Zatôichi abare-himatsuri (1970)'s comments

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Siskoid

I was stoked to see Zatoichi's original director, Kenji Misumi, come back to the franchise in Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival, and it's certainly one of the most beautiful to look at, with wondrous natural photography, revealing animal shots, and weird dream sequences. The script, however, is all over the place, which makes the film sometimes feel disjointed, and it never really coalesces into a proper whole (the title is almost an enigma). We get some frankly odd characters - the psychotic samurai, the gay pimp who wants to become a yakuza, the blind boss, the ambiguous honeypot - and I feel like they're (like the imagery) memorable in a way that the story is not. Many of the action scenes come off as silly (the bath house fight, for example), despite the amount of garish blood involved, but perhaps it should be lauded for going over the top, an example of exploitation film making that nevertheless can claim to be arty.

3 years 8 months ago

Limbesdautomne

Protean casting, the franchise starts to decline.

Read more in French on La Saveur des goûts amers.

6 years 3 months ago