As a teenager, I was lucky enough to make internet friendships with a few obscure movie connoisseurs — folks who had traded VHS tapes and staked out midnight movies for decades before meeting me so that I could access and enjoy the best of cult cinema. At the time, I had a subscription to the pre-streaming Netflix, which sent you discs of movies in the mail. With lists upon lists of weird movies at hand and a queue of movies stretching into three or four hundred, I often didn’t know exactly what was coming into my mailbox next, but it was often something totally weird an unexpected. I treated these DVDs like homework. $15 a month subscription was a lot for me as a 16-year-old, and I was determined to make the most of it.
So it came — extremely slow but beautiful Taiwanese art-house cinema, goofy and gory gialli movies, kung fu flicks and southern fried exploitation. And while a lot of that time is now a blur, a friend of mine recently dug up a list of recommendations I had sent him more than 10 years ago. We were looking for something to watch, and I recognized some of the titles. We landed on Lady Snowblood, and now I know why my teenage self must have liked this film so much — it’s absolute genius!
Now remastered in BluRay by Criterion Collection, the 1973 samurai flick follows a female assassin in 19th century Japan. It is a classic revenge film, and the protagonist, Yuki, has dedicated her life to finding and killing the low-lifes who exploited a political crisis to kill her father and rape her mother. Although the training sequences, deep and poetic explorations of honour and murder, and female protagonist in a typically chauvinist genre make for a compelling text on their own, Lady Snowblood is a visual masterpiece. Although it’s special effects are delightfully gonzo (bright red and orange blood spews in fountains from Yuki’s victims), the cinematography is stunning. Alternating wideshots of classic Japanese imagery and sometimes daring, vertigo-inducing camera movements, there is a surprising texture to this low-budget film. And more than anything, the vivid, highly saturated, hyperreal colour palate is so juicy, made all the better by the mastering of the folks at Criterion.
Cult movie heads probably already know this one, but for me, re-watching Lady Snowblood 10 years later brought me such joy and reminded me why underground and amateur cinema exists and thrives still today.
Jonathan Valelly is the assistant editor of Broken Pencil Magazine and a reborn cult movie enthusiast.