The Worst Film Ever

Awesome Movie

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Teruo Ishii's film The Blind Woman's Curse (aka The Tattooed Swordswoman) is a strange mix of elements from yakuza films, bakeneko ghost films, ero-guro, fun Asiansploitation trashiness and it even has a visual style reminiscent of Dario Argento at turns. The gorgeous Meiko Kaji (this is the first film she acted in under that name) is obviously the main selling point here, although she doesn't have as much runtime as in her later films.The plot of this film is almost an inconsistent mess, mixing yakuza turf wars, a ghastly black cat able to fly at low altitudes, expressionistic set design, circus elements (with a performance by Butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, who also appeared in Ishii's Horrors of Malformed Men), some boobage and copious amounts of blood (especially for a film from 1970). The villains' headquarters are pretty wild, with plenty of slide screens and mirrors, booby traps and so on.While this film is very entertaining, it suffers from bad editing and sometimes unconvincing special effects, especially if we're talking about the aforementioned cat. The dialogues could be better and there are some really lousy performances, not to mention the bad ending (even though it was cool how the two fighters just produce the swirling-cloud backdrop out of nowhere and decide to fight on that location as if it were a Mortal Kombat game). There are a few songs sung by Meiko Kaji, but they're not as memorable as the ones in Lady Snowblood. Overall it's a fun film, but there's not much to it besides that. Really cool poster, though.

The dragon-tattooed leader of the Tachibana Yakuza gang, Akemi (Lady Snowblood's Meiko Kaji) tries to avenge the death of her father in a rain-drenched showdown, only when she is about to deal the final death blow, she slashes at the eyes of the rival's boss younger sister, rendering her blind while a mysterious black cat laps up her blood. Akemi spends three years in jail before returning to the head of the Tachibana clan, where she intends to stop the violence that is causing her city to bleed and live out her days in peace. With the help of a Tachibana turncloak, a rival gang headed by Dobashi (Toru Abe) starts to invade Akemi's territory, planting drugs in their stalls and fighting them in the streets.Dobashi finds some unexpected help with the arrival of a blind female swordsman, Aiko (Hoki Tokuda), the woman from the opening scene who is seeking vengeance. It's here that the film starts to get seriously weird. Working as a knife-thrower at a carnival show, Aiko is accompanied by two assistants, a grotesque hunchback with a fetish for decapitation, and the black cat that Akemi believed put a curse upon her for mutilating an innocent. Soon enough, Akemi's gang are turning up dead, often with their dragon tattoo flayed from their back. Less of a threat and providing most of the film's comic relief is another gang boss permanently adorned in a thong and cursed with foul-smelling body odour.Blind Woman's Curse's mix of sword opera, Yakuza gangster movie, horror and surrealism is an unbalanced and occasionally frustrating concoction. If the story wasn't out-there enough, Kaji's disappointingly limited screen-time means that there is little holding everything together. The supernatural elements occur so sporadically that they seem out of place, but thanks to cinematographer Shigeru Kitaizumi, are beautiful to behold. The carnival scene is a montage of macabre and vibrant colours, with strange dancing and avant-garde plays from it's performers, and the climactic showdown between Akemi and Aiko plays out against a lavish painted backdrop of spiralling clouds. It's completely nonsensical, but it's an experience like no other.

Like France's Jean Rollin, Japan's Teruo Ishii stands for something. His films have a blazing signature. His obsessions are up there on the screen. The plots are coat hangers to hang his fetishes on. "Blind Woman's Curse" is a mixed genre extravaganza that is one part yakuza melodrama, one part sword opera, and one part horror film. Although it doesn't hold together dramatically, it is still a fantastic piece of fantasy cinema. Meiko "Scorpion" Kaji, one of the sexiest women ever to have graced the silver screen, is the head honcho of a gang who have been marked for extinction by a strange, blind swordwoman (Hoki Tokuda) and her hunchback servant (is there any other?) At the same time, another clan has it in for Meiko and her feisty, fighting girls. Ishii slathers on the macabre and bizarre in this wonderful, malformed romp. A grotesque night carnival is one of the film's highlights, as is a flesh-carrying, blood-drinking black cat that makes a strong impression. The activities of the hunchback are always fun to watch, as are the scenes of human skinning, tattoo removal, and sexual coercion. Like every Ishii film, except the execrable "Blind Beast Versus Killer Dwarf", this is a colorful, lurid compendium of cinematic delights.

Meiko Kaji spends 3 years in jail for avenging her Yakuza father, and on her release she inherits the leadership of the Tachibana gang. They're quite a nice bunch, for Yakuza, but a nasty rival gang are bent on taking over their territory. As if that wasn't bad enough, she appears to be under the curse of a black cat that got a taste of her victim's blood...The film takes a broadly familiar period-Yakuza story and mixes it up with elements of horror and... strangeness, making for an intriguing cocktail of styles, moods and ideas. Teruo Ishii was one of the premier visual stylists of the Japanese exploitation wave, and this film shares the style even though it's relatively light on the exploitation. The plot is straightforward but the details make it interesting, and having Meiko Kaji as the lead actress certainly helps there too.Good stuff!