Bohachi Bushido: Code of the Forgotten Eight 4K 1973 Ultra HD 2160p

Storyline
In PORNO PERIOD DRAMA, Tetsuro Tanba plays a nihilistic ronin who faces down the "Clan of the Forgotten Eight", who got their name because they lost all their basic emotions like conscience, gratitude, loyalty, shame etc. With his sword Onibouchou (literally: Ogre's Kitchen Knife!) Tanba's character hacks into their ranks in ways that has limbs and severed heads fly everywhere and the blood flows in rivers! On his way, he only stops to take every woman he meets, forcefully if need be!

User Review

Drenched in blood, gunpowder, and the spicy spirit of reformation and nationalist views, the times of the Tokugawa shogunate. The Bohachi clan, which once had great influence on the shogun and his entourage, enlists the support of the renegade samurai Shino, who has long ago spit on all the existing codes and laws, to start a showdown with the clan's outrageous rivals. In turn, Shino will be assisted in his bloody deeds by a motley group of prostitutes who have nothing to lose but their modest clothes.

For most of the uninformed, Japan has long since become a kind of cliché state, no less than the United States. If we mention samurai, the obligatory addition or association will be the honor that was defeated or recaptured, or the juicy ritual of bloody seppuku. If we start talking about food, we involuntarily mean the gastronomic substrates of sushi, sashimi, rolls and other fast-food semi-finished products. Japanese literature is rich not only in microscopic hokku or something highly philosophical, and Japanese cinema is not limited to Akira Kurosawa alone.

One of the cultural revolutionaries and chief trendsetters of the new cinematic fashion in post-war Japan was director Teruo Ishii, who can rightly be called Japan's Roger Corman. Ishii, during his long career that gave rise to the Japanese grindhouse movement, reached great heights, becoming one of the true apologists of the innovative film culture, producing influential films in the thrash subgenres, such as prison cinema (the Abashiri Prison trilogy), the wonders of pornographic torture cinema (Ishii's adaptations of Edogawa Rampo's novels have given eroguro and hentai their most deliciously extreme explicism), or fun pseudo-Samurai action films.

In fact, one of Ishii-san's most iconic works, the 1973 film Bushido Bohachi: The Way of the Forgotten Eight, whose plot is based on Kazuo Koike's comic book of the same name, belongs to the latter. Formally belonging to the pictures of the samurai genre, in Japan never outdated, the film “Bushido Bohati” non-trivial methods of its final dissection and conducted a complete and irrevocable deconstruction, deprived of the usual seriousness, philosophical and historical. In the luxurious surroundings of the bloody shogunate, Teruo Ishii created a movie ironic and frankly mocking in relation to everything that was previously immutable and conservative, preserved in its rigidity.

In the script content of the film one can easily guess the artistic motifs of literary works by Edogawa Rampo, Oniroku Dan, Kenzaburo Oe and even Ryunosuke Akutagawa; the cinematic fabric of the film is skillfully intertwined with both the classics of Japanese classical cinema, the same Kurosawa, and the most famous representatives of Western grindhouse cinema. “Bushido Bohachi” is essentially an inventive paraphrase in its cinematic language of ”Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and Russ Meyer's ‘Meagher,’ for the central character is far from Shino's ronin, but the several grand of four-wheeled geishas surrounding him with machine guns, whips, and machetes.

And Teruo Ishii acts as a director in the film in a very original way, adding to the usual set of explicit sex and sophisticated violence the exquisite silk laces of the visual series, but without going to all the extremes of cinematic poetics, but also keeping within the limits of aesthetics (without enjoying the aberrant naturalism of details), which Teruo Ishii's films have not suffered so much before. Instead of a parable about a ronin, the horrors of prostitution and clan feuds, Ishii presents an insane samurai film full of unbridled fantasy, completely devoid of the basic traditions of the genre, for the protagonist is in tune with the loner heroes of the 70s, who so assiduously populated the movie screens of those times, and the story itself and its presentation reeks of schizophrenia and phantasmagoria for miles. But it's better to say goodbye to the traditions of the past centuries this way than to wait for the moment when their stamps turn them into an unappetizing bloody mass, for sometimes even history tolerates subjunctive moods in favor of a spectacular artistic concept, in this case created not by the God of cinema, but by its Devil, who is sometimes called Ishii-san.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (70.0 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: HDR10

Info Audio

#Japanese: FLAC 2.0
#Japanese: FLAC 2.0
#Japanese: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Commentary by filmmakers J-Taro Sugisaku and Takao Nakano, moderated by editor Yoshiki Hayashi)
#English: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Commentary by Japanese film expert and author Tom Mes)

Info Subtitles