Sex and Fury

Ocho's father was killed when she was a child. Three cards were left in his hand, and each of the killers had a tattoo resembling a figure on one of them. Ocho has grown; she gambles, picks pockets and looks for those three tattoos in Tokyo. Meanwhile a policeman chasing an assassin, a European spy and the local gangs all enter the same web. Ocho is in the middle of an order that uses women and is trying to settle her own account. Norifumi Suzuki directs. Reiko Ike plays Ocho and Christina Lindberg the European spy. It is a Japanese production for the Toei company. The film opened on 17 February 1973 and is one of the known examples of the mixture of sex and violence the studio was producing then. Its most remembered passage is the scene in which Ocho, attacked in a bath, grabs her sword and the fight spills into a snowy courtyard. Quentin Tarantino has openly claimed the films of this period, and this one is counted among the sources Kill Bill fed on. The narrative uses the Meiji period but has no concern for historical accuracy. The film shows its women as strong and as constantly naked; that contradiction comes from the genre itself. The violence is not realistic; blood sprays and the scenes are given in slow motion. The narrative moves in fragments and cares more about staging scenes than about plot. The ending completes the revenge. Its limit is content; the nudity and the sexual violence are heavy and the film makes a spectacle of them. Who it is for: viewers curious about seventies Japanese genre cinema. Who it is not for: it is exploitation, uncomfortable, and the ending bloody.