Okay I understand why Suzuki got fired from the studio after this film, so bizarre... yet so awesome. The camera work and the editing is the real star of this film, it looks damn good. The acting is way over the top and downright bad a lot of the times. Yet delightful at the same time. If the women characters weren't constantly naked it would've bugged me more. This film is the kind of dream insane people have, totally surreal.

Kick-arse. There's a plot in here if you pay attention very closely, but it's bewildering and all over the place. I can't pretend I even fully understood it. It's a series of odd, seemingly unconnected set-pieces and dream-like sequences that add up to an exciting film that I couldn't tear my eyes from.

*points to jacobb1313's review*

Anti filmmaking that is randomly funny if you can stomach it. I forgot the WTF count I uttered now and then. Stupidity of editing is especially worth mentioning, things simply jump around in a weird cause&effect relation. I'm not sure this brainhack of a film will stay with me though. Mind you it's exclusively for film nuts who's willing to consider it in a referential frame, otherwise even -so bad, it's good- won't hold it together.

757

What a strange movie. An ordinary crime movie that just goes right off of the rails into crazy-land. I liked it a lot. It was very entertaining, with some good action, weird characters, and great black & white imagery. Quentin Tarantino must have loved this.

Big props for originality here. The editing is insane and takes it from what probably would have been a decent Yakuza/assassin movie and turns it into a batshit insane, weird, dream-like, incomprehensible mess... In a great way.

#759

It's weird, cool, sexy, freaky, claustrophobic and moody. Unpredictable as well. Some wonderful imagery, some crazy editing and pacing (unfortunately making some scenes quite confusing), and it was over way too soon. Me likey.

There's no reason this should be good...but it is. It's so good.

Truly brilliant. The camerawork is stunning. The editing style is so bizarre and twisted. And everything in-between works perfectly. A masterpiece, in it's own warped, special way.

This is everything I want in a movie.

The delirious visuals and tone create quite a few great moments but it doesn't really come together as a whole. It's consistently confusing and gets rather tedious.

This is probably my favorite movie of all time.

The delirious ending is great, as is the cinematography. Otherwise, just kind of bland.

Bizarre, pulpy brilliance. It's deliciously twisted and insane, and is full of dynamic camerawork, editing, and story-telling.

# 690

Ridiculous. Incomprehensible. Brilliant.

good but too trippy

What a cool freaky weird movie! Turns the gangster genre totally upside down and inside out.

Absolutely bizarre, but with an internal logic that somehow manages to make sense. You can imagine the movie being really boring if it were told by a more conventional director, but since it's Suzuki, it's never even close to boring.

Tokyo Drifter was admittedly a bit of a let down, but Branded to Kill was everything I was hoping for and MORE. It's got the shots and insanity I was looking for from Drifter. Makes me want to go back and revisit what I already considered a great flix.

...I didn't get it.

This is a director having a lot of fun with a stiff-collared studio and their little assassin-movie script. Pulpy, consciously uber-hardboiled, and just always with a sense of contained ridiculousness right below the surface. Interesting camerawork going on for '67, but the ending is really what sells the film.

Stylish and surreal deconstruction of the Yakuza genre. Typically irreverent and subversive film from Suzuki is also fairly incoherent but technically dazzling.

What's so brilliant? It seemed to me an incomprehensible, arbitrary mess. I could follow the basic plot fine, but certain details and characters I could not relate back. Each new progression seemed pointless. The only redeeming factor here is the audacious presentation, as this is one of the finest looking black & white films I've ever seen, with some sharp editing. I guess I'm missing something.

Kuroshi no rakuin: 8 // 6 // 6 // 7 // 7 // 7 // 6

An outlandish extravaganza of kinky and dark wit mixed with a bizarrely roguish depiction of cartoonish violence. What seems to be a lustful play with genres, pop culture, postmodernism and the film medium itself is only periodically a pleasure to inhale - far too often, this coffee's dry and bland... It's rarely genuinely interesting or exciting, despite the stunningly imaginative use of cinematography and mise-en-scène

Hallucinatory brilliance; probably Seijun's finest (and least accessible) film. A kind of existential nightmare and pulp art rolled into one.