Samurai slashing

One of my absolutely favourite things in the entire fucking world is when someone in an old samurai film just loses their shit and starts hacking away at any fools unfortunate to be in the reach of their blade, and all the badass cliches of the stoic, barely moving Japanese swordsman goes right out the paper window.

There's plenty of stillness of Kurosawa, and film-makers are still ripping off the precise and utterly efficient way Seiji Miyaguchi's Kyūzō moved in Seven Samurai, but when the brutes start fighting, they're just waving their blades around madly. There's no thrust or parry here, it's just mania. 

And while the Itto Ogami of the Lone Wolf comics makes his moves with precise gravity, the movements short and sharp, even with the the endless panels of the Manga format, the Itto Ogami envisioned by Tomisaburo Wakayama in the excellent movie adaptations is a whirling dervish of death, flailing around as he runs, creating fountains of blood with an exhausting attack.

While there are certainly great pleasures in the sudden stroke and the precise cut, sometimes you can't beat the sight of someone going totally apeshit.