7/25/2005

I really like jidaigeki and chambara movies. One day i saw that an asian film festival in Paris was playing a movie called Daibosatsu Toge. That movie was directed by Kenji Misumi and it was all i needed to know to go and see it. Kenji Misumi is the master of chambara as much as Leone was the master of western spaghetti.
Chambara is to samurai movies what western spaghetti is to regular western. The name comes from the sound the flesh makes when cut by a katana. It’s bloodier and sexier, it also spawned countless corny stupid flicks. Misumi participated in all the great series of the genre, Zatoichi, Kozure Okami(lone wolf and cub), and Nemuri Kyoshiro to name but a few.
Daibosatsu toge is an adaptation of an unfinished serie of books about Ryonosuke Tsukue, a psychotic samurai killing everybody in his path. The movie is in fact a trilogy starring then superstar Raizo Ichikawa (Kyoshiro Nemuri).
It’s desperate and bloody, it’s Misumi at his best.
Anyway a couple of years later, i stumbled upon Sword of Doom which is an adaptation of the same books. Being unable to track down any copy of the Misumi version i bought it by curiousity. I was expecting a much less intense version of the same story. Was i wrong. Sword of Doom is one of the best jidaigeki i’ve ever seen. The devil lives in Tatsuya Nakadai’s eyes i am now sure of it. The movie is only the first part of the story and it’s a shame that Okamoto never made a following.
Sword of Doom is nothing short of intense. The black and white cinematography is much more careful than in the Misumi version which bears some of the stigmates of the directing of that era.
The good news is that the film buffs at criterion have released last year a dvd edition of Sword of Doom, the bad news is i am late on this and it’s a limited edition like almost every dvd in the criterion collection. Go get it, fast.