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One of the most invig­o­rat­ing cult-movie rushes Your Humble Reviewer has enjoyed in the last few years was his indoc­tri­na­tion into their out­ra­geous, eccen­tric world of 1970’s Japanese exploita­tion films.  They were made at a time when the major Japanese stu­dios were fear­ing obso­les­cence due to tele­vi­sion chal­leng­ing their mar­ket dom­i­nance so they let their film­mak­ers off the leash to cre­ate the blood­i­est, sex­i­est, most berserk exploita­tion films imag­in­able. These wild, col­or­ful yet stun­ningly dis­ci­plined films are some of the most gor­geously styl­ized deviance a schlock addict could ever hope to see.

A great exam­ple of the dis­tinc­tive Japanese approach to exploita­tion can be found in Teruo Ishii’s amaz­ing Bohachi Bushido: Code Of The Forgotten Eight.  Ishii throws us in at the deep end with a manga-styled titles sequence that fea­tures Shiro (Tetsuro Tamba), our grimly cool anti-hero, lop­ping off a series of hands, arms and heads as he hacks his way through an end­less string of attack­ers.  When he real­izes he is still sur­rounded by ene­mies no mat­ter how hard he fights, he resigns him­self to the idea that “life is hell” and plunges him­self into a nearby river to meet the afterlife.

But the after­life doesn’t come.  Instead, Shiro awak­ens in a bed with three pros­ti­tutes rub­bing their naked bod­ies on his to revive him.  He dis­cov­ers that he has been res­cued by the Clan Of The Forgotten Eight, a group who have aban­doned all decent human val­ues to reign supreme over Japan’s pros­ti­tu­tion indus­try.  Their clan is suf­fer­ing from com­pe­ti­tion that is cheap­en­ing the value of the flesh they ped­dle so they recruit a reluc­tant Shiro to wipe out their oppo­nents.  Unfortuantely, Shiro’s stub­born refusal to aban­don his own eccen­tric code of honor ensures that there will be a con­spir­acy against him, one that involves a bloody sword-slashing finale…

The end result is crazy and lurid but also highly art­ful.  The sto­ry­line, adapted from a manga by Kazuo Koike of Lone Wolf & Cub and Hanzo The Razor fame, piles on the gore and a buf­fet of lurid, S&M-suffused sex but it also sat­i­rizes gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion and the ruth­less, cor­ro­sive nature of cap­i­tal­ism.  It even makes room for med­i­ta­tion on try­ing to main­tain a code of honor in a hon­or­less world (a clas­sic samurai-film theme).  The densely-structured sto­ry­line keeps the film from being a string of set­pieces and gives it an inter­nal com­plex­ity that allows it to hold up to mul­ti­ple viewings.

The film also boasts daz­zling, go-for-broke direc­tion from Ishii.  He splashes the film’s lav­ish sets with primary-colored light­ing and tells his story in a style that is baroque to the point of abstrac­tion.  It’s a bril­liant choice because it takes mate­r­ial that could have come off as silly if played straight and trans­forms it into some­thing sur­real and strangely, deca­dently beau­ti­ful.  A great exam­ple of his tech­nique is a scene where a rival clan mem­ber does bat­tle with a gang of fully-nude Bohachi female assas­sins.  Ishii con­cen­trates his visu­als around the extrem­ity of the con­trasts between the ladies and the attacker, skill­fully uti­liz­ing Peckinpah-style slo-mo and trippy, echo-drenched sound effects to up the scene’s sur­re­al­is­tic ante.  You might be chuck­ling at the start of the scene but your jaw will be on the floor by the end.

Most impor­tantly, the per­for­mances anchor the mate­r­ial.  Everyone plays their roles straight, each know­ing that the wild­ness of the mate­r­ial and Ishii’s direc­tion will sell itself with­out their help.  Tatsuo Endo is delight­fully sleazy as the Clan’s Machiavellian boss, smarm ooz­ing from every pore as he purrs each cor­rupt line of dia­logue through a leer­ing grin, and Goro Ibuki lends a solid pres­ence to his role as the second-in-command, a com­pany man who qui­etly admires Shiro’s independence.

However, the top hon­ors go to Tanba.  Even when the story around him gets so unhinged that it threat­ens to fly off into the stratos­phere, Tanba grounds it with his effort­lessly con­vinc­ing ver­sion of world-weary cool.  He wan­ders through the film’s hell­ish bor­dello world with a stone face and an end­lessly sup­ply of nihilistic/philosophical quips for each freak­ish sit­u­a­tion.  He’s the guy you want on your side when the shit goes down.

In short, Bohachi Bushido: Code Of The Forgotten Eight tosses you head­first into a world of unre­strained delir­ium.  It begins with and ends with sword-slicing mas­sacres and packs in mind­bog­gling amounts of car­nal deprav­ity inbe­tween.  However, its biggest sur­prise is that it is as beau­ti­fully made as any high-style cult flick you care to mention.

If that’s not a rec­om­men­da­tion then Your Humble Reviewer doesn’t know what one is.

WARNING: THIS TRAILER IS NSFW…