Sword of Doom 1966

Into the Dark
Sword of Doom is the best of the non Akira Kurosawa Samurai films. The action sequences are phenomonal, and the setting is so atmospheric and beautiful it leaves you entranced. The snow scene where our anti-hero meets with his kharmic opposite for the first time (Mifune Toshiro) has to be the most beautiful setting for a battle I have ever seen. The story is of a thoughtful swordsman who is evil, yet unlike so many other films where there is no character or depth to a villains evil we really get to know Ryunesuke. His Father comments that he is fascinated with evil and therefore he has sought it out and now it has overcome him. We later see examples of his swordstyle even affected by his soul. He kills people that ask to be killed without thinking twice, and all in all he is a complex swordsmen who can't necessarily be written off as just an evil person. The ending leaves you gasping for more, wich I am told exists you just have to read the books or speak fluent japanese to...

The Great Boddhisattva Pass (Daibosatsu Toge)
Thats the real name of this story. "Sword of Doom" was to be part one of a three part story. There are other versions of this story, but none have been subtitled into english yet. Basically, the story is about a swordsman who suffers from bad karma. Everything he does comes back to haunt him. He can't stop it and goes through fits of madness. If the story had continued further you would have seen him go blind in an explosion, become an even better swordsman, and continue to suffer more because he wants to see his son again. All of this is to convey the idea in Buddhism that "Life is Suffering". Most of the people that complain about the ending of the movie are clueless about the original book story, other filmed versions, and think that "Sword of Doom" is the complete story. It is not, because the sequels were never made.

Complex, Profound, and Bloody - The Bushido Way...
The actions of a man can describe the man's true identity, as the identity of righteousness and moral character are a reflection of a man's actions. Bushido expresses honor before living, which was the way of the samurai. This honor seemed to fade away, as large numbers of samurai without masters accrued in cities and other locations around Japan during the 1860s. At the end of the shogunate in 1868, which also changed the importance of the samurai in the Japanese society, warfare began a drastic change from swords to guns and cannons. The end of samurai also indicated an end to bushido, which lead many samurai into a more corrupt lifestyle where honor no longer had the same meaning.

Sword of Doom opens in the spring of 1860 where a young woman and her grandfather climb a mountain pass where the grandfather is ruthlessly murdered without any apparent reason by the film's antihero, Ryunosuke Tsukue (Tatsuya Nakadai). Ryunosuke is the symbolic embodiment of the...

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