A Woman’s Revenge

An unidentified man, grimacing and sweating profusely, is pulled in half by two trucks to which his arms and legs are chained as another man, bound and gagged, watches in horror. So begins Gun Crazy: A Woman from Nowhere, director Atsushi Muroga's low-budget piece of East-West cinema incest. The film is essentially a remake of Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, replacing Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name with Saki, a leather-clad, Harley-riding, gun-toting heroine played by Japanese supermodel and television star, Ryoko Yonekura (Musashi). So, what we've got here is a straight-to-video Japanese actioner based on an Italian-made American genre piece, itself a remake of a classic Japanese film, Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. What's odd is Muroga riffs solely on Fistful, showing little or no awareness of its Japanese source. He even backs Saki's entrance and final shootout with a piece of music so similar to Ennio Morricone's familiar score it's probably a copyright violation. The windy, dusty shot of Saki's slow approach during the climactic duel evokes both Leone and Kurosawa, but only because the former borrowed so literally from the latter. The billowing of our heroine's leather overcoat, looking like the dusters in Once Upon a Time in the West, is pure homage to Leone.

Akemi and the man of her clan confront their opponents; Akemi delivers a sword thrust to kill the opponents' leader, and Aiko, his daughter, tries to interpose herself, suffering a glancing blow to her eyes, thus cutting her badly, and blinding her. Amid the ensuing fight, no one notices that a black cat laps the young woman's wound. Years later, revenge between the two clans continue, plus added dissension amongst Akemi's people, leading to more deaths. A new member comes to help them, but she is a strange woman - and blind. The curse of the blind woman is about to fell on the dragon-lady.

A girl reaches the age of nine and is supposed to act as a grown woman according to her family. A girl participates in a bike race against the will of her husband. An elderly woman decides she wants to buy all the things she always wanted but could never get.

During the latter part of the 19th century, when some parts of Japan were being Westernized, some parts were still deeply rooted in the past. The story here has a cruel land-owning family seizing the property of a deeply-in-debt farmer. In an ongoing series of tragedies, the farmer dies, his wife and daughter are enslaved, the wife dies when trying to prevent the killing of a snake (it's considered bad luck to kill a snake), and the daughter is assaulted by the son of the landowner. Eventually, the spirits of the farmer and his family materialize in a quest for revenge.

A woman moves to a new town and opens her own gourmet restaurant after escaping from an abusive relationship. However, she soon finds herself in a deadly game of cat and mouse when she becomes the target of constant harassment from a jealous man.