Product Description

Branded to Kill, the wildly perverse story of the yakuza's rice-sniffing "No. 3 Killer," is Seijun Suzuki at his delirious best. From a cookie-cutter studio script, Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece-and was promptly fired. Criterion presents the DVD premiere of Branded to Kill in a pristine transfer from the original Nikkatsu-scope master.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48670 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 1999-02-23
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Black & White, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Japanese
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 91 minutes

Amazon.com
Seijun Suzuki's absolutely mad yakuza movie bends the hit-man genre so out of shape it more resembles a Luis Bunuel take on Martin Scorsese. Number three killer Goro Hanada (Jo Shishido) is a hired killer who loves his work, but when he misses a target after a mere butterfly sets his carefully balanced aim astray, he becomes the next target of the mob. Goro is no pushover and easily dispatches the first comers, leaving them splayed in death contortions that could qualify for an Olympic event, but the rat-a-tat violence gives way to a surreal, sadistic game of cat and mouse. The legendary Number One mercilessly taunts his target before moving in with him in a macho, testosterone-laden Odd Couple truce that ends up with them handcuffed together. Kinky? Not compared to earlier scenes. The smell of boiling rice sets Goro's libido for his mistress so aflame that Suzuki censors the gymnastic sex with animated black bars that come to life in an animated cha-cha. Because Suzuki pushed his yakuza parodies and cinematic surrealism too far, his studio, Nikkatsu, finally called in their own metaphoric hit and fired the director with such force that he was effectively blackballed from the industry for a decade. It took about that long for audiences to embrace his audacious genre bending--Suzuki's pop-art sensibilities were just a bit ahead of their time. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

What's It Worth?
Honestly, I was expecting a New Wave film, but what I got was a film that, stylistically, compares with the New Wave, but fails to achieve New Wave pathos. But that doesn't mean "Branded to Kill" is a bad film, it just means you have to look at it from a different perspective: The film is fluff, substance is style. It's lack of cohesion seems to be an intellectual bluff rather than a conscious, "artistic" convention. Therefore, the film should be compared to the films of Roger Corman and the Blaxploitation era.

"Branded to Kill" seems like the Asian precursor to films like "Hard Boiled" and "The Killer". BTK's action scenes are inventive and frenzied. They are not "realistic", but they fit within the film's tone, which is unrealistic anyway. Everything is over the top, and the film has that "go for broke" feeling of the New Wave. You have to admire Suzuki's moxy, which suits the era and environment in which the film was created.

In the interview on this disk, Suzuki says his films were meant to be strictly entertaining. That they are. "Branded to Kill" is one of the most entertaining films I've ever seen, besting even some of Roger Corman's films. It's both maddening and exuberant, and a great example of perverse cinema.

Butterfly Kiss
I was inspired to seek out Branded to Kill as it's one of Jim Jarmusch's favorite films, and he's one of my favorite filmmakers. You could say that his interest in Japanese pop culture first came to the fore in Mystery Train, the darkly comic tale of two Japanese tourists on a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Elvis. But it's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which mostly clearly takes its inspiration from Seijun Suzuki's bizarre, yet strangely beautiful Branded to Kill. Certainly, the external trappings are different (Suzuki's film is in B&W, it's set in Japan, RZA most definitely did not compose the soundtrack, etc.), but the central characters are cut from the same inscrutable cloth. Arguably, Ghost Dog also takes its inspiration from another non-American noir released in '67--Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai with Alain Delon as, you guessed it, a bird-loving hitman of few words (a film that, in turn, inspired John Woo's The Killer).

Branded to Kill plays like a cross between an American noir from the 1950s (Kiss Me Deadly), a French New Wave post-noir (Breathless, Le Doulos), and a Japanese "art" film (Woman in the Dunes). At first, you think Goro (Jo Shishido) is one odd dude (with his chipmunk cheeks, weird rice obsession, insatiable libido, etc.), but then you meet the women in his life... Both of them, his wife (Mariko Ogawa) and butterfly-obsessed mistress (Mari Annu), are about as strange as it gets (so strange--and downright kinky--that accusations of misogyny would not be completely misplaced).

If you've been looking for something different, you've found it in Branded to Kill. If the plot is as incomprehensible as that of The Big Sleep, it doesn't really matter. It's all about the look and feel of the thing, best exemplified by the set pieces, which can be quite spectacular (and were constructed more out of ingenuity than cash). Recommended as much to fans of Jarmusch and Melville as to fans of Takeshi Kitano, another helmer who's mastered the art of the silent, sympathetic hitman. And you'll never look at a butterfly the same way again--or a bowl of rice, for that matter.

Trivia note: Masatoshi Nagase (Mystery Train, the Suzuki-inspired Most Terrible Time of My Life) also appears in Pistol Opera (2001), Suzuki's sequel to Branded to Kill (released when Nagase was a year old!).

Never seen anything like this; Yakuza existentialism
Japanese Noir? If such a thing is possible, I guess this is it. Although I think that the more recent Beat Takeda movies are closer to the classic American form that Suzuki's stuff. Am I detecting the influence of the French New Wave in this film? Existentialism seems to manifest itself in different ways throughout the film particularly in the numbering of the yakuza killers. I was amazed by the really strong erotic content but found some of the violence cartoonish (not neccessarily a bad thing). If you buy this, and I strongly reccomend that you do,don't try very hard to figure it out as you go along. Just ride along with it and it will take you to some very dark, and bizarre, places.