I love both Message and Eight Samurai.

Message From Space is a more cohesive film with more wackiness and some of the best special FX made in Japan in the 70s. August is right I think in that it's inceptions owes as much to Yamato as it does Star Wars. It looks at times like a live action Leiji Matsumoto comic crossed with the kinetic wackiness of Inframan and also has a weirdly gritty quality akin to Kinji Fukasaku's yakuza films with all that handheld camera work and seedy space cantinas where you'd halfway expect to find Bunta Sugawara smoking cigarettes and drinking Japanese beer. It feels way more "Fukasaku" than The Green Slime does.

However, Legend of the Eight Samurai is a great treat, a beautifully shot work of sheer grotesquery. Fukasaku allegedly actually didn't like samurai films that much since he didn't think Japan's past was something to celebrated. He only agreed to work on The Yagyu Clan Conspiracy back in 1978 on the condition that he could do it in the anarchic, irreverent style of his yakuza films. I'm honestly not sure if Eight Samurai was just a hollow, sugary actioner that he made for Haruki Kadokawa, Nippon's Jerry Bruckheimer for the money, or if he had some sarcastic intent behind it, but the film plays almost like a twisted, self aware parody and deconstruction of the Japanese samurai film ala Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. The end where Hiroko Yakushimaru and Hiroyuki Sanada ride away into the sunset to consummate their illegitimate union, something that would have gotten them hunted down and executed in real Old Japan, as John O'Banion's Air Supply like English pop music plays is something I can't see anyone making and actually taking totally seriously, especially not the man who would make Battle Royale. And that it's subject material is drawn from one of Japan's most beloved folktales about the importance of following bushido at its purest form makes this only more obvious to me. In Macias' linear notes for the film, Fukasaku is quoted as saying that he wanted to make a film more like the American fantasy films being made at the same time like Conan the Barbarian than anything Japanese and you can definitely tell.

Last Edited By: Uchujin65 Feb 12 10 4:29 PM. Edited 2 times.