Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Crazy Samurai: 400 vs 1’ on VOD, a Gimmicky Martial Arts Outing Boasting a Single 77-Minute Shot

Crazy Samurai: 400 vs 1 (a.k.a. Crazy Samurai Musashi) is a Hi-YAH! original movie, available for subscribers of the martial arts channel, and also on VOD, but if you ask me, it sounds like a great way to take advantage of another seven-day free trial that you’ll forget to cancel until after you see your credit card statement, and then you’ll be mad not only because you were charged $3.99, but you never watched that old Jackie Chan flick you told yourself you’d get to. Anyway, the Japanese movie is almost somewhat possibly notorious for 77 of its 91 minutes being one epic fight sequence with “no cuts,” and by that, they mean “edits,” not “sword slashes,” because there are about 400 of those, give or take a dozen or two. So there’s your gimmick — now let’s see if this thing wows us or not.

CRAZY SAMURAI: 400 VS 1: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: This medieval Japanese clan ain’t happy. A murderous samurai named Musashi (Yuji Shimomura) slew the living guts out of its top two honchos, and it’s revenge time, baby. An old man sez he rounded up 100 students of the dojo and 300 mercenaries to take the bastard down, which, if my math is right, adds up to 400 vs. one. If I’m getting too detailed here, worry not, because the rest of the plot consists of one samurai fighting 400 samurai. The Truth in Advertising Dept. can take the rest of the day off.

So there’s a butterfly flipping and flapping around (stay with me here) and Musashi leaps from a tree and renders it asunder with his katana. That’s not one of the 400, I don’t think. Then he says, “Let’s get this started!”, so I guess the butterfly was just preseason. It’s a good day to do some killin’, it seems.

The first batch out of the 400 then begins its uncoordinated attack. I take that back — it’s totally coordinated because they attack Musashi one at a time. Some get slashed in the legs, some get slashed in the torso, some get their skulls split with an overhead chop; digital blood splatters yon and hither and thither. After a while, you worry the guy will get blisters on his poor purlicues. He clears out one batch of morons, pauses for a breath, then another group of oafs attacks. These are interchangeable men dying interchangeable deaths. The filmmakers are going for sheer quantity here. At one point, Musashi pauses and wonders aloud to no one except the crows and the corpses and possibly us, the audience, “How many more are there?” I couldn’t answer that. Should I have been counting? Shit. Don’t call off the Truth in Advertising folks yet. He might only kill 399 samurai.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Well, this kind of look-ma-no-cuts stuff always recalls 1917, Rope, Russian Ark and Birdman, to name a few of the biggies.

Performance Worth Watching: To my amateur eye, Shimomura can wield a sword convincingly. He isn’t asked to do anything else, of course.

Memorable Dialogue: Let’s just say dialogue isn’t the movie’s strong suit. For a moment, the camera moves away from Musashi and focuses on two squabbling samurai. The first one is ready to be honorably murdered. The second one is hesitant. “Were you thinking about your wife?” The first one asks. There’s no reply. “You’re a horny coward. No surprise. Your wife is damn hot.”

Sex and Skin: No time for the horny coward to get some

Our Take: I’ve seen dozens more creative kills in a single Kung Fu Theatre outing where, like, only 273 guys were killed. Musashi’s foes all look alike. Once, he takes out a guy with a hook on a chain, then it’s back to dozens and dozens and dozens of incompetent swordsmen. Not a single guy with a sai or shuriken or dagger. Would it be dishonorable to take out the dude with an archer in a tree? Or would such a thing end the movie too soon? After a while, you’d think Musashi would be as crisp as a 12-year-old Pringle, and he gets wobbly here and there, but he’s always the better fighter, because his foes make Stormtroopers look like Jude Law in Enemy at the Gates.

You know how Ogami Itto or any number of Mifune characters take out a score of threatening villains with minimalist precision? With but a few elegant swipes of the blade? Crazy Samurai is the opposite of that. You know how we forgave Bruce Lee movies for the we’ve-got-him-surrounded-now-let’s-rush-him-one-at-a-time offensive contrivance because he’d dispatch the bad guys with sweet moves? There are very few sweet moves here. The choreography is simplistic, and often seems improvised by stunt actors who don’t know a single sweet move. Someone on IMDb lamented that the movie doesn’t have a single decapitation. I feel that. I feel that hard.

A lot of what happens here appears to be squashed by budget considerations. Little variation in the action, a languid pace, not much in the way of visual effects, a score that sounds like royalty-free video game music. It’s a matter of simply making it through the marathon with little concern for the finish time. You get your 77-minute shot without the camera operator’s shadow in the frame, and call it good. Once the big shot concludes — with a dissatisfying edit, I might add — we get a coda featuring some good classic kung-fu fightaroo, and it’s too little too late.

There’s no real sense of death here because the blood is almost entirely digital. The bodies fall out of frame, never to be seen again. Musashi should be standing on top of piles of them at the rate he dispatches some of these goons. The ground should be soaked with blood. But that doesn’t happen. Am I saying I actually WANT to see blood and corpses? Of course! Because that way, the movie would have some heft to it, a feeling of consequence. Maybe Musashi could have a moment of melancholy as he looks over a gory scene of slaughter that he alone has wrought. But nah. Crazy Samurai is not only boring, but empty too.

Our Call: SKIP IT. You know the old adage about dull action movies being akin to “watching someone else play a video game”? I think Winston Churchill or somebody said it. Whatever. Anyway, not enough sweet moves. Crazy Samurai ain’t crazy enough.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Crazy Samurai: 400 vs 1