Kibakichi

His name is Kibakichi and his is a Wolf appearing as a man.  His travels have brought him to a village deep in the mountains.  Here a Yokai mob boss seeks to create a paradise where Humans and Yokai can live in peace like long ago.  Kibakichi is skeptical, having paid the price for trusting humans with the inadvertent destruction of his own home.  But when a shady government official prepares a team of Yokai exterminators to enter the village and kill everyone, Kibakichi will have to decide if one mans dream is worth dying for.  Either way, when Yokai begin to fall to the hands of man, the real Kibakichi is unleashed…and there might not be anyway to stop his rage.

I know X was supposed to start today but it didn’t seem right to do a review on Halloween of something that isn’t exactly horror in nature.  I had debated a while if I was even going to do this film and it’s sequel for Halloween…and in the end said, why not? 

It’s kind of hard to say when Kibakichi was released, information about the film is actually kind of sparse online.  Even though some sites say it came out around 2004, the look and feel of the film is almost reminiscent of 60’s and 70’s samurai films like Zatoichi and Sleepy Eyes of Death.  So I guess you could call this film a throwback to those days of wandering samurai getting into plots when all they want is some peace and quiet. 

Ironically, there’s an awful lot of quiet in this film after the amazing opening scene.  Seeing Kibakichi cut down a small group of thieves single handidly is something straight out of an Anime and is a joy to watch over and over again.  After that though, once Kibakichi arrives at the village the film is set in, things kind of hit a screeching halt.  Most of the movie is several gambling scenes and shots of life in this village of monsters disguised as humans.  There may be one or two tiny bits of tension but they never amount to much.  Even the horror factor feels a little low as we see most of the Yokai in the village in human form and rarely ever in monster mode (more on that in a second).  Once we get to the last half hour, however, it’s no holds barred action and Kibakichi is at it’s best when the werewolf Samurai actually gets to use his sword.  Anyone who’s a fan of over the top gore will get a kick out of the old school blood spraying when someone dies or loses a limb, it’s actually pretty hilarious.

Kibakichi’s true form is…more miss than hit.  The initial werewolf transformation is a little intense but once it’s complete, the film becomes laughably bad with it’s action.  The editing is choppy (my guilty favorite is when Kibakichi smacks a soldier twice, walks away, and then two seconds later the soldier spins to his death), the monster effects don’t look any better than what you’d see in a carnival haunted house, and really it just feels like youre watching a sample of an old Super Sentai battle with guys in suits not looking so terrifying.  For this being a village full of monsters, we don’t get to see too many monsters, nor do we see Kibakichi fighting them in human or wolf form.

There are plenty of good ideas here.  A village where monsters live as humans to avoid suspicion is novel but not when the monster aspect is almost nil.  It’s also good to connect it to Kibakichi, who knows as well as we do that the humans will eventually kill them off…cause it happened to his people once.  And come on, the bad guys are boy band models in black outfits, why the heck would you ever trust them?  Back to Kibakichi himself, his backstory is pretty tragic and the look of horror on his face in his nightmare flashbacks is genuine.  Same cant be said for his female Werewolf counterpart, Anju, who only appears for one short scene to set up her appearance in the sequel.  All Anju ever does is scowl, even when the flashback is showing happier times.  She’s hot, I’ll give her that.  But Anju never leaves an impression and she could have been left out of the film all together and nothing would have been bothered.

In my honest opinion, Kibakichi is worth the watch if only for the fantastic opening and the hilarious finale.  And by hilarious I mean the actual monster v monster battles (watching the village get massacared is actually pretty sad).  If you can stomach all of the slowness and unimpressive monster visuals in the middle, you can salvage your viewing experience with those two sections of the film.  If you’re a fan of lowly samurai with supernatural skills wandering the land and getting into trouble, it’s not a waste of time…but there are better titles out there (and probably scarier ones too).

5/10

Does the sequel fair better or worse?  I don’t know, this one set the bar pretty low.  Guess we’ll see later on when I post my review of Kibakichi 2.