Shogun Assassin (1980) on Netflix
Ogami Ittō is the Shogun's decapitator. Ninja kill his wife, and the Shogun's officials bring orders: swear eternal loyalty or die with his son Daigorō. He takes up his sword.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.3/1012,157 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes80%
Trailer
Plot summary
The Shogun has grown senile and suspicious, and sends his ninja spies to the home of his decapitator, Ogami Ittō. They kill Ogami's wife. Officials then deliver the Shogun's terms: pledge eternal service, or take his own life with the boy Daigorō. Ogami instead fights clear of them and sets out with his son. The head of the Yagyu clan, who leads the Shogun's spies and assassins, blocks their path and proposes a duel between Ogami and his own son Kurando, staking Ogami's freedom on the outcome. Ogami agrees. Long before, he had laid a sword and a ball before the infant Daigorō, and the child chose the sword, and a life of vengeance at his father's side.
Cast
- Shôgen Nittaas Master of Death
- Tokio Okias The Shogun
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Shogun Assassin (1980)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Shogun Assassin is not one film but a re-edit combining most of Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx with 12 minutes of Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance, both 1972 films from Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima's manga.
- When the Vipco video tape label released it in the United Kingdom in 1983, the film's extreme violence almost caused it to be banned by the Home Office; Vipco played this for publicity on its 2000 DVD, stamped "Banned since 1983!"
- Dialogue from the film is sampled prominently across several songs on GZA's 1995 album Liquid Swords, and again in the song "Agent Orange" by rapper Cage, from his debut album Movies for the Blind (2002).
- The title character, Ogami Ittō, is played by Tomisaburo Wakayama, brother of the producer Shintaro Katsu, who is known for playing Zatoichi in a series of 26 films starting in the 1960s.
- David Weisman, a protégé of Andy Warhol who had directed Ciao! Manhattan, made the film with Robert Houston after buying the rights to the original Kozure Ōkami films for $50,000 from the American office of Toho Studios.
- In Kill Bill: Volume 2, released in 2004, Beatrix Kiddo and her four-year-old daughter watch Shogun Assassin together as a bedtime story.
- One critic called the English-language version an "ingenious and deeply imagined reinterpretation" that was rewritten, rescored by Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders, and "disembowelled in the cutting room".
