Shogun Assassin

Banned since 1983! Cobbled together for New York grind audiences from a couple of films in Toho's Lone Wolf and Cub series, Robert Houston's Shogun Assassin plays like a murder mixtape. All killer. No filler. Feeder flicks Sword of Vengeance and Baby Cart at the River Styx (both directed by Kenji Misumi) have been strip mined with an emphasis on brevity and schlocky incident. Tomisaburo Wakayama's Lone Wolf wanders from massacre to massacre, infant son Daigoro in tow, the child papering over absent plot machinations with a cart's-eye voice-over. Drafted into the slaughter by his father, Diagoro views events with the casual indifference of the indoctrinated.

Roughly combining, and dubbing, two legitimate post-Leone pose down features is ever bankrupt, but Shogun Assassin does have a magic about it. Mark Lindsay and W Michael Lewis' psychologically tense electronica score coupled with Daigoro's impassive chattering, and a narrative that's more mosaic than plot, make a dream of proceedings. An awed son imagining his grumpy, but tender, father as a one man slaughterhouse, striving to please / kill his own fierce parent, here represented as the titular Shogun. Papa Shogun is never pleased. Always frowning. Always judging. It's an on-the-fly ordering that tallies pleasantly with the concluding chapters of Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima's originator manga. By that epic's end, the three leads are karmically aligned as a warring pseudo family. Shogun Assassin is an elliptical horror show, full of razor sharp cruelty, and pomp-quotes tailor made for hip-hop sampling.