Matrixston Wow! Such a good movie.

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Executscan Expected more

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

tieman64 The "Lone Wolf and Cub" series began in the 1970s as a manga by Kazuo Koike. This morphed into "Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance" and "Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx", the first two in what would become a sequence of seven feature films. Each film finds actor Tomisaburo Wakayama playing Ogami Itto, a nineteenth century ronin. Ogami wanders the Japanese countryside accompanied by his young son, Daigoro. As the whole world is out to kill them, Ogami and Daigoro take part in a series of incredulous action sequences.These action sequences are "Lone Wolf's" main claim to fame. Amongst fans of 1970s exploitation films, the series is renowned for its bloody, ridiculous and cheesy-but-cool violence. Our heroes are constantly battling samurai, ninjas and female warriors, each battle climaxing with geysers of blood, dismembered limbs and gratuitous decapitations. Characters hold their action poses, others scurry funnily in wooden slippers, whilst everyone delights in exhibiting elaborate special combos. Love them or hate them, films like this would result in hundreds of copycats, would influence countless video-games, would influence the aesthetic of future action movies, cartoons and comics, and would add numerous motifs, quirks and trends to the grammar of cinema."Shogun Assassin" was released in 1980. Directed by Robert Houtson, it was created by splicing together footage from "Sword of Vengeance" (1972) and "River Styx" (1972), the first two "Lone Wolf" features. The result - designed specifically for Western audiences - is a choppy and shapeless film in which plot is sacrificed in favour for an endless procession of violence. American grindhouse junkies of the 1980s loved it; they'd never seen anything quite like this before. But to purists, the film was mostly an insult. To them, "Shogun Assassin" lacked the gravity of other "Lone Wolf" features, even if it did ultimately offer the same weird blend of goofiness, hyper-violence and sentimentality.7.5/10 – Stupid but iconic. For more serious fare, see Kurosawa's "Ran", Okamoto's "Samurai Assassin", Yoji Yamada's samurai trilogy ("Twilight Samurai", "The Hidden Blade" and "Love and Honour"), "47 Ronin", "Kiru", Hiroshi Inagaki's "Samurai Trilogy", "Goyokin" (1969), "Chushingura" (1962), and the great Masaki Kobayashi's "Samurai Rebellion" and "Harakiri".

Viva_Chiba Shogun Assassin is a combination of the first 2 movies of the "Lone Wolf and Cub" saga, this "adaptation" was intended for the American grind house circuit and British cienemas, but probably it got a release in other western countries too.Just the fact that this movie is just an adaptation, you would expect something dreadful and horrible....but it's not ! The dubbing is great, but sometimes it gets hilarious, the soundtrack is awesome and it was composed especially for the Shogun Assassin edit, not for the original movies ! The action is cool and well choreographed, with lots of sword fighting and lots of blood, including lots of bloody sword slashings, some finger chopping and decapitations ! The movie is not boring at all, check it out !

epeteet I had been wanting to track this movie down for quite some time and when i finally scored a copy i must say i was far from disappointed. It's about a traveling samurai and his son. Every ninja in sight wants to kill these dudes so they get in tons of sword battles. That's about the extent of the plot. All you really need to know is that Shogun Assassin is a bloody masterpiece...and when i say bloody it's no exaggeration. There's beheadings, severed limbs and gallons and gallons of spurting blood. This is a very bizarre movie (aren't all foreign movies?) and that's what makes it so great; well that and all the excessive bloodshed of course. For example there's a very weird scene were the father rips this chicks clothes off and just when you think he's gonna rape her he, his son, and the woman all huddle up naked to keep warm. This allows his young son to cop a feel. Haha anyway it's a great flick for splatter fiends and ninja fans alike. Don't miss out!

El_Farmerino_Esq While at university I was introduced to the original Kazuo Koike/Goseki Kojima 'Lone Wolf & Cub' graphic novels by a half-Japanese friend and instantly became a fan. After a time we tracked down the movie versions and I was pleasantly surprised at how faithful they were to the original material - indeed, in many sequences it was as though the movies had used the Kojima graphics as storyboards for the filmed versions. All was well and good until, just yesterday, I saw this.Shogun Assassin is, in essence, a badly stitched together hack-job of the first two films in the series - Sword of Vengeance and Baby Cart at the River Styx. Eschewing the need for a coherent plot or any sense of pacing, it is merely a crude assembly of all the action scenes of the original films, with all the characterisation and plot development removed to make way for a nonsensical series of fights. It is, quite possibly, the worst editing job I have ever seen and, now that a box-set of the original movies is widely available, there is absolutely no point in seeing it. If you are at all interested in the Lone Wolf & Cub saga then seek out the originals immediately, but don't waste your time on this.