The Blind Woman's Curse

Meiko Kaji spends 3 years in jail for avenging her Yakuza father, and on her release she inherits the leadership of the Tachibana gang. They're quite a nice bunch, for Yakuza, but a nasty rival gang are bent on taking over their territory. As if that wasn't bad enough, she appears to be under the curse of a black cat that got a taste of her victim's blood...

The film takes a broadly familiar period-Yakuza story and mixes it up with elements of horror and... strangeness, making for an intriguing cocktail of styles, moods and ideas. Teruo Ishii was one of the premier visual stylists of the Japanese exploitation wave, and this film shares the style even though it's relatively light on the exploitation. The plot is straightforward but the details make it interesting, and having Meiko Kaji as the lead actress certainly helps there too.

Good stuff!

It's been a long time since I've seen this movie but I remember the plot as follows;

A woman in a cell in jail is being assaulted by other women inmates who draw back in fright when they rip her kimona off to reveal a tattoo of the head of a dragon, recognised by the inmates as having extraordinary significance.

She is the "Head" of an infamous group of swordfighters.All the other inmates want to know how she ended up imprisoned. The remainder of the movie recounts the exploits of a band of brigands who fight together against overwelming odds always starting and regrouping by standing together shoulder to shoulder, kimonos down, wriggling shoulders to make the full dragon tattoo (of which they each have a portion thereof) wriggle. The story is interspersed with various sexual exploits and goofy slapstick comedy, yet maintains a tense action-packed roller coster ride right to the end.

I only saw it the one time and yearn to see it again.

The way this film juggles being a samurai/yakuza, crime, and horror film all at once is quite impressive, and keeps things from feeling predictable. It's worth watching to see all those genres in play at once.

I think it may have become a little less satisfying in the second half, with maybe more characters than it needed, and Meiko Kaji (who's great here) unfortunately gets a little less focus in that back half.

It comes together well enough by the end at least, and the action's pretty good, the samurai/yakuza stuff is fun, and the horror elements work well, leading to a couple of creepy sequences. It's an odd and pretty good movie overall.

All I have to say is that them Japanese seem like they have way too much fun sometimes. Lots and lots if bloody sword fighting. Eccentric characters. The plot is straightforwards although it jumps around to odd places here and there. Not for everyone thats for sure.

I found this movie to be a weird mix and to be totally honest, I am not sure if I like this movie. This movie seems to have a weird mix of visuals from gore, psychedelia,Jidai Geki and yakuza elements. I personally found it a little off putting and there were parts of the movie, the psychedelic gore parts with the visuals and colouring, that I did not enjoy. Meiko Kaji stars as tachibana doing her soon to be trademark stoic, unspeaking character. Like her later characters Scorpion and Lady Snowblood, she does not say much nor shows much emotion. While it worked (very successfully) with these characters it does not work in this movie. Instead of driven she looked uncertain. Not the best movie but an interesting movie and a look at the development of meiko kaji as an actress.