I watched an incredibly shitty foreign film called The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi. It was made in 2003 and it feels like a student film. The sound design was horrendous, there were an incredibly high amount of questionable edit cuts, the music was a MIDI piece of shit, the story was all over the place, the climax of the film was shit, the plot twist upon plot twist upon shitty plot twist was horrifying, the special effects were horrific, and the character motivations and dialogue was just horrible.
And then Roger Ebert gives this movie a fucking
3.5 out of 4. Is Roger Ebert a FRAUD!? He must have been high writing such high praise for this godawful movie.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-blind-swordsman-zatoichi-2004In fact, I see nothing but high praise for this incredibly shitty action flick. There are people out there who like it because it's unconventional, and I'm okay with unconventional. I like unconventional. But it has to work. And this movie simply does not work.
Watch this 2 minute clip and tell me that's not utter shit. And I don't mind a shitty post-production movie if the story is good. It's not.
The movie started off well enough. It fooled me into thinking it was a decent movie for the first 5 minutes, even with the awful fake CGI blood they decided to go with for some reason.
Spoilers, I'm going to talk about the plot and it's not worth watching so don't worry.
Basically there's this blind man named Zatiochi who is a Samurai and he walks into this town where the Gizno gang runs things. There's an incredible amount of cringy exposition in the dialogue the further along this movie goes. It's like the screenwriter got lazy after the first 20 pages or so. So anyways, off track.
There's this Samurai referred to as the Bodyguard who is basically the main Vader type bad guy who does all the grunt work like a badass, and he has a wife or girlfriend who is sick, which is why he's being a bodyguard for the bad guy Giznos. She hates him killing people, and they mention this a few times, but she ends up taking a back seat to the rest of the film, despite her worries being a possible interesting side story for the movie. She also conveniently commits suicide unprovoked near the end of the film. I shit you not. She just pulls out a knife and ends it all, Japanese-style. No dialogue involving her for the last half hour before that. Just a shitty suicide with NO MOTIVATION. AAAAAAUUUUGGGHHHHH did a third grader write this shit
So what kicks this movie off is that the people are complaining that the Gizmos are stealing all their money through a protection racket. The blind guy ends up going gambling and he's perfect at it. He meets some deadbeat nephew or cousin of the landlady the blind guy is staying with, whom they explain using a horrible horrible transition effect, putting the image of him gambling over them talking, an effect they never repeat again in the film, so don't say it's some stylistic shit.
So anyways, the blind guy meets up with the nephew and they make a shit ton of money off gambling, and they go to get some hookers. Well, the nephew guy does, the blind guy just tags along because why not, old guys gotta get some action too. So they pick up some ladies, and they go in, and then the ladies are ambushing them but the blind guy has perfect reflexes so they back up and say "sorry we didn't mean to, listen to this story YOU WON'T BELIEVE" and instead of being normal and leaving, the main characters stick around with these two highly unconvincing people who literally just tried to kill them. Great script, morons. Maybe rewrite it?
So the story ends up being the driving force behind the movie's excuse of a plot. The two women (one who ends up actually being just a man who dresses up as a woman for the entire movie and then ends up just sticking with the look at the end of the movie, whoops spoilers) talk about their backstory, where they go out in the middle of the night as kids and while they do that a gang goes out and kills everyone inside, stealing all the loot. They know there are two kids missing but they're like whatever, might as well not look for them, let's leave!
So what ends up happening is that the two people who had a sad backstory want revenge on the bosses. Through some incredibly cringy and highly unlikely coincidences and dialogue, the two end up finding out that some guy they danced for is one of the people who killed their family. So they want to go back and kill him now, even though they suck at fighting. So that's kind of the premise, and a lot of stupid shit happens in this movie. I'm so mad I have to write a 3-page paper for this pile of shit.