Critics reviews

The sequel lacks the original's simple, non-stop pacing – hacking from one revenge killing to the next... It often feels like Snowblood is a supporting character in her own feature, as the battle between the Tokunagas and the government dominates. And they are far less compelling characters than Snowblood's enigmatic killing machine. So while it doesn't live up to the original, it still makes for satisfying viewing, especially for those interested in imaginative killings.

An aria of arterial spray, gushing in myriad patterns against a variety of white fabrics. It takes Jean-Luc Godard's tossed off comment that the blood in Pierrot Le Fou (1965) is "Not blood" but "red" to its logical conclusion, a festival of artfully composed throat-slittings and torso hackings. Blood spits out of human bodies like when Mentos are dropped into a bottle of Diet Coke. It frames killing as pure artifice, executed with impassive grace by the beautiful Meiko Kaji.

If the story is simple, the aesthetic is anything but. The first film pushes low-budget ingenuity to the cusp of experimentation, using paintings and still photographs to fill in historical and narrative context, as well as panels from Kazuo Koike's original manga to increase scenes of action. Fujita's direction alternates between carefully composed, mostly static images and rawer, handheld takes of characters in motion.

Yuki's desire to avenge her mother's rape and her family's destruction lends Lady Snowblood a focus that's lost in the less successful sequel, Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance, which replaces single-minded filial fury with a more nebulous consideration of political corruption. Yuki is too simple a character to shoulder the more complicated questions of right and wrong that the first film freely ignores.

Fujita doesn't so much borrow as cannily repurpose avant-gardish techniques and devices to his own more streamlined ends (whereas when Tarantino pays homage to Fujita and other Asian pulp masters, there is a museum-of-annihilation sense of lingering ponderously over each drop-dead flourish). The closest parallel to what Fujita achieves in the first movie is Story of a Prostitute, likewise a synthesis of radical content, formal daring, and an ultraexpressive slant on down-and-dirty conduct.

Love Song of Vengeance distills Japan's aggressive modernization into a crisis narrative whose sympathies are again with displaced peasants. It feels more hemmed in—trying to recapitulate the incredible highs of the first film and yet deviate from the template at the same time. It's the more piecemeal of the two, but nonetheless a captivatingly schizophrenic, startlingly weird movie in its own right.