subway cinema | shogun assassin (1974/1980)


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SHOGUN ASSASSIN (1974/1980) Directed by: Kenji Misumi/Robert Houston, David Weisman Starring: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Akihiro Tomikawa, Kayo Matsuo.
"He whips out his sword and relieves his victims of their heads!" "Lone Wolf and Son: the greatest team in the history of mass vengeance." Written and drawn by Goseki Kazuo and Kojima Koike, Lone Wolf and Cub is the prototypical Samurai manga from Japan. A comic book epic sprawled across 9000 pulp pages it tells the story of how the Shogun's executioner lost his wife and became a demon. When the Shogun has Ogami Itto's wife killed, he bundles Daigoro, his infant son, into a baby cart crammed with razor-edged blades and walks feudal Japan, slaughtering everyone who gets in his way as he hunts down the entire clan that betrayed him. A profound work that generated 5 record albums, 1 TV series, 4 plays, and sold 8 million copies, it also generated the famed series of films, Lone Wolf and Cub. Directed by Kenji Misumi in the early 70's they capture the paranoiac deathwish of the central character and reflect it out onto the world around him. Leaping death springs from every corner, scum lurks in every shadow, and coiled around his heart is the worm that eats Ogami's soul as he walks Meifumado: the road to hell. A stylized dream of revenge, violence and lost humanity, the Lone Wolf and Cub series is a highpoint for the Samurai film. Then, they came to America. And everything freaked. In 1980 the director of the Edie Sedgwick burn-out opus, CIAO MANHATTAN, became a fan of the films and recruited a partner. They licensed the first two films from Toho, and in a desperate quest to save their careers, and their souls, they vowed to release them in America. They cut the two films together, hired deaf mutes to read the lips of the characters and write down what they thought they were saying. In the sun-bleached Hollywood Hills they put every cent they had into their dream project. The poster designer's wife left him for her Aikido teacher. The teacher was recruited to be the model for Ogami Itto in the poster. A friend's seven-year-old son, Gibran Evans, was stuffed into a La-Z-Boy recliner, put in front of a microphone and told what to say. His words became Daigoro's voice-over. Sandra Bernhard, then a big nobody stand-up comic, was hired for $200 to dub the female voices (including the leader of the female ninja clan). Mark Lindsay of 60's band Paul Revere and the Raiders was dreaming of his comeback and was recruited by the composer to provide a studio and musical assistance. The team crossed their fingers, said a prayer, and sold the flick, now titled SHOGUN ASSASSIN (instead of SAMURAI AND SON), to Roger Corman's company. It was a desperate dream of success sent out into the world on a wing and a prayer. It was slotted into grindhouse playdates all over the country. Refracted through an exploitation lens, SHOGUN ASSASSIN became a primitivist howl of urban paranoia, a violent saga of high-pressure blood mist and sheer skull-twisting extremes. Released the same year as RAGING BULL, CALIGULA, THE ELEPHANT MAN, and AMERICAN GIGOLO it became (in Corman's words) "a gold mine". The director puts it more succinctly."Audiences fucking freaked." A long nightmare of high-style and geysers of bright red blood, anchored by Daigoro's ghostly voice-over and Ogami Itto's dead-eyed thousand-yard-stare, the picture held up a mirror to the death rattle of the 70's fuzzies and was a final, brutal attempt to drive a stake into the heart of the right-wing, America-first 80's before it ate the country's soul. A kaleidoscope of bloodshed, a walk down the long road to Hell, SHOGUN ASSASSIN is brutal and beautiful. With its synthesized drones and flickering images it haunts our skulls. To screen this movie now is to stage a ritual resurrection of New York City in the 80's. A father who has turned into a demon walks down the dead-end streets of old Times Square. The winter wind whips garbage across his path as he pushes his son across the crack strewn asphalt in a baby cart designed for war.

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