Two of the genres hat I feel I’m heavily influenced by as a filmmaker are Film Noir and the Ridiculous Action Movie (i.e Face Off, Die Hard, and Double Team).  Sword of Doom seems to combine both of these into one magical land of swordsmen, and adds some Igmar Bergman and Japanese Ghost Film for spice and accenuation.

A sory abou a psychoic swordsman in Feudal Japan.

Let’s sart talking about the movie.  Let’s star talking about the script.  It’s got a lot of scenes of talking and ploting, as do many Japanese films from this era.  Yes, it can be tedious, but it’s also inertwined with scenes of horrible hand-chopping violence.  Which is always nice.  As I said above, Sword of Doom combines elements of noir (an all around feeling of doom and dread), the ridiculous action (Sword fights, hand-chopping, sword fights, talk about fighting, and sword fights), Igmar Bergman (The talking and inaction), and the Japanese Ghost Film (this comes mainly through the subtex and what’s going on underneath the dialogue.  It also comes in the ghosts).  So we’ve got a script with heavy subext going on between the characters where one word from the main character (an unstoppable killing machine with a sword) can say leaps and bounds about his character.  Yes, it’s long, yes, there is a reason they’re called “samurai epics”, but DAMMIT I LIKE IT.

Let’s move on to acting, shall we?  The stone face is an acting technique hat can either make or break a film.  We’ve seen it put to excellent use in the films of Buster Keaton, in noirs such as In a Lonely Place or The Big Sleep, and even in films like Naked Lunch.  On the flipside we’ve seen terrible blank and flat performances from movies such as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Decided to Stop Living and Become Mixed Up Zombies!!? and the television show “Heroes”.  So what is the difference between these two?  For, I would say Tasuya Nakadai, who plays Ryunosuke Tsukue (wielder of the Sword of Doom and the Silent Technique), provides a stunning stone-faced performance.  The difference between stone-face and flat (good and bad, undersated and “I found this guy on a stree”) I believe all boils down to what I feel is at the core of my acting philosophy: The eyes.  You do not act with your hands, or your face, or your feet, but you act with your eyes.  For the eyes are the gateways to your soul, and if you do not believe what you’re saying, if you are merely reading words off of a page in front of a whirring machine, then it will show in your eyes.  In Sword of Doom, when you look into Ryunosuke’s eyes you see a sociopathic detachmen, you see calculation and angst, you see… DOOM.

Finally, I’m going to quickly talk about the cinematography of the film.  Here we once again head into Bergman-esque terriory with bizarrely framed close-ups and even stranger medium shots where the frame is so deep you can throw a rock into the screen and it’ll fall forever until it hits the girl who standing sideways back there. Yet, these oddly consructed closer shots are mixed with Japanese new-wave wides as we’ve seen in the work of Kurosawa and Teshigahara.  The camera is staic and what maters in the frame is not our actors, but rather the atmosphere around them and the effect the characters have over the atmosphere. So now, it’s time for our favorite part of Withou the ‘s: My arbitrary assignment of a grade:

A film I should own.

I give it an A. The atmosphere this film creates is incredible, as it’s one of dread and mystery.  It’s a world that is unforgiving and evil, much like the “City at Night” of film noir.  Only, unlike noir, it’s a world hat is rooted in emptiness and nature, a world where person’s psyche becomes his environment and at the root of all of the characters’ minds is something dark and desructive.  Also, I rather like the melding of genres… and dropping names. Orson “Fucking” Welles… bitches (Sorry for the profanity, but I’m pretty sure tha’s what it says on his tombsone).