"Blind Woman's Curse" -
Meh...Not having a good time with many first time viewing films at the moment.
We start off in a very groovy fashion with a rain soaked Samurai sword fight that drips cool.
But a warning sign of the slump to come was shown here also, when a vital plot point of a woman being blinded by a sword stroke from Meiko Kaji is played out by the sword swipe very obviously not being anywhere near her at all!
From here on we enter a world of chaotic plotting, muddled all to hell ideas, dubious translations and redundant characters.
By the opening we are expecting Meiko Kaji ("Lady Snowblood") to be a tough woman with an agenda.
Instead the rest of the film, right up until the last 10 minutes, has her do absolutely nothing at all except cry a lot!
Bad comic relief? Oh yes. How about a guy in a bowler hat and a smelly red nappy? You got it.
What else stinks here?
Well the big Blind Woman's revenge sub-plot plays out with her actually doing nothing at all (despite her joining up with a group of bad guys) until the very end...and then she simply does nothing all over again!
The only person who does anything is her grotesque hunchback assistant...who then gets told off by her for doing something!
The plot is a jumbled mess of schemes, double-crosses and betrayals that are played as secrets one minute and then played out openly the next.
Despite a stew of sub-plots (clan rivalry, cat curses, blind woman revenge, hunchback murders, mysterious stranger pop ups) and the various groups of bad guys to choose from (who simply end up tripping over each other) nothing much happens in the film at all. Ever.
It's purely down to the horror tinges (an utterly deranged traveling 'spook show' carnival) and that loony hunchback that anything remotely interesting happens in the movie at all.
This real mess of a mass of nothing has the odd great moment of bloody violence (total screen time 5 minutes max) a smattering of sleaze and nudity (one hellish dope/prostitution den scene) and some theatrical horror visuals...but this is a case of a needle in a tedious haystack.
And worse of all is the end.
After a huge, muddled, sludge slow trek we have a wonderful few seconds of sword gore before we finally get to the big revenge pay-off as the blind woman actually does something for once as she squares off against Meiko Kaji (who has herself has also finally done something in the film).
But what happens now?
Once again nothing! And yes I am going to reveal the end of the film to save you my pain.
In the end...blind woman decides she can't take revenge after all against Meiko Kaji because Kaji has a good heart!!
She promptly walks off and leaves Kaji and the audience staring off into space in utter confusion!
Before she walks off blind woman just so happens to sum up my thoughts.
"Seems as though I have wasted my life on this meaningless goal"
Change "goal " for "movie" and you have my thoughts exactly!
 |