Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf

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.

It's sad to see a jewel of a movie to get such a low IMDb score. This movie is like Planet Terror, or Dead Alive. Not to be taken too seriously.

It steals ideas and general storyline from movies all over the place. There's elements from so many movies I wouldn't even know where too start. This is B-movie cult stuff, but may be too cheesy for most viewers.

If you like samurai, loads of unrealistic blood and awesomely bad acting.... this is the movie for you. Give the movie a try, you'll know within 5 minutes if you're gonna like this movie or not :)

The cons out way the pros, but i respect the director's vision and the fact he had a go despite having a lame script, awful actors and no budget...'A' for effort anyway...

Its typical revenge fare and the blood and violence factor is high (maybe thats why i liked it?!)...there's a lot of samurai lore involved yet it appears most the actors have no martial arts abilities...i may be mistaken, since I've never heard of any of them, but usually its easy to tell the difference between someone who has learnt to throw a punch or kick or swing a blade in front of the camera and someone who is a trained martial artist. And only one dude here looks like he knows what he's doing but since no-one else does, he has to hold back from actually swinging his sword properly, or make his punches and kicks look as ineffective as everyone elses...either that or they were using real swords that were super sharp and so were afraid to swing them with any kind of real force or finesse...

There's shades of lots of old Japanese samurai flicks, plus bits of Tarantino's Kill Bill and Planet Terror (especially the grainy camera effects and use of 'old looking' filming techniques), plus Ninja Scroll, Azumi, Versus and possibly Shinobi, but its not as good as any of them...still, it was entertaining, and there's nudity and blood, so it wasn't all bad!

I love plenty of IMDb 3's and 4's but this one is just a load. Maybe I shouldn't have watched 13 Assassin's just a couple nights before, but I doubt anything could save this one. This guy just took all the best parts (and quotes) right out of the Baby Cart series and made yellow American cheese out of it. I LOVE Baby Cart, the series is long enough to enjoy repeat viewings for a lifetime. There's no need to watch this homage rubbish. He even stole the pistol slice move from Bohachi - Clan of the forgotten 8 (Highly recommended!). From the juvenile cut scene narratives to the 25mins worth of Reshething scenes, this blind wolf was a sad display. I'm sorry, but did we really need you to stop the film every 15mins to narrate to us how TRULY SKILLED these characters are!?