Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons

This is the fifth of six films of the Lone Wolf & Cub Series. A clan offers to hire Lone Wolf Ogami Itto for an assassination but they want to test his skills. They set five individual warriors upon him, each to test a certain skill. After each is defeated, the warrior is to give part of the story and a fifth of the payment. Upon defeating the fifth warrior, he is finally given his full mission.

Of the five, the poisoning is the most dramatic and the most interesting. The story is relatively simple except the side trip with the Cub. It's interesting that the Cub has his own little adventure. As always, Lone Wolf and Cub do a mass slaughter in the end. My only concern is that he has kill a little girl. It doesn't matter how bratty the girl gets. He still kills a little girl but I still like the massacre. I also really like Cub having his own adventure.

Master film-maker Kenji Misumi returns in the Lone Wolf and Cub series to helm the fifth entry, Baby Cart in the Land of the Demons, and if you thought even just for a fleeting second that this would be anything but orgasmically violent and existentially mystifying, you just don't have enough confidence on the man.

Picking up the story of the Shogun's former executioner Ogami Itto and his son Daigoro, this is another tale of betrayal, political intrigue and murder. The Kuroda Clan is in deep trouble, trouble that Ogami Itto's fierce opponents, the Yagyu, want to exploit for their own benefit. Ogami Itto is paid his usual fee (500 gold pieces of course) and bloodshed ensues.

Now as a chambara and LWAC fundamendalist, I will confess upfront that the combination of stylized comic-book violence and the existential, quasi-mythic look at both historical Japan and the genre conventions that form chambara, are a sure win in my book. It might not be as groundbreaking as the first two entries in the series, it is after all following a now well-tested tradition, but it is done with such conviction and deliberation that one has to pay notice.

As with other serialized characters of the chambara universe like Zatoichi or Nemuri Kiyoshiro, it is exactly that it simultaneously meets our expectations as a pure Lone Wolf movie that doesn't disappoint the way Hollywood sequels do and that it breaks the traditional forms of the period drama that make even a fifth entry of this tried and tested recipe so good.

The plot is of secondary value to the actual journey of Itto and his son. They have been through the crossroads at Hades and now into the land of the demons and there is no turning back. What pushes them through piles of dead bodies is revenge, and I say "them" because Daigoro has made his commitment to follow the same path of blood as his father, their fates inextricably linked through life and death; yet as with other Lone Wolf movies revenge is but a vague part of the storyline. A skeleton that gives these movies form and reason to be but they take life beyond that.

In Lone Wolf and Cub's case their journey is an existential fable bathed in blood, like they are doomed to cut their way through the land for all time and it is through the act of killing that their existence takes meaning. It takes one look at Ogami Itto's grim stare to realize that if there is a god and he would dare to appear in front of him, Itto would swiftly cut him down and move on his path. Takashi Miike understood all this crystal clear when he made Izo.

Speaking of blood, yes, there will be lots of it. It's a staple of the Lone Wolf movies and I wouldn't have it any other way. Arterial sprays, chopped heads and bodies sliced in half. And then there is Tomisaburo Wakayama, the man, the myth, crafting the most mesmerizing character role of his career.

Strongly recommended as are all the other Lone Wolf movies. Watch them in order though.

Even though all the festival-scenes are a sub-plot that adds little to nothing to the story, I find this an excellent film. The idea and the enactment of the five Samurai, each giving Ogami a part of his mission as their dying words, exemplifies the value of loyalty and truth above all. In all the Lone Wolf films honor is considered the highest value, and there is a continuous presence of morality throughout the series. In this film I was touched by the incredible loyalty of all the Samurais of the Kuroda clan. Even when on fire, fatally wounded or bleeding from every orifice, they still continue to serve their clan. In fact they care so much for their clan that they hire Ogami to kill their own, perverted masters, because their actions bring dishonor and great danger to the clan.

Story-wise certainly the most elaborate of the Lone Wolf films, I found this one to be the best.

This installment (#5) in the 'Babycart' film series finds Ogami Itto and Ogami Daigoro (played by respectively Tomisaburo Wakayama and Akihiro Tomikawa) recruited to protect the honour of a clan from its own leader, who is trying to pass off the offspring he sired on his concubine as his true heir. Much of the film moves at a slower pace than others in the series and there is a lengthy interlude in which little Daigoro, separated from his dad during a festival, has his own adventure. This sequence drags a bit although it is entertaining to see the stoic cub demonstrating baby-bushido as he is flogged for maintaining an honourable silence (like father, like son). Once the sanguinary twosome are reunited, the action picks up until the grand guignol finale, which even by the grim standards of this bloody series, is a bit shocking. The convoluted plot doesn't make a lot of sense (as others have pointed out, if only one of the waylaying samurai had died immediately when impaled on Itto's blade (as so many others have), the entire complex test-message scheme would have failed). That said, no one watches the Babycart series for tight plots and cohesive narratives. 'Land of Demons', the penultimate entry in the series, is notch below the previous installment (the splendid 'Baby Cart in Peril', with its topless, tattooed female assassin) and a bit less over-the-top than the final adventure, the frosty 'White Heaven in Hell' (with its incestuous impalement scene), but remains a watchable entry in the bloody, great series.

Where the Lone Wolf and Cub adventure has been delightfully frenetic up to this point, the fifth film is a decided change of pace. Much more deliberate and pensive, Baby Cart in the Land of Demons spends an unusual amount of time in one place, toying with a more nuanced (at times even confusing) story, while also fleshing out an important supporting character. Young Daigoro, stone-faced son of the wandering master at the center of this great storm, finally gets his close-up and proves to be every bit as determined, soft-spoken and unflappable as his father. His scenes are the ones that stuck with me afterward, resonating in a way that felt fresh while also remaining loyal to the saga's identity. Daddy, meanwhile, has his hands full with a difficult five-pronged onslaught and a pair of complex, intertwined kill contracts. His actions at the film's climax once more cast the character in dark grey fabric, a recurring theme for the series, and prove that (where duty is concerned) he hasn't changed all that much from the very first time we met. Less visceral and rubber-tendoned than any of the earlier entries, and perhaps overly ambitious with that tangled primary storyline, it's good stuff if a touch below the standard its brethren have thus far maintained. An outlier in many ways.