Sunday, April 08, 2007

Movie Log: Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades is the third movie based on the classic Kazuo Koike-Goseki Kojima manga series (I've seen the first two recently). It's more samurai action with an existential overlay, and I liked this one much better than the second.

The Peckinpah-ish streams of blood are toned down in this one, which is good -- they might be realistic, but they don't look realistic. And the scenery and cinematography are stunning this time out.

Again, I don't feel like looking up which manga stories this was based on, but there's at least one that I remember (where Ogami Itto and his baby-cart face down an army of gunmen and archers at the end), and this movie, like the others, seems to have been adapted by Koike directly from his scripts.

I'm no expert on samurai movies, so it's easily possible that there are better ones than these. But these are pretty good, and should be of interest to anyone who's read the collections. I do intend to watch the last three myself, if that means anything.

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