SHOGUN ASSASSIN

By: Brian Thomas
Review Date: Saturday, July 01, 2006

The saga of Lone Wolf & Cub is one of the most influential stories to ever come out of Japan. It began as a comic series by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, serialized every week in MANGA ACTION magazine. The premise of the story is deceptively simple: Itto Ogami, the Shogun's executioner, is betrayed by his political enemies and his wife is killed. Refusing to commit suicide, Ogami chooses to instead become a rogue samurai. Considering himself dead already, he takes "the road to hell" seeking vengeance. Left with his infant son Daigoro, he offers the baby a choice between a sword and a play ball, leaving it up to fate whether they go down the path of vengeance together. With Daigoro traveling along in a deceptively rickety-looking babycart, Ogami becomes assassins for hire, available to kill anyone for their standard fee of 500 ryo (gold pieces). The comic became an instant hit in Japan, and eventually filled dozens of fat paperback volumes.

The success of the manga led Shintaro Katsu (of Zatoichi fame) to produce a film series based on it. The films created an even bigger sensation in Japan. The combination of violence with a strong dramatic premise, excellent direction and good performances made the films instant classics. I was a big fan of the LONE WOLF series via the manga translations issued by First Comics in the 1980s, but was only vaguely aware of the movies as something I'd heard about but as yet unreachable. So it was quite a surprise when I tuned in a local TV station at around 2 AM one night to find SHOGUN ASSASSIN playing on the late, late show entirely uncut, complete with onscreen nudity and decapitations! Distributors New World Pictures in the USA had purchased the rights to the first couple Baby Cart features, and rather than simply dub them into English, writer/director Robert Houston took about ten minutes from the first film and 75 from the second, combining them through clever editing and overlaying it all with a fine new soundtrack and very clever narration.


Bits from the first picture included via flashback tell how Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama) was portrayed by the Shogun (instead of merely a powerful but evil ruling family patriarch) and chose the road of a hired assassin rather than submit to a humiliating execution. This second entry in the series takes as its center the eyes of little Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa). They take in everything, from the dance of butterflies to the sight of his father, slaying assassins of the Yagyu Shadow-Clan. In SHOGUN ASSASSIN, this viewpoint was taken a step further by having Daigoro actually narrate the story. Spymaster Ozuno (Izumi Ayukawa) brings orders from the Shogun to Sayaka (Kayo Matsuo) of the Akashi Clan that Ogami is on his way into their territory, and they must kill him. Her clanswomen prove their capability to Ozuno by cutting his strongest warrior to pieces. The Edo Chamberlain of Awa has hired Lone Wolf to kill Makuya, headman of the indigo farmers (who provide precious dyes to the textile industry). The Shogun has sent the Hidari Brothers (the infamous Gods of Death) to bring Makuya to Edo, putting the secret of the Awa indigo dye in jeopardy. Each Hidari has a lethal specialty: Benma uses a claw weapon, Tenma a club, and Kuruma an armored glove. With Daigoro providing wry observations to the horrific violence, the story takes on aspects of black comedy that the original filmmakers never considered, but it makes for a very entertaining show.

One episode in the narrative has little Daigoro required to nurse his father back to health. Then cowardly Yagyu agents kidnap the boy in an attempt to draw the Lone Wolf out. On the road to Akashi to catch a ship, Ogami is faced with waves of attackers. First the Akashi clanswomen, then Ozuno's warriors take him on. Sayaka poses the only real challenge, fighting him to a draw. The ship they board holds not only Sayaka, but the Gods of Death as well, making it a very hazardous voyage.

The fight choreography in the films - much of it drawn directly from the manga - is incredible. It's also incredibly bloody; fans of samurai films had grown used to seeing a lot of killing on the screen, but never before had the slaughter been presented so graphically, with blood gushing and splattering about freely in slow motion. The westerns of Sam Pekinpah, which dared to actually show realistic bullet wounds, had a similar effect on people. However, this violence - and everything else in the original films is presented with taste and style, always framing his shots in just the right way. Like Daigoro, we're allowed to see all, yet retain our innocence. In SHOGUN ASSASSIN, we fear that this innocence is being warped, and wonder what kind of man Daigoro will grow into if he survives.

AnimEigo issued the original six films in excellent editions on DVD, which are now available in a box set, complete with carefully translated subtitles and educational liner notes. It was somewhat ironic that these films became so readily available in the USA, while SHOGUN ASSASSIN was only to be found on bootlegs or foreign editions. This DVD cures that ill, but AnimEigo goes one better than the others. With the original film transfers on hand, they've decided to edit in as much of the original image as possible, so this edition of SHOGUN ASSASSIN contains all but a few shots taken from the Baby Cart films rather than from the dupes used to make the theatrical version. Some purists may object to this, but as an on-disc comparison shows, the results are dramatically positive.

Copyright © 2006 Brian Thomas, author of the massive book VideoHound's DRAGON: ASIAN ACTION & CULT FLICKS.
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