The success of a director like Seijun Suzuki shouldn't happen. Imagine what would happen if one of the directors from the straight to DVD cheese factory Asylum decided instead of making a souless rip off of GI Joe and instead decided to make an all out gonzo art film instead. It's Antichrist for the z-fare audience. That's who Suzuki was, back in the 60s. Working for Nikatsu Studios he was tasked with making low rent crime and sexploitation movies. Sleaze and cheese. Bored with making cinematic meat for his employers, he decided to create avant-garde crime cinema. Branded To Kill is the last in what unofficially consider to be the last part of his Yakuza Pop Trilogy (the first two are Youth of the Beast and Tokyo Drifter), a movie so stylized and so weird that it caused him to be fired from Nikatsu and be blacklisted from the biz for over a decade.
Branded to Kill plays to Suzuki's strengths, having scene after scene of well framed action sequences as well as a protagonist with a twisted sense of sexuality. This is the only movie outside of a director like Miike or Cronenburg who could have a protagonist who needs the scent of a warm bowl of rice as a sexual aid.
The set pieces are brilliant as well. Two of Ghost Dog's assassinations are lifted whole sale from this movie, including the famous butterfly sniper scene that Matt Fraction acknowledges in the back matter of Casanova as being an influence on his work.
Branded To Kill, like most of my favourite movies, sticks with me for sheer audacity and willingness to buck conventional structure. Check it out.
