Powerful

People are voting emotionally.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This is an epic film. Everything from the sound editing to the acting, the fight scenes and the way it looks is mesmerizing. There's a scene at the beginnign where the grinding of the water mill sounds like the beating of a woman's heart just before she is brutally attacked, which is followed up by a more suggestive motion of the mill's inner workings. Metaphors like that help create the tension which is cranked up throughout. I couldn't help thinking while watching it, that this movie must have been a massive influence to modern day film-makers like Quentin Tarantino. The most noticeable thing though is the lighting. It's used to great effect in most scenes to project shadows and silhouettes.If I had to criticise it, I would say the ending is slightly abrupt, but that's being a bit harsh. Overall it's a highly stylish, brutal tale of a samurai on the path to self destruction

THE SWORD OF DOOM is a action drama about a tradition, family and honor, which are connected by a bloody sword. A melodramatic story suggests some form of madness in a lecherous society. It is based on the serial novel of the same title by Kaizan Nakazato.Ryunosuke Tsukue is an amoral and bloodthirsty master swordsman with an unorthodox style. He kills, in cold blood, an elderly Buddhist pilgrim who he finds praying for death. Later, he kills an opponent in self-defense in a fencing competition that was intended to be non-lethal, but became a duel after he coerced his opponent's wife to have sex with him in exchange for throwing the match and allowing her husband to win. He is, for murder, banished from the city. His opponent's ex-wife goes with him. In order to support his wife and child, Ryunosuke joins a mercenary service, which is composed of ronins. Eventually, he learns that the younger brother of the man he killed in the fencing match is looking for him, intent on revenge...It is an isolated and wild action, which has peaks in various forms of killings and bloodshed. The atmosphere is very anxious in an impressive environment. Social categories are distorted in many ways, therefore, this movie reminds on an amoral game, where the winner is only weapon - the sword. A traditional spirit has had a decisive influence on a very good characterization.Tatsuya Nakadai as Ryunosuke Tsukue is an intelligent assassin. He certainly does not show emotion. This is evident in the scenes where he looks his family with a touch of quiet contempt. He is an unconscionable character, but his spirit is shaken when he met his match swordsman. Mr. Nakadai has offered a good performance.His support are Michiyo Aratama (Ohama) as his frightened mistress, Yuzo Kayama (Hyoma Utsuki) as a vengeful, but sensible young man, Yoko Naito (Omatsu) as a young beauty, who is a victim of a sick society and Toshiro Mifune (Toranosuke Shimada) as the master swordsman in the true sense of the word.The film's abrupt ending leaves many plot elements unresolved. Mr. Okamoto has left us to think about destiny, justice, romance and bloody sword.

Over the last thirty plus years hyper-violent action films have been on auto-pilot, recycling the same basic formula where one man with a special skill takes on an army of bad guys in some justified and cathartic slaughter. The motivation for these slaughters almost always involves some variant of a wrong doing typically in the form of the abduction or murder of the protagonist's wife and/or kids. 1967's The Sword of Doom might be party responsible for influencing this tired formula, but Kihachi Okamoto's samurai spectacle is as guilty of cashing in on a pre-existing formula as are its American predecessors. While SOD was made at the height of the Zatoichi craze, the Zatoichi franchise would not exist if not for the WW2- era Japanese Samurai films of Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa (to name a few). Considering the summer blockbuster phenomena was started by a movie ripped from the pages of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, then it's pretty safe to say Hollywood owes Japan, at the very least, its respectful props. But if you consider that post-Kabuki Japanese cinema was greatly inspired by Hollywood, then you're stuck studying a convoluted timeline where influences are consumed by the influenced. What's the point of pointing out this self- consuming timeline? Perhaps the realization there is no such thing as an original story in cinema, just original ways of re-telling the same stories. In other words...it's all in the details.As far as details go, SOD proves even throwaway exploitation films can be incredibly rich, where every element of the mise-en-scène trumpet expert craftsmanship and a commitment to exceptional detail. The most striking of these elements are the images photographed by cinematographer Hiroshi Murai. Murai's work utilizes the very literal expression of black and white photography, painting the contrast between good and evil with the competitive opposition of darkness and light:In addition to the beautifully stark visuals, SOD distances itself from its many American clones thanks to the un-redemptive nastiness of protagonist Ryunosuke Tsukue (Tatsuya Nakadai). Commercial action films with this type of main character rarely (if ever) get financed and the reasoning is simple: how can an audience be expected to root for such a venomous tyrant? By the time SOD comes to a brutal and surprisingly abrupt close, little sympathy is spared for Ryunosuke and even though we know he's possibly the greatest swordsman in all of Japan, few tears are wept in his honor.

Most of the comments have focused on direction. I'm more interested in the acting. Naturally, that is a function of how the director shapes performances on the set and in the editing suite, but the director has to have something to work with.Tatsuya Nakadai has, for his long career as a performer and teacher, a justifiably great reputation. But there's an arc to his development as an actor that has him starting out by chewing scenery as a younger performer and gradually becoming a decent, and then sublime, actor.Sometimes in his early performances a director was able to rein in and/or harness Nakadai's excesses to good effect. For instance, I don't think Kurosawa brought him under control at all in "Sanjuro," but managed to make the best of his hamminess in "Yojimbo," largely by having him channel Elvis Presley's swagger and sneer.The situation is similar in "Sword of Doom," except in this case Nakadai is channeling James Dean's brooding intensity, but with not nearly the subtlety James Dean was famous for. That sort of subtlety comes a lot later in Nakadai's career, most notably in "Kagemusha," when Kurosawa, or Nakadai himself, found his volume knob and turned it down. We don't realize how fortunate we were to have Dean in full-blown genius mode from the beginning. He was a preternaturally old soul. Nakadai just had to age the normal way in order to uncover that inner core that makes a screen performance transcendent.