In a battle against the Tokugawa shogunate army, thirty-seven thousand Christians wind up dead, their severed heads stuck on poles. More than a bit miffed by the brutal slaughter of his people, Shiro Amakusa (Kenji Sawada) renounces God and vows vengeance, assembling a team of 'devils' by resurrecting the recently deceased - people who died with regrets and who want to return to life to fulfil their desires. One-eyed samurai Jubei (Shin'ichi Chiba) finds himself fighting the devils, one of whom is his own father, whose dying wish was to be able to pit his swordsmanship against his son.
Samurai Reincarnation opens with the striking image of a battlefield strewn with bodies and littered with heads, and ends with a sword duel amidst a blazing shogunate palace; throughout, we get Sonny Chiba sporting an eye-patch, just the thought of which is enough to send many fans of Japanese action cinema into paroxysms of ecstasy. However, I seem to be in the minority in finding the film as a whole incredibly disappointing. Sandwiched between the memorably grisly battlefield imagery and the fiery finalé is a whole load of tedium, with much talking and just a handful of not-particularly-exciting fight scenes. Kinji Fukasaku (Battle Royale) directs proceedings with an eye for a cool visual (the sets are certainly impressive), but injects very little in the way of excitement, his film seriously dragging in places.
The subtitled Japanese version I watched clocked in at just over two hours. Apparently there's an eighty-eight minute cut that was released to home video - it's not often that I advocate watching a severely edited movie, but in this case you might be doing yourself a favour (I jest, of course: watch the whole film as intended or just don't bother and put on G. I. Samurai, The Street Fighter or The Legend of the Eight Samurai instead).
Samurai Reincarnation opens with the striking image of a battlefield strewn with bodies and littered with heads, and ends with a sword duel amidst a blazing shogunate palace; throughout, we get Sonny Chiba sporting an eye-patch, just the thought of which is enough to send many fans of Japanese action cinema into paroxysms of ecstasy. However, I seem to be in the minority in finding the film as a whole incredibly disappointing. Sandwiched between the memorably grisly battlefield imagery and the fiery finalé is a whole load of tedium, with much talking and just a handful of not-particularly-exciting fight scenes. Kinji Fukasaku (Battle Royale) directs proceedings with an eye for a cool visual (the sets are certainly impressive), but injects very little in the way of excitement, his film seriously dragging in places.
The subtitled Japanese version I watched clocked in at just over two hours. Apparently there's an eighty-eight minute cut that was released to home video - it's not often that I advocate watching a severely edited movie, but in this case you might be doing yourself a favour (I jest, of course: watch the whole film as intended or just don't bother and put on G. I. Samurai, The Street Fighter or The Legend of the Eight Samurai instead).