shogun assassin (cinema history class)

Session: Supernatural Martial Arts, week 4
Movie: Shogun Assassin (1980)
Directed by Robert Houston
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
After his wife is killed, a Shogun goes on the lam with his young son. He tries to evade the Ninjas who were sent to kill him, and hires himself out as an assassin. Hilarity ensues.

Background and Reaction:
One of my ongoing (read: "slowoing") projects is a screenplay titled Bleed Me a River. The first treatment I came up with had the shortcoming of a very weak plot. I was reminded of it during Shogun Assassin because that had a similarly weak plot. I shouldn't be surprised by that. Keith explained that the movie was actially stitched together using footage from two other films. It kind of makes sense to me that a movie whose script is limited by the footage available would be limited.

That said, there were some cool things here. The innocent child as killer was quite amusing, and that buggy made him seem like some kind of James Bond. The narration (provided by Sandra Bernhard) worked better than I would have thought. But the plot just didn't manage to catch me.

Ratings:
Joe: 6
Dave: 9.3 - 9.4
Scott: 8.5
Me: 7.2
Ethan: 6

Bechdel:
Shogun Assassin fails the Bechdel test.

Extras:
We, the guys in class, had been having an email discussion about killer devices. It kind of jumped off from Joe mentioning that he watched The Lift, which is about a killer elevator. At any rate, I mentioned an idea I had for a horror short, which reminded Joe of an episode of Monsters, a cheesy late 1980's horror anthology TV series. Joe, in turn, brought in that episode for us to watch after the main event.