The legendary midnight movie sensation that firmly embedded samurai mythology within American pop culture consciousness, this English-dubbed reedit of the first two films in the classic Japanese chanbaraseries Lone Wolf and Cub is a giddily entertaining, mesmerizingly gory classic of East-meets-West grindhouse mayhem. Following the murder of his wife at the hands of an evil shogun, an avenging ronin (Tomisaburo Wakayama) roams the countryside with his young son — and the boy’s sword-shooting baby carriage — in tow, dispatching ninja assassins with steely resolve in operatically stylized flurries of hallucinatory violence. With its pulsing synth soundtrack (cowritten by Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere & the Raiders) and delirious action set pieces — kinetically edited whirlwinds of flashing blades, spurting blood, and severed limbs — SHOGUN ASSASSIN proved an instant cult favorite that has bubbled its way up from the underground to the mainstream thanks to its influence on artists ranging from the Wu-Tang Clan to Quentin Tarantino. (Janus Films)

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