SICK SWORDSMAN
Hanzo the Razor is no Zatoichi
By Andy Klein
Decades before there was Frank Miller and Sin City, there was Kazuo Koike and his manga creations, which inspired numerous film adaptations; among them were the six Lone Wolf and Cub movies, the two Lady Snowbloods, and the three Hanzo the Razor titles. Like the recent Sin City movie, these films tried to reproduce the aesthetic style of their source material, though not always quite so faithfully. The results were no less full of ultraviolence.
What distinguishes the Hanzo the Razor trilogy is the extent to which the ultraviolence is sexual. Hanzo "the Razor" Itami was portrayed by Shintaro Katsu, the beloved star of the twentysome Zatoichi movies. Perhaps tired of playing the noble, blind masseuse/gambler/swordsman - he had shot 24 Zatoichis in 11 years - Katsu took on this vastly different role. Like Zatoichi, Hanzo - a lawman for the magistrate's office in the Edo period - is fighting the good fight. It's his tactics that are distinctly different.
About them, all one can really say: Yoicks!
Let's start by grabbing some quotes from the trailers: "Edo Is My Territory!" "His Tool Is for Official Duties!" "His Thick Staff Thrusts Through!" "A Woman's Body Leaks Secrets!" Yes, Hanzo may be good with a sword, but his mightiest crime-fighting tool is ... his tool.
In each of his three adventures, a moment comes when Hanzo needs to interrogate a woman to get crucial information. Luckily, he knows not only how to make 'em talk, but how to make 'em scream. As he lies on his back on the floor, the subject, trapped naked inside a rope net, is lowered down upon his massive erect member and periodically spun around.
This is our hero - rapist for a greater good.
It doesn't require a lot of feminist consciousness to find this offensive, but, brace yourselves, that's not the worst part. Do the women finally confess what they know in order to get Hanzo to stop? If only. After a minute or two, their screams turn to moans, at which point Hanzo gets them to talk by threatening to stop. (Afterward, they tend to want to move in with him.)
Curiously, Hanzo himself derives no apparent physical pleasure from this; it's strictly business. The only thing that does seem to turn him on is being tortured himself - something that he indulges in his leisure time. Hanzo claims that, if the authorities are to torture people, then they must undergo the same tortures themselves, to better understand their victims. Somehow that motivation doesn't really jibe with his physical reaction to those tortures: "It seems to erect when it's in pain," he says to his supervisor, who has recoiled from the sight of Hanzo's humongousness, just released from having a half-dozen huge concrete slabs piled on it.
Indeed, the credit sequences in the first two films - Sword of Justice (1972) and The Snare (1973) - show Hanzo pouring boiling water on his bloated "billy club," then pounding on it with a mallet, then humping a bag of steaming hot rice. Only at these moments does his face suggest pleasure. What makes the whole thing more perversely smutty is that Japanese cinema at the time couldn't show actual images of genitals, so this is all done by implication.
Home Vision has released a box set of all three films, beautifully transferred: The only bad technical elements - laudably mentioned onscreen before the movie starts, but unlaudably not mentioned on the outside packaging - are 25 seconds of missing audio and a few seconds of missing footage, both in Sword of Justice. The only on-disc extras are the trailers, all three of which are present on all three discs. More valuable are the liner notes by the estimable Patrick Macias, who gives us the financial and cultural context for the films and the trend they represented in Japanese cinema, without trying to excuse them.
It can truly be said that these movies are not for everyone, and probably not even for very many. It's a shame, since they are, in purely aesthetic terms, quite interesting, with some excellent swordplay and totally inappropriate Shaft-ian funk soundtracks.
Published: 05/26/2005
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