The Razor 3: Who's Got the Gold?
(Goyôkiba: Oni no Hanzô yawahada koban, 1974)
Inoue Yoshio
Japan
86 min, color, Japanese (English subtitles)
The third, and final, in the Hanzo, the Constable series, this is easily the best of the lot. Shintaro Katsu reprises his role as Hanzo, the tireless constable who incorporates very nontraditional investigation methods in order to track down a loan-shark ring that uses the gold from Shogunate's Treasury. I like to show Hanzo flicks to my American friends and lie to them about how progressive the methods are. Since the movies violate just about every Western taboo of political correctness, the shock and disbelief are amusing, if boringly predictable.
Hanzo, who trains his humongous member, which happens to be one of the chief "weapons" in his questioning technique, is very convincing as he bones female suspects left and right. Quite the stud, he "beats" them into submission not by threatening to rape them, but by raping them and then threatening to stop. Of course, the ladies cannot bear him to stop porking them in the middle of the proceedings, so they betray husbands, national secrets, and their firstborn as well.
There's a lot of scintillating swordplay worthy of Shintaro's talents. There's also some slaying and torture of blind people, all in good faith. The filmmakers even threw in a political statement about the penetration of Western ideas and the refusal of Japan to wake up to "civilization" (correctly defined as "we have the bigger and badder cannons"). Everything should be taken with a huge grain of salt lest anything gets in the way of pure entertainment, which THE RAZOR has always been.
A great letterboxed transfer, subtitled very well by AnimEigo, the guys who bring to us every samurai film they can lay their hands on. I can't wait for the DVDs, which I will be the first to buy. Warning (and I can't stress this enough): this series is not for the prudish, self-centered, or anyone without good, and not easily-offendable, sense of humor.
May 20, 2001. BLS