Geysers of bright red blood spray all over the screen in this entertaining vengeance flick full of the kind of cool touches, moving cameras and jazzy editing tricks that keep the story crackling and that get film geeks all excited. 20 year old Yuki, or Lady Snowblood, (Meiko Kaji) was born in prison and raised for revenge. She spent her whole childhood in brutal martial arts training and is now ready to go slice up the band of slimebag robbers who gang raped her mother and killed her family. Her mother managed to knife one of the murderers to death, but Japan in the 1800s was a cruel place and she got a life sentence in prison for it. There, she slept with any man she could get near just so she could have another child who’d grow up to kill off the rest of the creeps. She wanted a boy, she got a girl. No matter—the plan was still on.
Quentin Tarantino borrowed heavily from this film for Kill Bill. He even used its orchestral pop theme song to make the homage perfectly clear. If you like that film, you need to see this.
Adapted from a manga originally by writer Kazuo Koike and illustrator Kazuo Kamimura.