Director:  Kenji Misumi
Year: 1966
Rating: 6.0

What's going on here? Suddenly Kyôshirô Nemuri has gone soft on us? The protector of the people, stray kids and a woman looking for revenge. Perhaps by the eighth film in the series, the producers thought it was time to give him some humanity. We saw hints of it in the previous film when he saves a fifteen-year-old virgin from ninja killers, but now it is the general populace he is concerned about. I worry that in the next film he will be Santa Claus giving out gifts to orphans. Director Kenji Misumi keeps the kill count to a minimum and focuses instead on a convoluted plot of revenge and anarchy. And a plan for a mass killing with the burning of Edo.


The narrative is hard to follow and has a number of characters that come into it. A group of survivors from some sort of massacre in Oshin are in Edo for twofold reasons. To assassinate certain government officials who were behind the massacre that killed their Master, Kakunosuke, and to kill the merchant Yahoko-ya who stole a blueprint of an oil refining process. There are only a few of them but they are led by the devious and merciless Aizen played by Shigeru Amachi (The Lady Vampire, The Ghost of Yotsuya).  Into this plot wanders Katsumi, a street performer, along with two children and an old man. She knew and betrayed Kakunosuke for the man she loved who then deserted her. She wants him dead and has a blade up her sleeve to do it. She is played by Shiho Fujimura who was in a number of genre films at the time - Zatoichi, Shinobi No Mono and a couple other Sleepy Eyes of Death films. I remember her because for some reason from certain angles she always looks to me like Maggie Cheung.


Nemuri wants nothing to do with any of this. He is happy lolling about in bars drinking saké and watching the world go by. After having to kill hordes of ninjas in his previous film, one can hardly blame him but unfortunately, he has a strong resemblance to the dead Kakunosuke who Katsumi and the band of rebels think has come back to life. He is slowly pulled into the plot - warned by the rebels to stay away and by the government to kill the rebels. The first kill doesn't occur until the 45-minute point in an 86-minute film. There was a lovely scene earlier when a group of men challenge him on a bridge at night and the half moon is behind him, but he kills no one. When he discovers that the rebels plan on burning down Edo - which happened on a few occasions in history - and killing thousands, he realizes that he has to take a side - "Kill all the government officials you want, burn down the castles but leave the people alone."

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