Lady Snowblood (1973)

 


Quentin Tarantino's movies often receive some hipster hate these days, as former fans try to earn cool points by taking him down a notch for stealing large chunks of other movies for his films.  Notably, they like to go after Kill Bill Vol. I and Vol. II.  While I am not a big fan of the second, I quite like the first one.  What confuses me, however, is that the hate comes now.  From using miniature sets of Tokyo that were later used in one of the 2000s Godzilla films, to stealing little details from other Toho monster and martial arts films, Tarantino never hid a thing.  He was sampling movies like a hip-hop producer samples old records for beats.  

One of the movies he heavily sampled for the first half of Kill Bill was Lady Snowblood, right down to including its theme song in the soundtrack.  Luckily he changed a number of the circumstances of why the female lead wants revenge, or else Kill Bill might have looked more like a remake than an homage.  Still it is obvious that this is, without a doubt, the movie that was on his mind at the time.  

Yuki (Meiko Kaji) is born in prison to a woman named Sayo (Miyoko Akaza).  Sayo's husband and child are murdered when the couple arrive in a village, and Sayo declares vengeance, passing that task onto Yuki at birth.  The child is trained as an assassin and then pursues the criminals who destroyed her family.  Along the way she meets journalist Ryurei Ashio (Toshio Kurosawa), who writes down the story of her life. 

The story is based on a manga of the same name, and though it is a low budget feature that doesn't keep director Toshiya Fujita and cinematographer Masaki Tamura from making a beautiful, if over-the-top violent, film.  As can be expected red and white are the emphasized colors, with the occasional blacks or blues thrown in to contrast.  The blood effects are generally exaggerated, with sword blows causing unnaturally long showers of blood to erupt, but it soon becomes its own sort of art through patterns and the sound effects associated with it. 

Yuki herself is supposed to be an asura, a demon in human form meant to take revenge in the place of the person who called her forth.  Although it is clear that she is not an emotionless killing machine, part of her ability to hide in plain sight is to be able to blend in with society.  While that's the idea, and the script definitely tries to pretend that she does, there is no way anyone with half a brain would think it was a good idea to get within 10 feet of someone with Meiko Kaji's dead-eyed stare.  Wisely, like most of the best protagonists, she doesn't speak much, and most of the exposition comes in manga form as a tribute to its source material. 

Although many of the confrontations are quite exciting, the one thing I wish is that the criminals Yuki is taking revenge against were more of a challenge.  I expected the difficulty to amp up as she went along, and it does a little, but that is one of the places where Tarantino departed from this film; he knew that their had to be some challenge for the Bride as she encountered those that had wronged her.  While Yuki does face a challenge at the end, it's more of a surprise rather than an out-and-out battle, and is better suited to bringing a portion of the story to a close. 

It is definitely an interesting, well-told story, even if the showers of blood may verge on comedy at times.  It has a unique and memorable style, and it is no wonder that it highly influenced Tarantino in making his epic revenge tale.  Of course Lady Snowblood is the better of the two. Kill Bill - at least the first part - is obsessed with being a spectacle of blood and violence, while Lady Snowblood is focused on the toll that a vengeful life takes.  Yuki is asked to sacrifice from the very moment she is born and, though he was supposed to leave her human side behind, she still has her emotions intact.  She has no mercy for those she kills, but it doesn't mean that she isn't aware of the life that she has been denied.  To get back to the analogy of sampling: many songs have been sampled to great effect, but without that emotional connection with the original, there would be no desire to sample it.  The same is true here. 

Lady Snowblood (1973)
Time: 97 minutes
Starring: Meiko Kaji, Toshio Kurosawa
Director: Toshiya Fujita

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more