a JRPG quest well before JRPGs were a thing: a group of swordsmen are wandering the land each with a portion of a payment for Lone Wolf and a portion of the mission briefing, and he must fight and defeat each of them to collect both his fee and the information he usually needs to decide whether or not not to accept the job. What is the plan if the last one bleeds out too quickly to finish the explanation? This is a poorly thought out scheme but I guess it’s a fun way to eat time at the start of the movie.
It turns out he’s being hired by Kuroda Domain, whose lord is actually a five year old princess, Hamachiyo (Sumida Kazuyo), who pretends to be a boy with the connivance of the vassals and the previous lord, Naritaka (Shingo_Yamashiro), who has abdicated in her favour; if the Shogunate realised that a girl was running the region, they’d dissolve the domain. However, Hamachiyo is illegitimate, and Prince Matsumaru, of comparable age, is the legitimate heir – Naritaka having preferred the mistress by whom he sired Hamachiyo over Matsumaru’s mother – so Matsumaru has been kept prisoner at Naritaka’s bidding. Foolishly, Naritaka has entrusted a letter to Abbot Jikei (Hideji Otaki) detailing much of this – a letter which would unravel the whole scheme if it fell into the hands of the Shogunate. And the Abbot may well break confidence and hand over the letter – for he is secretly the leader of a Yagyu ninja spy network!
This is the last Lone Wolf and Cub movie to have Kenji Misumi directing, though he got thoroughly tired of the franchise during the process and declined to return afterwards, commenting that the series had “become like a Western”. As you might expect from a movie where Lone Wolf has to kill the head of a monastery, the Buddhist themes of the series start to get rather bluntly direct in this one. The bit where the Abbot explains that Itto can’t kill him because he’s too enlightened, and therefore understands his essential nonexistence, and everyone knows you can’t kill nothing is pretty neat, and the way Itto manages to finally get to the Abbot is such a Wile E. Coyote-esque scheme that you have to applaud the absurdity of it.
In between those incidents, though, the story kind of grinds to a halt and we get caught up in an aside about O-Yo (Tomomi Sato), an expert pickpocket and master of disguise, and her lackey the Mole (Koji Fujiyama) being tracked down by Edo cop Senzo the True Heart (Bin Amatsu), which ends up being a Daigoro-focused side plot all of its own. Itto ends up watching in silent approval as Daigoro bravely accepts a public flogging in order to protect O-Yo, since he’d promised not to admit to seeing her and he puts that high a regard on keeping his promise. This is all as weird and uncomfortable as it sounds, except more so because his bare ass and penis are on display for a good chunk of the scene in question, and seems to exist just to eat some ten to fifteen minutes before Itto has a cool fight with a ninja lady, Shiranui (Michiyo Ōkusu), who then tells him the side of the story the other Kuroda agents left out and hires him to perform an even more extreme job after be deals with the Abbot.
The core plot is complex enough that I question the need for filler when the same time could have been used to both better explain the core situation and explore it further. I wasn’t entirely clear, for instance, on why Naritaka had opted to retire in the first place, when it put his domain in danger to abdicate at that point in time and there didn’t seem to be any compelling reason to do so. Then again, Naritaka’s motives here are poorly explained at best. There’s a bit at the end where he makes a big fuss and refuses to perform seppuku, but he, the mistress for whom he set aside his wife and imprisoned the true prince, and his daughter are all dressed in splendid white “let’s look fab as we die” outfits in their final scene, meaning that they all got changed into them during the last battle. There’s no way you’re getting those clothes onto someone who is actively resisting.
The Yagyu connection gives us another chance to catch up with Lord Retsudo, now one-eyed and pallid after being wounded fighting Itto at the end of the previous movie, and played this time by Minoru Oki, who’d also play him in the final movie in the series…
White Heaven In Hell
The baby cart isn’t mentioned in the title this time, probably because it’s less of a baby cart at this point and more of a handy means to carry stuff – increasingly Daigoro’s just been walking under his own steam alongside Itto except when on usual terrain. Last time, we saw him using it like a boat on a river, and scooting over desert sand on skis into the bargain. Here, the skis see use again, as Daigoro and Itto make use of the cart as a sled.
Anyway, our story: the Shogun himself has started to get seriously tired of this whole Lone Wolf and Cub thing, and warns Retsudo that he really needs to tie this whole thing off in a hurry. As it happens, Retsudo has a daughter, Kaori (Junko Hitomi), that he’s been training specifically to be an Itto-killer. In fact, he’s burned through all the other Shadow Yagyu in the process of training her – it’s just him and her left and this is apparently his last gambit to take down Itto, so it’s kind of upsetting to Retsudo when Kaori bites the dust fairly early on. Driven to extremes, Retsudo resorts to dark forces – he might not have any legitimate ninja wariror kids left alive, he does have Hyoe (Isao Kimura) – his bastard son who, abandoned as a child, has grown up to be a powerful sorcerer as part of the Tsuchigumo clan. Despising Retsudo but wishing to upstage him, Hyoe deigns to take on the mission, and sends his supernatural warriors to take down Itto.
