The story is about Lone Wolf, a samurai warrior who long ago served a shogun, but as the shogun became older he also became paranoid and wanted to destory all those who he thought might be against him and that including our hero. So the shogun sent his ninjas to the samuari's home but instead of killing the samuari himself, they ended up killing the samurai's wife. Wanting to avenge his wife, the samurai sets out on a mission of vengeance together with his son.
Shogun Assassin is a true cult classic, maybe not a horror movie per se but I think it fits well into this category anyway. Famous for being hyper-violent with a massive body count and bloody as hell, people into bloody horror films will definitely have a fun time watching watching Lone Wolf slaying people.
It's a very simple story but that's all that's needed, you watch this movie for the fighting, the killings, the slayings and the blood and not really for that it's a deep or touching story or anything like that. Although I must admit that the story is somewhat like a fairytale and Shogun Assassin makes for a cool brutal saga.
Back to the earlier mentioned body count part which is very high, throughout the movie the killings never stop and some of the killings are lame (which means you don't get to see much), and some of the killings are brutal and there's a lot of gushing blood.
Cool thing though is that a lot of times in the movie when someone gets to taste Lone Wolf's sword the blood is actually gushing out in a red stream, like spraying and it adds a lot to the actual killing scenes.
The music fits the movie very nicely, I wouldn't listen to it on a cd but when watching the movie it's great and adds a lot to it. Towards the end of the movie when Lone Wolf's fighting the three masters of death in the desert, the music is actually quite similar to what could be a video game and the desert scene has that feel to it too.
In the end this movie is pretty great and has a lot of feeling to it. Extreme kills happens all the time and the movie features some cool characters. Definitely something worth watching.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 1980
DIRECTOR: Robert Houston
WRITING CREDITS: Robert Houston, Kazuo Koike
GENRE: Action, Adventure, Horror
CAST: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Kayo Matsuo, Masahiro Tomikawa
COUNTRY: Japan, USA
RUNTIME: 86 min
RATING: 8/10
Shogun Assassin Website/IMDB Click here
Shogun Assassin Trailer Click here
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