How I missed “Lady Snowblood” when it originally played back in the seventies is beyond me. It is the kind of exploitation film from the Far East that I would have loved. It’s a Revenge story with a female protagonist and it involves martial arts and sword play, the nature of which inspired Quentin Tarantino when he made “Kill Bill”. I did finally catch up with the film on home video through a Criterion Edition that I bought at one of their annual sales. So I didn’t go into this last evening screening completely blind.
The idea that makes this film work, is that the woman in question was born into revenge. She is supposedly a demi-demon incarnation of her mother’s desire for Vengeance. It takes a series of flashbacks to see how she got prepared,during the twenty years after being born and her mom dying. Meanwhile we get to see her in action a bit before we go through the exposition.
Copious amounts of stage blood are used in the film as katana swords are the weapon of choice for most people in the film. Heads and hands get separated from the body on a regular basis, and gushers occur as they do in these sorts of movies. There seems to have been a whole subculture of criminal organizations in Japan at the time. Rival gangs rat each other out, fight for power, and generally get to the center of the Revenge plot in a variety of ways.
Sometimes the storytelling in films like this is a little incomplete. It’s not quite clear what the motivation of the first gang leader is, when helping Lady Snowblood track down her victims. It’s also not quite clear how the sensationalist writer who starts publishing stories about this quest for vengeance, ends up being in an alliance with our heroine. And maybe there’s even a romance there, but again that remains relatively abstract.
The truth is that we don’t really care about much of that stuff. What we want to see is Lady Snowblood go off on criminals who stand in her way, but we especially want to see the ones who destroyed her family be punished. We do get all of those things, along with a mournful song starting and ending the film. So you can sit back rest assured, that there will be bloodletting and revenge. There might even be a moment or two of contemplation but don’t take it too seriously because there’s a geyser of blood coming.
Kirkham A Movie A Day 