For years, the Japanese cinema cranked out samurai adventures about a blind swordsman named Zatoichi. As a job description, “blind swordsman” does not sound reassuring, but it’s a gimmick that has ...

Nobody can make you like this stuff if you don't want to. So although there's no doubt that "The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi" is the summer's most rousing action picture, it's also hard as nails, bloody ...

How does one perpetuate the longest-running samurai action series–which yielded 26 films and over a hundred TV episodes starring the late Shintaro Katsu as a blind, sword-wielding masseur–without ...

Jeremy has more than 2100 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly ...

But there’s still enough “Beat” in Kitano for him to retain his impish streak. In “The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi,” more so than any other Kitano film save for the little-known “Getting Any?,” a gag is ...

Blind Meng, played by Mo Tse, is a blind bounty hunter with a mysterious past who hunts wanted criminals during the twilight years of the Tang Dynasty, where corruption and lawlessness spread across ...

When I was in high school 20-something years ago, I would get up early every Saturday to watch Zatoichi movies on cable. One of Japan’s longest-running film series (seriously, think the Marvel movies ...

Of the two (count ’em!) Asian swashbuckling epics reaching our area this week, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi is best recognized as the one that doesn’t carry the pandering tag line, “Quentin Tarantino ...

The hundred episodes of the TV series followed 1970s TV dynamics: Zatoichi was (mostly) unchanging from one episode to the next, and the 45-minute episodes (allowing for 15 minutes of advertisement ...

I admit it. What I don’t know about samurai or martial arts flicks would fill up a thousand Thomas Video stores. I snobbishly dismissed the genre as cartoonish, over-the-top drivel geared toward ...