Baby Cart in the Land of the Demons

The best thing about Baby Cart in the Land of the Demons (1973) is its surreal title.  The film itself is relentlessly gory with a trite plot devised as means to string together a series of massacres.  There's no suspense in the movie since the hero is invulnerable.  At the end of the picture, the main character slaughters about a hundred enemies armed with various sorts of weapons without even breaking a sweat.  It's ridiculous, but, worse, also weirdly nihilistic.  The taciturn hero, who looks like a fat Clint Eastwood, kills everyone in sight -- when the rest of the cast (and, possibly, part of the crew) are dead, the picture ends.  

The so-called "Babycart" series, also sometimes known as "Lone Wolf and Cub", are based on Japanese manga popular in the sixties.  Itto Ogama (I'll use Western conventions -- that is, surname last) is the retired (or exiled or what?) "shogunate executioner," also called "Lone Wolf".  With his four-year old son, he wanders around Japan killing everyone in sight.  The little boy is called Daigoro or Cub.  Itto pushes the tot around in a wooden perambulator that is surprisingly versatile -- it floats, moves readily even through deep sand, and is equipped with various spring-loaded spears, lances and knives.  The child is completely impassive, numb apparently to the carnage occurring at intervals of about five minutes, violence that ramps up from individul duels to the murder of whole platoons of enemies.  There is only the thinnest of plot-lines since the raison d'etre of the movie is to cram together as many showy killings as possible.  The hero barely speaks and seems modeled on the Man with No Name character played by Eastwood in spaghetti westerns.  There's no love interest -- female characters get slaughtered with the same alacrity as everyone else.  The films are beautifully, if monotonously, shot -- the camera uses an extreme wide-angle aspect with almost continual use of telephoto lenses to squash everything into the ribbon of the picture-plane.  Sometimes, parts of the picture in close range are blurred -- sometimes, the opposite effect is used with the more distant part of the image out of focus.  Most of the film is shot on location, out doors, and, as is typical of Japanese films, the landscape imagery is frequently very beautiful.  As in classical Westerns, the terrain changes from scene to scene -- in this movie, there are waterfalls, mountains, dense elegant forests, and a great expanse of sand dunes along a savage-looking seacoast.  There are usually interesting things to see in every shot and so the film is not too awful to watch, although it is sometimes tedious and, certainly, alienating to a Western viewer.  A typical scene involves a duel next to an overshot waterwheel -- the wheels creaks and turns, a great wooden disk framed by the rickety scaffolding that pours water over its top.  The telephoto lens makes it seem as if the duel is happening about six inches in front of the water-wheel which rotates inexorably during the fight.  The hero, of course, stabs the bad guy through the sternum.  These villains, who aren't really bad guys, just hapless messengers, have a  trick of applying pressure to their mortal wounds long enough to provide the plot information necessary to move the story forward.  Then, they let go, blood  gushes out, and they conveniently drop dead.  The hero frowns and scowls like a Kabuki demon and, then, resolutely pushes his perambulator into the next scene.  There are frequent close-ups of the small boy watching the blood shed -- his head is shaved elaborately (he has various topknots and man buns).  His huge benumbed eyes seem to represent the fascinated, if indifferent, glare of the audience surveying all this carnage.

Land of the Demons was the 5th in a six picture cycle that was, of course, wildly popular.  The film feels a bit exhausted and, certainly, is repetitive.  Five vassals of the Koroda clan are sent, one after another, to assassinate Itto.  Of course, he readily dispatches all of them, but not before they announce to him that he has been hired to retrieve a letter in the hands of an old sinister Buddhist abbot. (They have to assault him with various weapons so he can prove his prowess -- which he reliably does by killing each of them.)  The letter apparently explains that the Koroda clan's warlord has been manipulated into allowing his favorite concubine to substitute her daughter (about the age of Cub) for the rightful prince (who seems to be about seven).  The gender of the little girl has been concealed.  For some reason, this is an outrage and the Buddhist abbot, who has learned of this through the letter, plans to use this information to incite other enemy clans to destroy the Koroda's.  The letter is the MacGuffin, as Hitchcock would call it, an object of no intrinsic value that everyone is desperately seeking.  Midway through the picture, in an elaborate fight scene involves three or four different contending enemies, Lone Wolf seizes the letter after attacking the Abbot when he is crossing a river with his entourage.  (Lone Wolf swims under the Abbot's elaborate barge, cuts a hole in the bottom, sucks the priest into the river and, then,  disembowels him in showy plumes of blood underwater.)  Once, Lone Wolf has the letter, his mission apparently changes -- now, he's been paid to kill the prince regent, the scheming concubine, and the four-year old girl masquerading as a boy-prince. In fact, the letter turns out to be literally meaningless -- some sort of fluid comes through the ceiling of an Inn where Lone Wolf is staying and erases the kanji on the letter; I had the impression that a female heroine pees on the letter through the porous roof, but, probably, this is just a fantasy.  Lone Wolf forces his way into the palace of the War Lord, slaughters everyone, and beheads not only the evil concubine, but her consort, and the little girl.  The happy ending, as it were, is a shot showing the heads of these three characters sitting on a window sill.  Lone Wolf, then, goes to the seashore where some woman has just committed hara kiri -- they talk, she drops dead in the surf, and the hero, with his toddler-son, sails into the setting sun.  Some of this is quite jarring -- a few minutes before she is unceremoniously beheaded, the very cute little princess pretending to be a boy makes funny faces at Cub, who responds in kind; they would obviously like to be playmates except that fatso Dad has the bad habit of cutting off the head of everyone they meet, including women and children.  The gore becomes more and more pronounced as the film proceeds -- the film progresses (if that's the right word) from simply bloody wounds to huge arterial sprays that sound like fire hoses being deployed.  The blood is a strangely syrupy pinkish stuff -- it's not blood, as Godard said about one of his films, but just red accents sprayed here and there to make the images more colorful.  There's a strange sequence involving a comely pickpocket named Quick Change O-Yo.  She gives Cub a purse that she has just stolen and tells him to not tell anyone about what she has done   He gives his word.  She, then, gets captured and to get Cub to confess, a local magistrate beats the four-year old with flail that's bigger that the child.  The scene goes on and on, apparently devised to demonstrate the tot's courage and his stolid adherence to the psychopathic samurai code of honor.  (Of course, Cub doesn't confess or say anything other than "no".)  Much of the film is surreal and idiotic -- scenes of the swordsman running around with his perambulator in open country, pausing now and then to hack to death a couple dozen bad guys, are risible.  In one sequence, a vassal obedient to his thankless assignment of getting himself killed in order to deliver a message to Lone Wolf, gets stabbed and falls into a bonfire.  No worries, he delivers a lengthy bit of plot of information to the silent and impassive Lone Wolf while the fire burns him to a cinder.   All characters in this film, including small children, are tough as nails; they just aren't too smart. 

I'd like to recommend this film as a "guilty pleasure."  Here's some dialogue:  "My son, I have chosen the path of carnage.  We live the demon way in Hell."  But the picture is too irredeemably stupid to be worth watching.