SHOGUN'S SADISM (1976) - A FILM GUTTER REVIEW

Dir. Yuji Makiguchi, Japan, 80 mins

 
Japan is certainly a nation that has a strong reputation for extreme cinema, but over my time reviewing at Film Gutter I am starting to come to the conclusion that reputation is built much more on quantity than quality. There are some gems, don't doubt it – brilliant movies like Audition and 2LDK are personal standouts – but those are heavily outweighed by a lot of offerings that I would consider pretty poor. There's never been any fear of pushing boundaries, of exploring taboo or of taking artistic risk. But all too often the ideas simply aren't matched by the execution, and we end up with movies that are kind of a mess. Maybe things were made in a rush to cash in on the splatter phase, maybe things were made with too low a budget... who knows.

Enter Shogun's Sadism, an infamous 1976 offering that I had been aware of for a while and decided to 'treat' myself to one Sunday afternoon. The term is loosely applied, because this was another Japanese offering that simply didn't gel with me on a personal level. The movie itself is almost a portmanteau, being made up of two separate stories – the first following a young Christian girl who gets captured as a slave and violently tortured, while the other follows the master of a brothel who falls in love with one of 'his' girls and attempts to run away with her. I would say – on the upside for this movie – the setting makes the movie feel pretty authentic to the era, and the effects don't look too bad given they are over forty years old as I write this.
 
Unfortunately that is about where the positives end for me. There's very limited characterisation of anyone involved, and our 'bad guys' are just that and nothing more. It also feels like there's insufficient explanation of the historical setting and context – something that many viewers may already be familiar with, but I'm afraid I wasn't. The acting is no more than OK, and the bottom line is that much of the torture and gore feels pretty extraneous and – dare I say for someone who reviews extreme horror on a weekly basis – exploitative. With the plot being so very thin that sense is enhanced as you watch along, and without much reason to care about the people enduring it into the bargain.
 
I'm aware this movie does have a big cult following, and many people love it and consider it a classic of Japanese extreme and splatter, but I'm afraid to say this one just left me cold. Even at a mere 80 minutes it feels overly long and the two storylines show little to no connection, which just feels rather clumsy to me. If there were three or four it would feel a bit more like a proper portmanteau, but with only two it feels more like a couple of different movies crammed together to make the one offering. If you were to run two parts of Guinea Pig together – probably the first two parts for the best analogy – then it might look something like this. And sure, that might appeal to you, but it's not for me.
 
RATING: 2.5/10. I can see that the content itself, on a visual level, is certainly disturbing and the shooting and style do make it feel authentically like its historic period. Despite that, this is a movie I found pretty boring. I've never been a huge fan of gore just for the sake of gore, and this feels like a movie that is really going for that style and approach. If you're particularly big on Japanese splatter then this might just be the kind of thing that would work for you, but I can't give it any more than a  poor 2.5/10.