Having watched and thoroughly enjoyed Kurando Mitsutake's Gun Woman (2014), I thought I would check out his previous movie, Samurai Avenger The Blind Wolf. It's hard to believe how much his film-making skills evolved over the space of one film, this homage to a variety of cult movies of the '70s lacking Gun Woman's astuteness and professionalism.
With Samurai Avenger, Mitsutake has attempted to emulate spaghetti westerns, the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Sex and Fury, and Zatoichi, but the result is a lame pastiche, coming nowhere near any of those films in terms of style, execution and invention. The use of distressed filters to age the film is a desperate gimmick that does little to help matters (and has been done to death since Tarantino/Rodriguez mis-fire Grindhouse).
The film does deliver in terms of nudity and violence, with a topless Asian swordswoman (who uses her magnificent breasts to hypnotise her enemy), a trio of hotties in hot pants, and plenty of gore, including severed limbs, eviscerations and arterial spray, but it's not enough to compensate for the poorly choreographed action, uninspired direction and terrible performances. Also serving to irritate is an intermittent voiceover that helps to explain certain plot points.
I rate the film 4/10, solely for the gore and the T&A.
N.B. Try playing the Samurai Avenger drinking game: down a shot every time someone sheaths a sword or shakes blood off the blade. You'll be rat-arsed before you know it.
