Sword of Justice is the film that kicked off the Hanzo trilogy, where each film was done by a different director. The original title Goyokiba means something like "Honorable blade user" or something like that, according to Google Translate (yeah...). The producer and the star is Shintaro Katsu (most famously known as Zatoichi), while the writer is Kazuo Koike, who made the original manga of this, Lone Wolf and Cub, and Lady Snowblood. The director of the first film is Kenji Misumi, better known for his Zatoichi, Sleepy Eyes of Death and Lone Wolf and Cub films.
This trilogy is like a mix of samurai-sploitation, soft-core porn and crime-sploitation. Kind of like a mix of Shaft, Dirty Harry, Yojimbo and pinku flicks. Even the slick title theme sounds like it's based on Shaft's. It's like a miniature '70s time capsule.
The protagonist, Hanzo Itami, is a bad-ass Edo-era officer striving for justice with his sai blades in his one hand and his penis in the other. He's against corruption and willing to fight the system all the way up to the top, but he also likes to torture himself for testing the limits to this particular punishment, and he also likes to train his c*ck for maximum strength. He beats his d*ck with a stick, splashes it with hot water and f*cks a bag of rice and pebbles to make it more resilient. Why? Because he needs it to interrogate the suspects.
You see, the ladies he encounters literally get the information f*cked out of them, as he uses his Long Arm of the Law to rape them until they confess. This may sound strange enough, but the thing is; the ladies quickly start to enjoy it. Therefore, Hanzo threatens that he'll stop raping them unless they spill out all the info, in which case they'll be awarded with further rape (!!!). Obviously, this isn't the kind of a film you'd have to take seriously, it's more like a sex fantasy with a budget (once again I stress, the film was produced by Katsu). To say that they don't make them like they used to is an understatement. A movie like this would never, never get made in today's times. It's really a curious piece of history that something like this exists.
I forgot to mention that the second rape scene is as follows: the woman is held in a suspended net, which is lowered by Hanzo's assistants, allowing their boss (who's calmly laying on the floor) to f*ck her without moving. I admire the creativity, at least.
The plot of this film is typical over-plotted mess, a soup of characters characteristic for a film like this. Whether or not the story makes sense or not, you don't really care, as long as you have Hanzo murdering the f*ck out of everyone with his psychotic arsenal of weapons and a booby trap-laced house. There are some loose ends and many, many things which weren't clear to me at all, including the digressive sub-plot taking place in the last 10 minutes, where Hanzo ends up being a saint for euthanazing a dying dude by hanging him, but really, this isn't the type of film that benefits from the plot. It's a sick sexual fantasy which needs a pseudo-plot to make it somewhat justified.
Oh but let me tell you, this movie is really visually inventive. Sharp editing and quick cuts, split screen, all the modern goods. I like how whenever Hanzo has to travel to the other side of the town, he's shown running in front of maps of Edo in the background, until he gets to the destination. I'd also like to point out the outrageously weird shot where Hanzo is raping a woman; his stone-cold face is placed in the right corner, her "I'm trying so hard not to enjoy this" face is positioned on the left, while the middle is a huge superimposed POV-shot of his d*ck entering her vagina. I'm not kidding. Almost 40 years before Gaspar Noe got the same idea for Enter the Void.
Also, you really have to admire the way things are framed here. Someone put actual effort into the visuals of this film. And it looks incredible. It follows the zen-framing politics of many samurai films, and it looks absolutely astonishing. The woman's face seen through the net of a straw basket, the water surface reflections of characters dominating the frame, it's all so beautiful.
And then you remember what this movie is about, and, well...
