Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx (Kenji Misumi, 1972)

Cast: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Kayo Matsuo, Akiji Kobayashi, Minoru Oki, Shin Kishida, Shogen Nitta, Takashi Ebata, Kappei Matsumoto, Akihiro Tomikawa. Screenplay: Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Art direction: Akira Naito. Film editing: Toshio Taniguchi. Music: Hideaki Sakurai.

Among the cinematic innovations that Akira Kurosawa is credited with is the use of a pressurized hose to spew fake blood in his 1962 film Sanjuro. The story has it that the amount of pressure needed was miscalculated, and the explosion of gore nearly knocked Tatsuya Nakadai off his feet when he received the fatal blow from Toshiro Mifune's Sanjuro. But the effect was so startling -- and so in keeping with the comic tone that pervades the movie -- that Kurosawa decided to keep it in rather than go to the trouble of reshooting. And so a continuing motif of excessive bloodletting was introduced to the samurai movie. The pressure hoses get quite a workout in Kenji Misumi's second film (of six) in his Lone Wolf and Cub series, as his hero, Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayama) continues to trundle little Daigoro (Akihiro Kobyashi) across the landscape of 17th-century Japan. Wide-eyed Daigoro is witness to all sorts of bloody encounters, and even at one point participates in them: Under attack by a small army, Ogami gives the pram containing the boy a shove into the melee, signaling him to release a mechanism that shoots blades out of the cart's wheels, cutting off a couple of the attackers below the knees. The story doesn't matter much: It's about Ogami's being commissioned to assassinate a man who threatens to reveal a clan's secret process for making indigo dye. This secret is so important that the people who plan to steal it commission ninjas to guard the man who plans to leak it, including a small army of female assassins and a trio of brothers who wear what look like large straw lampshades. Ogami bests them all in various ways, while continuing to defend Daigoro, who at one point is kidnapped and threatened with being dropped into a deep well. The film is full of ingenious ways of putting people to death, including a scene in which the guardians of the thief are crossing a desert when one of the brothers stops and plunges his iron-clawed hand into the sand, out of which bubbles a geyser of blood -- their opponents have buried themselves in the desert, planning an ambush that gets thwarted by the keen-eared brother. But eventually he too, gets what he deserves from Ogami, who cuts his throat, resulting in an almost touching moment in which the dying man listens to his final breath whistling through the wound -- a sound, he says, he always wanted to hear, but not from his own throat. It's this kind of distancing from the dismemberments and blood fountains that makes Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx tolerable, and sometimes even poetic.