After seeing Kill Bill and noting that the wonderful aspects of the film were taken from Chinese and Japanese cinema, I decided to hunt out similar flims that featured awesome swordplay and body part castration. It’s a shame than the American director Quentin Tarantino did a better job using the staples of these cult films than Masakazu Shirai does in Reborn from Hell: Jubei’s Revenge.
Not since The Haunted Lantern have I seen such a horrid horror film. Legendary Samurai Jubei Yagyu (not the Jubei from the popular series Ninja Scroll) faces off against Necromancer Shisetsu Yui and his undead armies. Even if Jubei can overcome the legions against him, he must still confront his own father, who has been resurrected as a devil in the present. As I say this, I feel utterly retarded and unworthy of writing, but I deserve a purple heart of some kind for sitting through this film.
I found the traditional samurai-era costumes and hairstyles cool, but it was really hard to like anything in this movie without it being ruined by something that made no sense and destroyed any hope of the film being redeemed at all. For instance, at first, I thought the fight scenes had some good choreography with great swordsmanship, however, that was ruined with really bad sound effects every time the swords hit or were just swung. It was very cartoonish and got even worse when the choreography of the sword fights started slipping. The fight scenes became slow, redundant, cheesy and almost looking as if a walkthrough rehearsal was shot and because of budget constraints had to be placed in the film instead of the real shot.
There were a couple cool fight scenes especially when Jubei’s disciples would be outnumbered and fight their best to stay alive only to die. However, those scenes were choppy and unrealistic, because blood was spurting everywhere even though the movie’s producers apparently did not have the budget to even show someone getting stabbed by the sword. It got much worse as a ninja was stabbed by numerous swords, and still managed to walk around dripping with blood and to make one final call to Jubei before succumbing to his death. Talk about overacting.
Speaking of bad, there was some seriously bad dialogue here as laughable as you can expect from any bad movie that actually takes itself seriously. “You would have never said such things before,” said Jubei to an old friend who responds, “Now, I’m a demon from hell.” There is also a laughable scene where our main villain casts a spell to bring someone back from the dead by reciting what sure sounded like an old Beatles song (de dum de dum de da, de dum de dem de da). Maybe playing a Beatles record backwards really does bring out the evil?
Then there was this scene where Jubei confronts his demon father who tells him just how much he does loves him. “I may be your father, but I am going to kill you, NOW!!!” In all honesty, this battle was the only scene where emotions played any factor. Flashbacks show us that the father is actually responsible for Jubei losing an eye (tough love). When Jubei eventually gets his revenge and slices his father’s head off, he and the head have one last meaningful conversation before Jubei takes his father’s head, wraps it in a blanket, hugs it and walks away with it. Awwww!
Of course, who can forget the scene where the head of a woman begs someone to reattach her to her body? What was really sad was that the blurb on the box claims this movie was better than the first film in the series. Could that be honestly possible? Then again, I did sit through this whole film without killing myself. So I guess anything is possible; anything except me recommending this film. Buy it as a gift for someone you hate.
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