Hanzo the Razor [DVD]

He’s Hanzo "The Razor" Itami; the incorruptible and uncompromising samurai cop, and he packs a weapon more devastating than any (just ask any of the female suspects he "interrogates"). From the creator of the Lone Wolf and Cub series comes this legendary 1970s trilogy based on Kazuo Koike’s classic man, and starring Shintaro Katsu (Zatoichi) as Hanzo, the screen’s most outrageous samurai anti-hero. In the name of justice, there’s no torture he won’t endure, no pain he won’t inflict, and no superior he’ll bow to. Each film is presented complete and uncut. .com ---- Are you a fan of samurai films, but wish they were somehow...dirtier? Welcome to the deranged world of Hanzo the Razor, a weird blend of play and sexploitation. The first Hanzo movie, of Justice, came out a year after Shaft and Dirty Harry and fuses the influence of both: stout and surly Hanzo (Shintaro Katsu), a rebellious yet obsessively moral samurai, is also enormously well-endowed and provides almost unbearable pleasure to the women he "interrogates"--that is to say, rapes in the name of the law. Hanzo also tortures and blackmails without qualm as he slices through crime, uncovering corruption at higher levels in each progressive film. In of Justice he overturns his own craven superiors; in The Snare, he breaks into a temple used by local magistrates for the sadistic torture of young girls; in Who's Got the Gold, the shoate treasury is being looted by its own officials--had there been a fourth film, Hanzo would probably have confronted the sho himself. But while the movies wallow in Hanzo's ruthless of criminals and women, it also ogles the torture Hanzo inflicts upon himself! of Justice will knock you sideways as you struggle to balance Hanzo's puritanical code with his masochism and brutality (as well as the funky '70s soundtrack). The Snare and Who's Got the Gold?, disappointingly repeat many of the same routines (in particular, the "net torture" of female suspects). But while the fight choreography in the first two films is often crude, Who's Got the Gold (directed by Yoshio Inoue) has more visual finesse and social commentary--not many movies combine temple orgies and geysers of blood with inflation, unemployment, and high interest rates. (There's a particularly eerie scene in which a samurai in debt is hounded by a pack of blind men.) Hanzo the Razor undoubtedly influenced the moral outrage/leering voyeurism mix of Death Wish and its ilk, but Shintaro Katsu's gleeful ferocity (in contrast with Charles Bronson's dour, repressed deadpan) makes this trilogy stranger and sleazier. Katsu was also the star of the hugely popular Zatoichi: The Blind sman series. --Bret Fetzer

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