150 Word Review: 'The Sword of Doom' (1966)
Study the soul to know the sword
A society on the verge of an apocalypse. Director Kihachi Okamoto’s foreboding, hopeless The Sword of Doom takes place during the slow-motion fall of the once-powerful shogunate in 1860s Japan. Samurai are drunken mercenaries. Lords prey on young women. A few men have honor, but not many.
Ryunosuke Tsukue is a pitiless swordsman who murders an old man for sport the moment we meet him. Tsukue is a sociopath with cold, dead eyes who does not care about his wife or his baby. He has no moral code. He kills and sips sake. The cast is superb, from Yoko Naito’s bright, hopeful courtesan Omatsu to Ryunosuke’s wife, a vulnerable, strong-willed Michiyo Aratama. But this is Tatsuya Nakadai’s movie; his gaze is demonic. Hypnotizing. There’s a hungry mass of evil inside him trying to crawl out through his eyeballs. The sword fights are swift ballets of butchery. It snows in hell.
Feels deep like it’s saying the real fight is inside, not just with the blade 😄