This is an interesting late-series turn for the style of the series; once Hyoe is in play, the genre takes a hard turn into horror, with his minions spending weeks on end buried underground in a death ritual and with the capability to crawl about underground as a result of their training. They aren’t classic movie zombies, but they certainly have undead implications. Director Yoshiyuki Kuroda was a less seasoned figure than the previous directors on the series and was more known as a special effects artist, and perhaps this is his touch showing through, at least initially offering something of a breath of fresh air. The curses and ill-fortune dogging Lone Wolf and Cub once the Tsuchigumo are mobilised adds an eerie air to things, and it feels like the entire movie could have been dedicated to this.
Nope! Instead, as with Baby Cart In Peril, the apparent main plot wraps early so we can have another big flashy fight scene against a Yagyu horde, along with a fight against Retsudo. Could this be the final battle? No, no it isn’t – the movie series just ends inconclusively after this, despite all the signs being that this was being constructed to offer a capstone to the series. In particular, towards the start Itto and Daigoro visit Azami’s grave, tend it, and Itto declares that he now intends to take Daigoro to Edo for a final confrontation with Retsudo, so clearly they were planning for the series to wrap up either now or very, very soon, so why not just… write an ending? Perhaps they refrained out of deference not just to the manga, but to the TV series which had started up at this point – reasoning, maybe, that if people saw a conclusion to the story in the movies they might stop following the other serials in other formats.
Azusa, another daughter of Retsudo, enters play after a bit, so I am thoroughly confused as to how often Retsudo laments that he’s run out of kids only to remember he left a spare one somewhere. She’s largely here to provide nudity and an incest/rape scene with Hyoe. This all comes kind of out of nowhere – earlier Retsudo asks her to help Hyoe cool his jets a bit since his tactics are getting a little extreme, but otherwise she doesn’t appear much and we don’t see any interactions of theirs before this. If this were a storyline from the manga, I’d suggest that it was being contracted for the running time, but as it turns out White Heaven In Hell is an all-original story. Yes, this is what anime fans the world of know all too well – a filler episode arising from the series catching up to where the manga is!
The snowbound terrain here is wonderful, making an instant and major aesthetic impact. Whilst past episodes did have some variation in locale, generally speaking the centre of gravity of the series has been in lush, verdant forest and countryside. Even for those of us not reared in a culture where white is associated with death, by now the use of white execution/suicide robes has established the thematic connection onscreen. Before we get to the snowy regions we have other interesting bits of terrain like the foreboding swamp where Hyoe and Itto duel, with the onlooking Tsuchigumo retainers lending the whole thing the air of some manner of folk horror ritual. The sound of the movie differs from prior episodes as well – in the early sections the soundtrack is notably funkier, with some neat nods to Night On Bald Mountain when Retsudo goes to contact Hyoe.
In other respects, though, this is kind of more of the same, and it’s notably over-reliant on old gimmicks from past movies – the baby cart’s bag of tricks, in particular, is getting seriously samey at this point, especially the overused machine gun. (Hey, I told you the secret weapon was anachronistic.) The massed battle in the snow is perked up by the fact that it’s in snow, but it still feels like a rehash of the battle at the end of Baby Cart In Peril, which is itself a rehash of the one at the end of Baby Cart In Hades, which has the best Itto-vs.-an-army fight in the whole series. As a result, despite the shift into more supernatural territory and the wider variety of terrain this story goes through, White Heaven In Hell doesn’t quite overcome the sense that the Lone Wolf and Cub series has run out of ideas.
Shogun Assassin
Shogun Assassin is the seventh of the six movies in the series. After David Weisman paid Toho $50,000 for the rights to do an English-language version, Robert Houston set about overseeing a new dub and edit – but whilst no new footage was shot, the dubbing and editing makes such significant changes to the source material that it’s almost an entirely new story in its own right.
For one thing, it doesn’t exactly correspond to any one of the existing movies – instead it draws on the first two,, mashing up the backstory sections of Sword of Vengeance with the main plot of Baby Cart At the River Styx. As well as adding a fairly heavy-handed synth soundtrack, the English dub makes sweeping plot changes; rather than being a vassal of the Shogun, Retsudo is recast as the Shogun himself, and footage of the Awa clan from Baby Cart At the River Styx suppressing their dye workers is repurposed to represent the Shogun’s troops putting down popular unrest. The dye manufacturer that Itto is hired to kill in River Styx is recast as the Shogun’s brother, and in general the movie is less happy to go along with the “if only the Tsar knew!” pretences of the original series in favour of having Itto be more willing to go against the Shogun directly.
Perhaps the biggest departure in how this is all presented is the narration from Daigoro, which is extensive. Daigoro’s voiceover narration is used to cover for plot points which would otherwise get lost in the edit, to give further context to episodes which would otherwise seem a bit disconnected from everything else, or to just plain waffle. Houston seems to have been under the impression that American audiences would absolutely reject the movie if it had any long moments of quiet in it, and so they go out of their way to fill all of the quieter moments with music (or which there’s significantly more than in the Japanese originals) or Daigoro’s babbling.
The edit tends to make everything feel substantially more kinetic, condensing the material down to focus on the action scenes and dial back on everything which isn’t a fight. The end result isn’t exactly the most coherent way to experience the story, but it does have this violent fever dream aspect to it which perhaps explains why it got the cultural traction it did; this is the version which got sampled a lot on GZA’s Liquid Swords album, the Wu-Tang Clan being big fans of the movie (Lone Wolf and Cub, it turns out, ain’t nothing to fuck with), and this is the version which ended up on the video nasty list. It’s all rather flashy, and if some of the substance of the originals has bled out in the editing process, the style still shines through.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 