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Intro/teaser: A single iconic image is used on the DVD main menu, the same five seconds looped endlessly: A man stands with his sword unsheathed and at the ready, a child borne on his back, the sinking sun setting, the sky ablaze behind them. As the wind gently blows the grasses around them, they stare off towards a recently vanquished foe, still standing upright despite his lack of a head, blood spurting up and out, but not obscenely, almost amusedly, as if to say, “Well, that happened.”

When I was a child, Leonard Maltin’s TV Movies and Video Guide was my flashlight of mini-criticism shining into a world of thousands and thousands of films that I (wrongly) suspected I would never be able to gain access to. I reread those capsule reviews so many times that a good number of the sentences have become as dear to my heart and repeatable as anything captured in Bartlett’s Quotations. For the original Friday the 13th, a parenthetical aside on its success with the teen market snarkily asserted that this was “one more reason as to why SAT scores continue to decline.” The review for the sequel succinctly observed, “More nubile campers. More bloody executions. If you loved Part 1…”

Still another: Scorsese’s The King of Comedy comes highly recommended as a “pungent black comedy” where “ the denouement is a wow!” Since both of those vocab words popped up over and over in my Honors English classes, I have a special scholarly nostalgia for them, I must confess. But regardless of that, “the denouement is a wow!” may be the most elegantly composed and concise sentence in the entire book. It trips off the tongue. It’s upbeat, and lyrical, and it also sounds like the best band name ever for a solo electronic artist making music on his/her laptop. A Google search only shows three hits for it so here’s hoping this helps to carry it just a little bit further.

Sometimes, it wasn’t simply a catchy sentence that stayed with me, but the desire created by the capsule review to see a particular film. Shogun Assassin was one such film. All I knew about this film until the time I was 19 was encapsulated in Maltin’s three sentences (one quite long, the other two fairly short.)

And yet, despite having seen Shogun Assassin twice before this week’s column, I had never delved any further into the rather protracted history of the film. If I had, I would have discovered that the last of Maltin’s sentences is (gasp!) wrong, after a fashion. I also would have realized that Shogun Assassin isn’t really a Chapter Two. But it is. Kind of. Are we clear on that? Then, l shall begin. And since this is me, I’ll start in the middle.

I had never had any luck locating Shogun Assassin at the smaller, independently owned video stores in Sisters or Bend, so imagine my surprise when one of my college chums discovered it at a Hollywood Video (RIP) location in a town several miles outside of Portland. It seemed surreal that a chain video retailer dedicated to having multiple copies of all the new releases would have such an obscure film. But this was proving to be a fortuitous year for such matters.

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