Beyond Elder Law

Discover Ayurveda’s hidden science of personality types, beyond doshas, unlocking 16 secret mind archetypes

Love samurai films? Wish they were… dirtier? Welcome to Hanzo the Razor’s deranged world of crazy swordplay and sexploitation set to a 1970s funk soundtrack. Uncut for the first time ever in the UK, this cult 1970s Japanese pinku trilogy was seemingly influenced by Dirty Harry and Shaft, but there’s no doubt who has the ‘longer arm of the law’! Shintaro Katsu (best known as the blind swordsman in the original Zatoichi) stars as Hanzo a rebellious yet obsessively moral samurai police officer who slashes his way through the backbone of crime, uncovers corruption at higher levels, and tortures relentlessly using his own unique techniques. Shocking audiences even today, the hardest man in Edo regularly unleashes his special weapon in the form of his oversized penis, which he uses to ‘interrogate’ female suspects into pleasured compliance…

This haunting, kabuki-inflected version of a Japanese folk legend is set in a remote mountain village where food is scarce and tradition dictates that citizens who have reached their seventieth year must be carried to the summit of Mount Narayama and left there to die. The sacrificial elder at the center of the tale is Orin (Kinuyo Tanaka), a dignified and dutiful woman who spends her dwindling days securing the happiness of her loyal widowed son with a respectable new wife. Filmed almost entirely on cunningly designed studio sets, in brilliant color and widescreen, The Ballad of Narayama is a stylish and vividly formal work from Japan’s cinematic golden age, directed by the dynamic Keisuke Kinoshita.