Review of Zatoichi

Zatoichi (1989)
One of the worst swan songs ever sung in movie history
25 May 2015
This 26th also the last of the Zatoichi series indeed is the worst one among the 26 episodes. Shintarô Katsu in 1989 looked fat with natural gray short hairs, he directed and produced this one, added lot of modern stunts, his katana sword's ghost-like flashing cuts now got crimson blood splashed out of his opponents' bodies, unlike the early episodes, only cut but no blood coming out. we got chopped off hands, arms, legs even heads rolling on the ground. we saw him cured the sword in a hotel room. then we saw at the first time he finally got the chance to make love to a beautiful Yakuza local chief in a hot spring.

Yeah, these are the new stuff he put into this last episode. but some of the scenes were overly used again and again in former episodes so many times, such as gambling scene, purposely letting two dices littered outside of the cup, cutting fake dices, etc., etc. but the scene that he stumbled into a dirt pit on the road is too much and too lazily copied from one of the earlier episode, simply is not quite good either.

One of the worst arrangements of this series is repeatedly used so many same actors played so many different roles in different episodes. although their names or titles might not be the same, but these repeatedly showed actors were just killed by him in last episode, then same actors with the same faces showed up right in the next episode. this careless arrangement had seriously caused some viewing problems. a serious franchised series should not use so many same actors to repeatedly showed in different episodes; it's just stupid and ridiculous.

This 26th episode actually should never been made in the first place. it looked just so tiresome and spiritless. by making one like this only meant that Shintarô Katsu just wanted to cash in the last time.

Due to this series' popularity at that time, he even put some songs and sang by himself in the last several episodes, but the song in this last one was simply stupid, we got an English song! was it just because he sold this episode to some unknown American TV channel, so he got to put an English roaming samurai song in it for the American TV viewers? Well, the stupidity always amazed me.
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