Kuroneko

A couple women are murdered and worse by some samurai so they turn into cat ghosts trying to get revenge on all samurai ever which goes pretty well until the older woman's kidnapped son/younger woman's kidnapped husband (same guy) shows up. It gets real sad!

RATING: 71%  

New Tale of Zatoichi

This is the third Zatoichi movie and the first one in color. Here our pudgy blind samurai friend returns home to find out his old mentor has turned into a bad guy! Zatoichi considers retiring with the woman he loves and having a nice life where he doesn't slice up evildoers but there are, like, twenty movies left in this series so I'll let you guess what he decides.

RATING: 76%

The Tale of Zatoichi Continues

This is one of those sequels that returns exactly to the scene of the first movie, like Back to the Future II (time travel) or Return of the Jedi (Death Star). Here Zatoichi returns to the place he was sort of forced to honor-kill the dying samurai in the first movie, but a buncha people are super pissed at him! Unlike the first movie, Zatoichi quickly and frequently fights large gangs of assassins because we don't have to wonder if it's a myth that he's so great (because why would they make 26 fucking movies about him being a good liar). It's not as good as the original but it's still fun to watch Zatoichi act like a loveable clumsy doofus until he's forced to kill approximately 100 people with his cane sword.

RATING: 66%

The Tale of Zatoichi

I just recently finished watching all twenty-whatever James Bond movies and wanted a new series to watch, so why not the Zatoichi samurai movies I asked myself, and I said ok, sure, just watch 'em. In this first film of the 26 film saga, Zatoichi, a blind masseuse, shows up to a gambling house. It turns out Zatoichi is basically the Japanese Daredevil (though, hm, it beat Daredevil's creation by a year so I suppose Daredevil is the American Zatoichi) - he may be blind, but he has enhanced other senses and swordsmanship to take over. Anyway, he's one of those swordspeople who realizes killing is bad, m'kay, so he doesn't want to get involved in a big gambling house war, even after he meets a dying samurai named Hirate who befriends him and begs him to fight him. I'll let you guess whether or not these two swordsmasters fight by the end of the film!

RATING: 76%