Hanzo the Razor: The Snare

Shintaro Katsu

Yasuzo Masumura's Hanzo the Razor, from 1973, is the second and best of the trilogy of films about the titular samurai. The films were vehicles for its star and producer, Shintaro Katsu. Katsu is best known as the star of the Zatoichi films which followed the adventures of a blind masseur who excels at swordplay. Between 1962 and 1973, Katsu starred in 25 films as Zatoichi, but by the 70s interest was waning in the samurai genre. Katsu responded with the Hanzo films which amped up the blood letting and added dollops of kinky sex. The Hanzo films more closely resemble the exploitation films of the era that played on the grindhouse circuit in the US than classic samurai films.

A short summary of the plot should steer away the fainthearted from this tawdry piece of pulp. A young maiden is found dead of a botched abortion. Hanzo confronts the (topless) abortionist who hips him to a temple where young females serving the nuns are exploited to satisfy the debased needs of the temple's elite patrons. Hanzo arrives in the nick of time to save a woman being savagely beaten by a wealthy letch. Hanzo, in turn, beats the perv and kidnaps the prioress in order to torture her into revealing the identity of the fiend who has bankrolled her depraved nunnery.

At this point, Hanzo unsheathes his secret weapon and it is not his sword. Previously, we have witnessed Hanzo training his penis in a most peculiar fashion. First he douses it with boiling water, then beats it repeatedly with a thick stick, and, finally, repeatedly plunges it into a large block of rice. Despite (or because) of this abuse, Hanzo's member retains its tumescence. After some preliminary torture of the prioress, he binds her in a net and then suspends her in the air and lowers her on his mammoth manroot. He spins her on his phallus every which way until she is so overcome by pleasure that she spills the beans.

I don't like spoiling a film's plot this much, but feel it is a public service in this case to steer the easily offended away from what is a good, but not great, exploitation film. Certainly the tastes of a culture that spawned tentacle erotica are alien to mainstream America, now and then. The film's final third are a bit of a letdown as Hanzo thwarts a thief's attempt to rob the local mint. However, the verve and color of Masumura's direction (Antonioni was a fan) kept my eyes glued to the screen even when I was rolling them. 

I feel that Hanzo as a character is the result of the conservative backlash to the 1960s in the same way that Clint Eastwood's protagonists were. Like Dirty Harry, Hanzo is a cop dealing with the criminal scum of an increasingly depraved culture. Also like Harry, his higher ups are portrayed as decadent and effete with little sympathy for the common man. Hanzo's sword, like Harry's .357 Magnum, is a symbolic phallus and both series of films are essentially masculine fantasies. Eastwood's sexual conquests, in early films such as For A Few Dollars More, Hang 'Em High, Coogan's Bluff, and High Plains Drifter. are essentially rapes as are Hanzo's. Eastwood, at least, expanded the scope of female characters in his films as he matured. The Hanzo films decry sexual licentiousness while reveling in it: a case of having your beef and cheesecake and eating it, too. 

As an aside, the music of this film was composed by Tomita, the Wendy Carlos of Japan, who released numerous albums on RCA in the 1970s and had composed the scores for a couple of the Zatoichi flicks. This score is very 1973, but more derivative than, say, Lalo Schifrin. Synthesizers rehash themes from Morricone, Stevie Wonder, and Rick Wakeman, but this is preferable to Tomita's subsequent plundering of Debussy, Stravinsky, and Holst.