Baby Cart: le sabre de la vengeance

I've always wanted to read these manga, so to find out that there is *six* Lone Wolf and Cub movies was an amazing find!

This first live action movie tells their backstory and how they ended up wandering Japan as Lone Wolf and Cub. Sure, its a hokey '70s style movie with blood shooting 7 feet into the air, but the story is solid, and the action fun to watch. I'm thrilled I found all six to watch, so I can get my samurai mode on! 7/10.

I hold true to my summary. Beautiful. I belive that the cinematography is excellent in perspective and atmosphere. Disturbing. There is a rape scene which is not gratuitous in its presentation but is nevertheless disturbing. Bloody. It is a samuri/swordplay film after all. Touching. There is a gruff honor about this film that I truly appreciated. The ideas of duty, honor, disgrace and vengence meet here. If you like the genre I think that you will like this movie.

Sword of Vengeance is the first film in a series about a noble samurai and his son fallen from grace through a conspiracy, and now under a constant fear of death by assassination. This movie by itself is a fine example of how a more modern, 'slasher' style Samurai film and 'old' values like honor and '1-good-Samurai-defeats-army-of-bad-Samurai' can be put together to make a solid, entertaining film. The later films are sometimes better, sometimes worse than this movie, but I found all of them to be very entertaining and worthwhile.

If you like to see some classic Samurai action, check out the whole serie of six films. Years later they took all the juicy bits out of the first four films and stitched them together to form the film 'Shogun Assassin', a film I suspect made for export to western countries: Less story, more blood.

The foremost reason why this is a standout movie-series is because of it's unusual and highly original main concept. There are plenty of Japanese movies about a shogun, ronin or a samurai fulfilling their destinies and travel through the country, getting into all kind of adventures and troubles. The Kozure Ôkami-series has an original take on this type of movies by letting the main character carry and drive around his infant son in an armed and dangerous baby cart. His infant son even helps him in battle sometime. No big surprise that this all is being based on a manga-series, by Kazuo Koike, who also contributed to this movie its script.

It also becomes obvious that this movie is being based on a manga when you look at its violence. It's really deliberately being over-the-top and the entire series is well known for featuring fountains of blood, whenever someone gets struck down or gets a limb or head cut off. It's a pretty bloody movie but because it all gets down in such an over-the-top way, it's nothing too shocking to watch, even when you don't have the stomach for it.

It are really its action sequences that stand out and there is plenty of action in this one. All of the fights got nicely choreographed and brought to the screen and above all things they also often have something original to offer. Often Itto uses some tricks to fool his opponents and can strike down the best trained and most powerful shogun with one strike because of some clever and unexpected moves and tricks, sometimes helped by his infant son Daigorô.

The movie is good looking, thanks to its fine directing, that provides the movie with some nicely done sequences but also due to its great looking environments. The movie often uses nature elements and environments as a key part of the movie its climatic battles, such as water or the sun.

All in all, a great start of the series!

8/10

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My knowledge in Japanese samurai films is a bit narrow, but I'll take the chance to draw a parallelism between east and west cinema that could sound blasphemous or stupid to somebody who knows more about it. But I suppose, if westerns had John Ford as a traditionalist filmmaker and Sergio Leone as a revolutioner who shattered that sanitized and mythic image and made it dirty and unheroic, I could apply that same logic to samurai films of Akira Kurosawa and then to what Kenji Misumi accomplished in this first chapter. I guess that shallow explanation could serve a newcomer to picture what kind of brilliant and bloody action film they'll find here. also judging from the bloody fight scenes its clear where Tarantino got his influence for his Kill Bill films.