1971 Asian genre-blending action flickRating: 15/20
Plot: The one-armed swordsman, Wang Kong, is travelling in Japan to receive martial arts training with some monks. He meets a family of three and decides to travel with them. They come across what appears to be a funeral procession which the young boy disrupts. The mother and father are killed immediately, and Wang Kong slashes up some people and runs off with the child. Zatoichi stumbles along and agrees to travel with them despite their language barrier. Misunderstandings lead to distrust as the blind Zatoichi and the one-armed Chinese man have to fight off hordes of bounty hunters. Lots of people get sliced open.
A gigantic body count here. There's some wonderfully poetic blood splatterin' and some terrific fight sequences. Genres cross with the Zatoichi samurai stuff (humor, swordplay, Zen-like reflection and philosophy) clashing with the early kung-fu one-armed swordsman stuff (high flying, punch and kick choreography). I prefer the fight scenes with Zatoichi (the one-armed swordsman is a pre-kung-fu boom stuff that looks a little slow and unnatural), but the climactic fight scene between the title characters is good stuff. There's almost zero rapport between them since they don't speak the same language. In fact, you're required to read two sets of subtitles to explain puns as they try to communicate. I could watch this blind bastard cutting people up all day, so it's a good thing there are about 300 Zatoichi movies. They're a little formulaic, but I still haven't seen a bad one.
This is me watching, I believe, my eleventh Zatoichi movie:
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