Choose The Sword takes a (brief) look at the film series Lone Wolf and Cub. Twice a month, Jon and Chris share their impressions of each film, both on its own terms and its intersection in the Cinema Dual hosts’ lives.
FROM THE BOX: In this distinctly lowbrow entry in the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Itto Ogami is hired by the Owari clan to assassinate a tattooed woman who is killing her enemies and cutting off their topknots. Meanwhile, Daigoro is separated from his father when he follows a pair of traveling street performers outside of town.
WHAT JON THOUGHT: It is more tempting than usual to start and end my thoughts on Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril with just the word “boobs.” It would be fully in line with how the film sells itself to the audience, with a violent topless Oyuki, an assassination mission for Ogami and opening credits before we’ve hit the four-minute mark. I suppose the film deserves credit for efficiency in that regard. This series has dipped into the exploitation bucket before, but new director Kazuo Koike seems to want to dive much further into those depths. Koike does deserve at least some kudos in my opinion for keeping that stuff related to the plot, give or take a few lingering shots of Oyuki’s bare breasts.
While it takes a while for Ogami to get past the film’s pre-requisite side quest, once we do actually zone in on Oyuki’s story, it’s a pretty decent revenge story. She is labeled a deserter the domain of Lord Owari, and she is seeking revenge on Enki, the evil wizard that raped her and caused her to desert. She keeps dispatching the soldiers sent to bring her back in the hopes that Lord Owari finally sends Enki out for Oyuki to take her vengeance. When the final confrontation between Oyuki and Enki happens, she manages to overturn his magic by, and this is true, taking her top off. It had been briefly hinted at earlier, but here we see the logic of her fighting topless, that she got some tattoos so cool, they freeze men in their tracks like magic. This is almost certainly still fits into the “exploitation” category of movies, but at least it’s plot relevant.
I was also impressed that the movie doesn’t end with either Enki’s death nor Oyuki’s afterwards at Ogami’s hands, a noble fight with no trickery. A job (paid for by the families of the soldiers Oyuki killed) is a job afterall. Ogami returns to Oyuki’s village, where he is followed by Retsudo, the Yagyu clan and Lord Owari’s men. A mutual respect between Ogami and Jindayu (Oyuki’s dad) results in Ogami fighting to save the village, ending with a showdown with Retsudo that leaves Retsudo with one less eye, and Ogami all beaten to hell. It’s a nice way to honor Oyuki even after she dies.
WHAT CHRIS THOUGHT: We get a changing of the guard in director Buichi Saitō, taking a lower brow approach from Kenji Misumi’s earlier entries, making Baby Cart in Peril not exactly a dud, but certainly the weakest entry in the Lone Wolf and Cub series. The crux of the story centers around Oyuki, a female assassin who uses her tattooed breasts to distract her targets, allowing her to cut them down and further disgrace them by cutting off their top knots. Ogami is hired to take her out, and along the way contends with Daigoro getting lost and wandering into Gunbei Yagyū, who was also up for the position of Shogun Executioner again Ogami but lost despite superior swordsmanship at the time. Not only does Gunbei have a personal score to settle, but his father, the crooked Retsudo, is also scheming for power, and Ogami stands in his way.
Confused yet? We haven’t even mentioned the reason Oyuki is killing people, and the flaming swordsmith who raped her. Much of Baby Cart in Peril feels like a bunch of fragments and ideas strung together in order to meet a running time, despite this being written by series creator Kazuo Koike. Saitō’s direction is competent if slightly mechanical, staging fight after fight with plenty of grisly violence but without the canted angle charm Misumi brought to his pictures. It’s also the first time Tomisaburo Wakayama appears tired instead of resigned as Ogami Ittō. If there’s a plus to the film, it’s that by the picture’s end you can (hopefully) see the pieces of the endgame coming together.
ANYTHING ELSE, JON? If I dwelt on Oyuki’s storyline above, it’s because there’s not much else in this movie that we haven’t seen before. Past films have often been able to give some context for the big fights they put on, but multiple times in Baby Cart in Peril I had to ask myself, “Wait, who are the ninjas and why are they here?” And frankly, unless Gunbei Yagyū really sticks around to be a big compelling series antagonist in the last two films, I don’t know if Ogami’s backstory needed even further fleshing out.
ANYTHING ELSE, CHRIS? It’s hard to get away from the overt exploitation this time around, especially when your very first scene is a naked breast. You definitely get the sense this is a series fast approaching its end as the producers race to get six films done in under two years. The baby cart itself get relied on more for form’s sake than from actual plot, and the key action sequences are mainly retreads (if bloody ones) from the previous entry, straight down to another ninja attack and a massive final battle against an army. I enjoyed the mayhem to be sure, but Id be lying if I didn’t admit it was growing a little long in the tooth.
THE FINAL WORD(S): For Jon, this movie does have a few bright spots but they’re mostly buried in rehashed action scenes. For Chris, the fourth entry gets a little too paint-by-numbers and loses some of the singular charm of the Misumi entries.
NEXT TIME: The adventures of Ittō and Daigoro continue in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons.
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