Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Branded to Kill started life as another B-movie for the Nikkatsu Company, but the suits weren’t all that enamoured with the script. So, they gave their go-to director Suzuki free rein to do whatever he wanted to, and seemingly what he wanted to do was melt the brain of anyone wandering into a cinema expecting a film that had any sort of conventionality to it. I say this in the way of pre-amble to excuse any recap not making a lot of sense, as, well, it doesn’t.
Joe Shishido’s Goro Hanada is the number three ranked hitman in Japan, and in a roundabout way agrees to help a friend with a job that turns out to be disposing of a body for the Yakuza that turns, for no readily explicable reason, into a running series of firefights with other gangsters, including at least one other highly ranked hitman. For all the chaos, the main plot driver coming from this sequence is Hanada’s car breaking down, leading to him being picked up by an exceeding strange femme fatale, Annu Mari’s Misako Nakajo, a woman with a deathwish and is as into dead butterflies and birds as much as Hanada is into the smell of boiling rice, which is to say worryingly obsessively.
She offers him an almost impossible to execute multi-target contract, that against all odds, and in some instances the laws of physics, seems to be going well until a freak accident sees Hanada kill a bystander, which is apparently a big no-no in the ranked murderer league, meaning that there’s now a target on his head that the legendary number one killer, played by Koji Nanbara, is coming to collect. It’s up to Hanada to survive, and perhaps defeat the odds and claim the number one position for himself.
Now, said like that, it’s more or less coherent, which I do apologise for, as that’s entirely misleading. This film is bonkers, the likes of which I’ve not seen since Operation Kid Brother. I’ve carefully left out the parts where, for example, Hanada makes an escape by randomly jumping out of a window to land on a passing hot air ballon, or the multiple times items of jewellery prove to be life-saving bullet deflection devices, or, indeed, the entire final act where in order to mess with Hanada, his new mortal enemy simply moves into his apartment and lives with him for a while. It is bananas.
Now, the weird thing for me (and apologies for the opinion spoilers), despite Pistol Opera doing much the same schtick, I really enjoyed Branded to Kill in a way I did not for its sequel. I don’t know if it’s the charming jankiness that comes from the low budget origins, or if it’s the hypnotic qualities of Shishido’s cosmetically enhanced cheeks, making him look like a psychotic hamster, or if it’s the film’s dedication to zagging where every bone in your body expects it to zig.
It’s 100% certifiable absurd, perhaps parodic nonsense, of course, and there’s more than a few elements of this that ordinarily would just be straight up gratuitous, particularly everything involving Hanada’s clothing averse wife that’s maybe only not entirely indefensible as porn because Hanada’s often huffing boiling rice at the same time, giving these scenes a veneer of implausible deniability.
I’m certainly not going to call Branded To Kill good, in any way. But I can at least tell you that I laughed like a drain, a plumbing item renowned for laughing heartily and frequently, throughout this film. Am I laughing with it, or at it? There’s a question, but perhaps the answer is not as important as the laughter itself.
But I’m definitely laughing at it.