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While the soundtrack does retain some of the musical cues of the Lone Wolf and Cub films, an entirely new score was commissioned by the American producers and co-composed by Mark Lindsay (former lead singer of Paul Revere & the Raiders) and W. Michael Lewis (who had a good thing going with these sorts of flicks for a while, also doing music for Enter the Ninja and Revenge of the Ninja). Relying primarily on synthesizer (with performance credit given to the “Wonderland Philharmonic”), the score is moody and in a minor key, but used to enhance and not overpower the scenes, like an ambient wave washing over the visuals. For me, it was reminiscent in parts of Tangerine Dream’s cinematic projects around that time. In key scenes of swift and brutal violence, the wise choice was made to keep the score silent and only allow for the sounds of blades meeting and flesh weeping blood (a decision carried over from the Japanese films.)

The dubbing of the voices is handled fairly well for this sort of project. Yes, the voices don’t always match with the lips but the American team (including but not limited to director Robert Houston and writer David Weisman, who were also producers and providers of some of the voice work) seemingly did not set out to translate this into a parody of its source a la What’s Up Tiger Lily? Or Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. It is amusing to note that a very identifiable Sandra Bernhard made her screen debut (or her voice did at least) here, just two years before her first major role in…The King of Comedy.

What was done via the new dialogue and voiceover was a major oversimplification and overhauling of the plot so that the “story” could be kept confined to a single film with beginning, middle, and end, and the key action scenes from Sword of Vengeance (which is mostly setup for the series) could be lifted out and somehow incorporated. By an amusing irony then, the plot of Sword of Vengeance is so dense that to encapsulate here would almost require a separate column and the “plot” of Shogun Assassin is so minimal that it evaporates from one’s mind even in the act of viewing it. I found that watching the two films so close together tended to defeat any distinctions even further, especially since I was seeing the exact same footage in a different (but not drastically so) context.

But the film’s masterstroke, intentional or not, is the narration. Some research on the Web - verified in more than one place - indicates that Gibran Evans, who was seven-years-old at the time, supplies the voice of Daigoro. Evans is the son of Jim Evans, a painter, illustrator, and graphic/web designer who also worked on concert and film posters including, yes, Shogun Assassin. So Houston and Weisman obviously didn’t venture far to find young Evans.

The punch line is that - at least for this fan of voice over narration - Gibran’s work ranks among the best ever. I don’t know how much praise is warranted - if he was directed to read with a flat and consistent inflection or if he read all of his lines in 30 minutes in one studio session with no modulation but his voice matches perfectly with the sad passive eyes of Masahiro Tomikawa, and even now I can hear his tones sifting through my brain.

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