Goyôkiba

Don't watch this one with your female significant other unless she's cool.

Misumi plays a law enforcer with a huge "razor" and uses his "razor" to get women to talk. He also beats the living mess out of every person who messes with him. He hates the government and is sticking it to the man.

All the things you don't want to see are in this film: torture, sex, rape, extreme violence, and dick jokes.

This is a hilarious series. If you love black dynamite or Shaft, this movie is in that VEIN.

See what I did there?

No pun intended with my summary line. I actually did expect something along the lines of "Zatoichi" when I watched this at a local cinema, as part of Retrospective. Well I was in for a treat (and if you have seen the movie, you do know what I'm talking about), because it is anything but that.

I like Zatoichi-style action, don't get me wrong and there is quite a bit of action on display here. But mainly the "sword of justice" might be something else than you'd expect. Unless you know what you are getting into that is. Speaking of "getting into" ... well better not, I don not want to get to graphic here. The movie is doing more than a good job, so I leave it to the film to blow your mind (if you can get your head around the idea and weirdness of it all, that is). The ending did seem a bit rushed though ... but I guess that happened for a reason.

Misumi seems ill-at-ease doing a kind of extremely cartoonish and lurid sexploitation film where the emphasis is on Hanzo's 'interrogating' techniques (read forced sex which the victims end up enjoying so much they spill everything he needs to know as a constable - how's that for PC?) rather than anything resembling a samurai movie. That's probably why it verges on the incomprehensible and the experimentations with style and form are as disjointed as the silly script against which they're supposed to work as diversions. In one of the greatest strokes of irony in Japanese cinema, where Misumi failed, Yasuzo Masumura (a director know for more art-house fare) succeeded beyond all expectations in the second entry of the Hanzo series, basically by doing what Misumi opted to avoid: a serioud dark movie. The kind of film Misumi made a career out of.

Wow - I have seen many Japanese sword films, many weird sexual exploitation movies but this one - where it combines so many genres (plus a film score that Issac Hayes would be proud of)this film is an oddity but also lots of fun. Hanzo is a tough cop who refuses to follow orders from his superiors. He is tough, he tortures HIMSELF to become even tougher. The actor is a bit pudgy with a double chin but his eyes - he is the real deal. Intense, a real bad ass. Another way he toughens himself up is to slam his own male member with a cane and then have sex with a huge burlap bag of rice (makes me think twice of ordering rice in a Japanese restaurant)- then when he needs to "interrogate" female suspects and/or witnesses - he uses his toughened flesh "sword" to get the women to comply. Strange, weird. The violence goes from clumsy to very real. My film group really liked it.

Part Zatoichi, part Dirty Harry and part Dirk Diggler, Hanzo 'The Razor' Itami (Shintarô Katsu) is an incorruptible Edo-period lawman, highly skilled in the martial arts, and a big hit with the ladies, who are more than happy to tell him everything after receiving a thorough pounding from his over-sized trouser truncheon. In fact, Hanzo is so bad-ass, that he regularly tests his endurance to the limits, suffering extreme pain during prolonged bouts of self-inflicted torture, and dousing his massive member in hot water before bashing it with a stick and ramming it repeatedly into a bag of rice.

After apprehending a small-time criminal (by crushing his nose into a bloody pulp), Hanzo learns that a contract killer named Kanbei has somehow escaped from the island to which he was banished. As he follows a trail of deceit and corruption that leads all the way to the Inner Castle, home to some of the region's most powerful people, Hanzo upsets a few officials, inflicts major damage on those crazy enough to take him on in a fight, and interrogates a few lovely ladies in his own inimitable style.

Although I admittedly lost track of proceedings from time to time (over complicated plot or stupid viewer—you decide), the cool 70s trappings (surreal visuals, split screen, funky soundtrack etc), inventive soft-core coupling, incredibly bloody action (including ruptured eyeballs and assorted nasty wounds spurting geysers of blood), twisted humour, and general craziness ensured that Hanzo was a consistently entertaining piece of exploitation from start to finish.