Branded to Kill [DVD & Blu-ray] [1967]

This is truly a very bizarre film. It's surreal, it's like a dream, a nightmare. This is a film that could only be made by a genius like Seijun Suzuki. It's so weird and crazy that led Nikkatsu firing Suzuki.....!!! The cinematography is stunning, the music is fantastic and adds a lot to the atmospere, but above all is the extraordinare perfect direction by Suzuki. Be prepared and pay attention because the movie is diverse! Branded to kill is a really unique and surreal thriller.

Low budget, but pure artistry on the go. (Ed Wood would have been in raptures.) Seijun Suzuki takes us by the hand into a beautiful world of innocence, instant art, driven by action, sex blended with a sensual surrealism that captured the soul and feel of the 60's. Like the smell of rice, being Japanese, just made the whole experience even sweeter.

Yes I should have read the description very very closely, but the front cover is all in English. Of course being a BR I can't easily rip it and combine it with downloaded subs.

This deliriously violent piece of yakuza surrealism throws genre conventions out the window and instead breaks rules in the best ways imaginable.

great movie!

Seijun Suzuki is probably the most overated Japanese director in the West, it is completely inexplicable how his films are hailed as "cult classics" having watched a few of his films I could clearly see his film were style over substance but not in good way it was just a lot of style and idiotic stories that don't make any sense and feel like parodies. After watching most of his films it looks like he was just a bored director who threw in as many stylistic flourishes or comedy into his films as he could without caring about the craft of story telling. Branded to kill is no different it is just a lot of Pop-Art imagery imposed on a crap story yet for some inexplicable reason it is hailed as Cult-Classic. The first 30 minutes is interesting and coherent with a hitman hired to escort a man to a destination while being followed by killers. These thirty minutes are the only best parts as from than on the film becomes really bizarre and incoherent, we just get bombarded with a lot of sex scenes, the hitman sniffing rice and a incomprehensible plot involving the hitman obsessed with a woman who loves dead butterflies. All this may be amazing to a cult-film lover but it struck me as dumb and idiotic. A Colt Is My Passport (available in Criterion's Nikkatsu Noir boxset) is much better than this crap it stars Jô Shishido as also a hitman (without the parody elements in Branded to Kill) and combines a gripping and coherent story with pop-art imagery that is style and substance while Branded to Kill is just style over substance. Yume Pictures should release a Yakuza film that deserves a DVD release like "Gangster Vip" (1968) Retaliation or Roughneck (Arakure) from Nikkastu and a gripping Yakuza crime films but unfortunately those yakuza classics remain in obscurity while Suzuki's incoherent and pretentious crap get more DVD releases.

Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima cranked up the concept of reality T.V a few notches in 1970 when he invited a few of his media pals along to a hijacking of a government building where he then performed seppuku (Ritual self disembowelling) as a protest against the erosion of traditional Japanese values. Japan in the late 60's saw an upsurge of such demonstrations against western influence - an uprising which had seen riots outside the Budokan Sports Arena a few years previously when the Beatles appeared there. Somewhere during this volatile chapter of cultural osmosis director Seijun Suzuki got fired by the Nikkitsu film company for making his masterpiece BRANDED TO KILL. This maverick film maker was already on thin ice with his fiercely conservative paymasters when his 1966 film TOKYO DRIFTER took the Yakuza (Japanese gangster) genre into new (and thus feared) directions but BRANDED TO KILL was the one that finally broke the chopstick - Rendering the director unemployable for a decade. BRANDED TO KILL charts the fall and fall of No3 Killer, (Jo Shishido) a down at heel hitman, who bodges an assignment when a butterfly lands on the end of his rifle just at the crucial moment. For this gaff he is now subject to the murderous attentions of the mythical No1 Killer. Looking like a giant Gopher in a mohair suit and Raybans, No3 Killer finds himself in a bizarre vortex of shadows and monochrome as he attempts to save his girlfriend from being incinerated, get the better of superior Killer No1 and to survive to become No1 himself. His bizarre quirk of using boiled rice as a form of Viagra does nothing to make his journey anymore straightforward. Surely one of the most beautiful black and white films ever, BRANDED TO KILL is a collision of American `Noir' and giddy Japanese oddness. A genuine cinematic experience - everything within the frame appears to be sculptured from mercury.Cultural Osmosis is rarely an easy thing, but when it works, the result is often something like the offbeat gorgeousness of BRANDED TO KILL.Adrian Stranik

Great release from Arrow of the the super-artsy yakuza tale ’Branded to Kill’ (1967).Nikkatsu did fire Suzuki over this movie, he sued them back, and ended up blacklisted for 10 years. But on the other hand, I it also made him an icon and a legend in the ”counterculture” anti-mainstream society.’Branded to Kill’ has been dissected and praised so many times, and I guess it needs no poor analyses from a simple minded action/horror-nerd like me, but I would say it’s a superb blend of Arthouse and genre cinema with a visual language that's impossible not to get mesmerized by.And what about Shishido Jō? Ain't he the coolest squirrel you ever saw?