Samurai Reincarnation

Resurrection Shuffle

Samurai Reincarnation
Japan 1981
Directed by Kinji Fukasaku
Toei/Eureka Masters Of Cinema
Blu Ray Zone B

Samurai Reincarnation is a movie directed by Kinji Fukasaku (of Battle Royale and The Green Slime fame), although it was original supposed to have been directed by the great Hideo Gosha... but he was arrested on firearms charges and so that fell through for him, allowing Fukasaku to replace him.

It tells the story, set in Edo period Japan, of a reincarnated Christian leader called Shiro (played by Kenji Sawada). After a whole bunch of his Christians have been slaughtered by the shogunate, including himself who joins some of the many heads being displayed, he manages to reincarnate himself when his head flies through the air (wait, is this an Indonesian film... that’s the kind of stuff I expect from their film culture?) and takes over the body of an actor playing him on a stage. He then goes around resurrecting (which often includes killing them before resurrecting them) various people, including real life, non-fictional characters like Musashi Miyamoto, who was played by Toshiro Mifune in the original Samurai Trilogy (which I will be revisiting at some point in the near future for this blog) but who is here played by Ken Ogata (four years before he played Mishima in Paul Schrader’s Mishima - A Life In Four Chapters). This film takes its basis on one of the novels covering the real Musashi Miyamoto’s life, in fact (although I’m guessing half zombified hell spawn returning to fulfil a thirst for vengeance from a former severed head is not actually plucked from moments from Miyamoto’s actual, true existence).

Denouncing God, Shiro uses his weird, Christian magic to pull souls back from hell to reanimate for his cause, which is to rid the kingdom of the shogun and burn Edo to the ground. Opposing him is Jubei Yagyu, played by the legendary Sonny Chiba, presumably as a member of the Yagyu Clan (I’m assuming this is the same bunch who were the bad guys in the Lone Wolf And Cub manga and movies). His father, who is also killed and resurrected to Shiro’s cause, is played by none other than the great Tomisaburô Wakayama, who of course played Ogami Itto in the famous six film series of adaptations of that manga, Lone Wolf And Cub.

The film is split into five chapters under the title Hell, the first four of which are around ten to fifteen minutes long (where Shiro returns and then starts recruiting) and the last of which takes up the huge remainder of the film. And it all looks fantastic, it has to be said. The studio bound ‘external locations’ of the opening gives a vision of Hell in the many Christian bodies piled up and their separate heads displayed while the sky is rendered in the studio in purples and pinks, like some kind of chaotic hellscape painted by Hieronymus Bosch.

And, it has to be said that, despite all that gravitas with the blood and honour in which the Japanese seem nobly steeped, the film moves along at a fair pace and is nicely shot, with lots of colours used to brighten up the compositions such as, for instance, when an actor is shot through a series of multicoloured glass panes of a window. Just as a scene gets just a little too talky and threatens to drag, things are switched out and some kind of conflict comes to the fore, which means the film never really has time to get dull or even allow you to question the silliness of some of it. And with skilled actors like these, the film has a certain weight to it which, bearing in mind the subject matter and the 1980s cheesiness which the film almost crosses over into, is actually pretty impressive.

And I think that’s me done with this one for a while. I was quite impressed at the number of heavy hitters that are part of the cast of this one and I found the whole experience somewhat entertaining, it has to be said. The only thing which bothered me was in one scene where Sonny Chiba gets his sword out and then re-sheathes it before any blood has been spilled by his blade... surely this was against the Samurai code? Regardless of this though, I had a pretty good time with it. Samurai Reincarnation is not a film I would jump into if you’re not used to watching samurai movies but it’s well acted and has bright colours... so if you are a fan of the genre, then you might want ot take a look at this one.