Kill!

Heaps of fun! From the spaghetti influences to the tearing down of tropes to the great Nakadai performance.

The fast pace can give you a headache but there is no question that this is a fun and entertaining ride. Nakadai is great in this.

Tatsuya Nakadai is excellent in this bittersweet black comedy about the shortcomings of the Bushido Code. Great samurai flick.

A tad confusing but fun.

An early discourse on samurai cinema. Although it applies common elements of the genre, it makes a mockery out of them. There are no ritualistic moments and samurais are depicted as puzzled men with sword in hand. The score is exceptionally good. Nakadai is very believable as the only detailed character in the movie, sympathetic as the observer melancholic ronin. Sword play looks gimmicky and poor which is not a problem with the route Kill! takes. I didn't like it much, but it surely stands out.

I agree with others that there appears to be as much spaghetti Western as jidai-geki conventions pastiched here; but Nakadai is funny as hell, as Okamoto picks apart the haughty cinema of Kill!'s recent past. Works despite its bizarre structure.

Hard to know what's going on at any given point but it doesn't really matter all that much. It's easy enough to keep up with generalities, if not specifics, of the plot. It's a pretty damn fun ride, with a clear spaghetti western influence. I don't have a lot to say about this. Nakadai is great though.

There's more spaghetti influence in this than any other samurai movie I've seen. If I didn't know any better, I'd think Ennio Morricone was hired on to write the score. It's fast-paced and funny - quite the opposite of Okamoto's Sword of Doom, but it's still highly stylized in the same way. It's a little confusing at first. Many of the characters are given much more depth than the Kurosawa version, but it boils down to a pretty simple plot, and a really fun movie.

Dare I say it, Okamoto's version of this story beats Kurosawa's. In Sanjuro, you really only care about Sanjuro and the other characters are dead weight. Here the supporting cast is loaded with entertaining and sympathetic characters who have their own stories. It's a wickedly delightful movie that celebrates chambara conventions while also having some fun with them. The only problem is that the plot is terribly confusing, and it takes a while to sort out who's who and their motivations.

DVD Versátil Cinema Samurai Volume 1

The acting is fantastic, the action well done and the wry look at samurai film is the icing on top