Available on Blu-ray from Radiance Films on 03/26/2024
In this trilogy of films, a spy with samurai skills and an affinity for medicine finds himself in situations where he must prevent the firearm sale to a local shogun, protect a village against an evil Lord trying to displace them, and retrieve gold that belongs to the government and could lead to major issues in a village.
Killer’s Mission (1969)
The first film in the trilogy and the stronger of the three, the viewer gets to meet our hero, Shikoro Ichibei, who is a spy, possibly a samurai, and definitely a rascal at times. The film follows him through adventures and fights, with these often being rather bloody and leading to more problems. Here, the story is decently interesting, and the acting is solid while being very much of its era. The cast is interesting to watch, the fights have mostly aged well, and the special effects look, well, cheap to today’s standards. That said, the film is entertaining, the acting works here, with lead Tomisaburō Wakayama is fun to watch here, in his pre-Lone Wolf and Cub era.
The Fort of Death (1969)
Unfortunately, not the best follow-up here. The story is a bit lackluster, and the film is just too long for its own good. Tomisaburō Wakayama does decent here, but the rest of the film is less interesting, so it’s harder to stick with it. The change in director, going from Shigehiro Ozawa to Eiichi Kudo, shows in how the film moves, how things develop, and it how the film’s style and pace changes/
Eight Men to Kill (1972)
This 3rd entry in the trilogy sees Shigehiro Ozawa come back in the director’s seat, which is a good move here, but this only brings back some of the quality of the first film. As a whole, Eight Men to Kill is better than The Fort of Death with a story that is bit more interesting in how it develops and how it moves through its scenes, better acting and action overall, and a bit of that little something fun from the first film comes back.
The new release here looks fantastic with a solid transfer in 1980p (for the first time) with uncompressed audio (still mono, but that’s how it was recorded at the time). The extras here are limited, but some of this may be due to the films’ ages. The features on this release are decent though minimal, with some of them coming up on top of the others in terms of interest such as the audio commentary by Tom Mes on Killer’s Mission and the interview with Akihito Ito, a Shigehiro Ozawa expect (and film history expert) who clearly knows what he is talking about here. The box set of course has art aplenty and some written content in its booklet. The contents here are of high quality.