Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril

Ogami Itto keeps moving, pushing his son Daigoro in a wooden cart; he works as a sword for hire and is after the Yagyu clan that destroyed him. The job in this instalment is to kill a woman: Oyuki, whose body is covered in tattoos, who fights with a sword and who is killing the men sent after her one by one. Once the reason she is running becomes clear the target stops being simple. Meanwhile Daigoro is separated from his father. Buichi Saitō directs. It is the fourth film of the series; the earlier ones were made by Kenji Misumi. The source is the comic by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima. The structure of the series is simple and repetitive: an assignment, encounters on the road, and a large massed fight at the end. The violence here is at the series' most exaggerated; the arterial spray is deliberately unreal. What is interesting is Daigoro. The child does not speak, does not cry and knows what his father does; that silent acceptance is the most disturbing idea in the series. Oyuki is among the known instances in Japanese cinema of the woman swordfighter, and her tattoos are used inside the narrative as a record of the past. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies Japanese sword films and followers of the series. Who it is not for: it is extremely violent, the narrative expects the earlier films, and the plot does not step outside the mould.