Hanzo the Razor - L'épée de la justice

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.

What can I say about this movie? It is the kind of a story you would describe to a psychiatrist and then add, "At that point, I woke up". A law officer, whose morals are above reproach, rapes female suspects to get them to confess. He also gets sexually aroused by torture.

One might get the impression that the star and producer, Shintaro Katsu, arrived at the conclusion one day that he had enough money to make a movie about his darkest sexual fantasies to watch in his old age.

And yet, I liked the movie...as incomprehensible as much of the plot was... Obviously Katsu is an excellent actor. One sees absolutely no trace of the charismatic Zatoichi character in his Hanzo. He is a different person altogether. Zatoichi lived within society and corruption. Hanzo is fighting a one sided battle against it.

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?

Great 70's samurai film. What separates it from other classics of the same era, like the Lone Wolf and Cub and Sleepy Eyes of Death series, is its decidedly tawdry sexual aspects- Hanzo's mammoth penis aka-"The Long Arm of the Law", and his 'interrogation' of female suspects. In essence it is one part samurai film, one part rouge cop/Dirty Harry flick, and one part soft core porno.

A bit slow in the action department, with a few brief sequences. The film mainly takes focus on Hanzo dealing with the ladies, as well as, the corrupt officials that try to undermine him. If you want action every five minutes, go elsewhere. If you want a super groovy soundtrack, look no further. Definitely hard to forget.

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.