In the vast, vast world of cinema, all filmgoers, historians, and snobby Fellini-loving critics can all agree on one thing: The Japanese. The Japanese go where Americans fear to tread, with absolutely no regard to the so-called danger of taboos, shattering traditional narrative and outdoing all other hard working countries in nearly every genre they ‘feel like’ partaking in. Boundaries are pushed, lines are crossed, and cinema is forever changed.

The classic genre of Japanese cinema is the Samurai film, equivalent to how the Americans feel about the Western, that the subject is truly theirs, and cannot be touched by anyone other than those of their homeland. While they started out typically straight, love stories with sword fights, tales of swashbuckling for honor, in the early 70’s the style of these films started to change. The abolishment of the Hays Code resulting in the massive experimental boom of the late 60’s and early 70’s gave the Japanese an opportunity to indulge in the most sinful of movie pleasures: The Arterial Spray movie. The Japanese decided to make films like Lady Snowblood, and Lone Wolf and Cub, where the violence was so over the top, the blood almost seems to shoot like a fire hose out of wounds, it almost bordered self parody.

Shogun Assassin is the absolute zenith of this sub-sub-genre. You may have seen it in Kill Bill Vol. 2 (two characters are watching it near the end of the movie), a film whose first installment was massively influenced and some might say flat-out copied by Shogun Assassin. Censors did not take kindly to the film, resulting in it being banned by the American Home Office and put on a list of "Video Nasties" (Mary Whitehouse’s list of films deemed too depraved for the American public, and an outright sin to watch).

Shogun Assassin is about a Samurai roaming the countryside, a drifter, with his infant son. They are hunted by the evil, insane shogun, and are constantly fighting off his army of ninjas. If the only action you’ve ever seen is films like Die Hard, or Lethal Weapon, you will probably find this to be too over the top, too insane, too GOOD.