At first glance, Bushido Man: Seven Deadly Battles appears to be a traditional, “serious” martial arts movie, but Director and Writer Takanori Tsujimoto takes the film in a really bizarre and frankly disagreeable direction during the last half hour. So the story sees skilled Japanese martial artist Toramaru, played by Mitsuki Koga, returning to his master’s dojo after a year of traveling Japan and challenging the best martial artists across seven different styles. The goal was to challenge them in a fight, win, and thusly receive a special scroll that describes their particular martial discipline in detail. The story is told in a flashback form after the first few opening minutes which establishes Toramaru’s return and his sitting before his master, named Gensai (Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi), to tell him all about his journey.
The tales center around two principles: Toramaru’s travels and what he ate upon arriving to each city where the next master was, and the fight itself. Gensai’s character, both in his appearance and dialogue, gives the movie a slight humorous overtone which was unexpected, but it worked to the film’s benefit. It’s Gensai’s believe, and thus that of Toramaru, that you can tell much about an opponent by his diet. Toramaru’s diet varies wildly between the challenges, and the viewer gets to witness some interesting Japanese cuisine which was also unexpected, yet interesting. These scenes build up nicely to the encounters with the masters. The first of which is Yuan (Kensuke Sonomura), who is a Chinese Kung Fu master. This impressively technical fight is very well choreographed and gets the film off to a rousing start. This fight is topped by the next one with Master Mokunen (Naohiro Kawamoto, a skilled and proven stuntman). In this second bout, the fighters use bojutsu (“bo staffs,” or stick fighting) and it’s a really captivating scene. I will elect not to spoil any more of the details of the next encounters, but suffice it to say that my favorite was with Mokunen, and unfortunately the film starts to gravitate in the bizarre direction thoroughly once Miki Mizuno’s character is introduced. Again it’s not my intention to spoil things, so I’ll avoid further detail from there, but expect to be entertained and confused by movie’s end. Furthermore, the ending of the movie sat with me a couple of days as I tried to figure out just what Takanori Tsujimoto was going for.
I may not have completely agreed with how the film turned out, but I was impressed with the presentation quality. The locales used to film the fights were really easy on the eyes and the 1:78:1 image presented those in a crisp and vibrant manner. The DTS-HD 5.1 audio was mixed well, too. The lone extra feature runs just over eleven minutes, is in HD, and is worth watching. It’s a very candid making-of feature with Sonomura, Koga, Director/Writer Tsujimoto. It’s centered around their visit to the Fantasia Film Festival in Toronto, and even includes some footage of Koga and Sonomura as they walk in the Toronto airport, having just landed, and also in their hotel practicing some of the close quarters combat from the first fight scene. You’ll also see them as their film is about to be shown to the audience, and in calmer, quieter settings for an interview. It’s revealed that they had practically no money to make this movie, which only speaks to the skill of the cast and crew involved in that it turned out very well — although I still think the last half hour could have been less bizarre.
To the summary…
