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Movie Review: Zatoichi:The Adventures of a Blind Man (Zatoichi sekisho yaburi)

IMDB's entry for Zatoichi sekisho yaburi seems to have the wrong year, since everywhere else lists it as 1965. I guess when you have 25 films in a series, it is tricky to keep them all straight. IFC is running one every Saturday as some "samurai saturday" series, although Zato Ichi is not a samurai as far as I can tell. He's a blind masseur who also happens to be a great swordsman and goes around helping people, A-Team style. This was actually a pretty enjoyable movie as far as silly action movies go, although there was far less action than I would have expected. Most of the fights are over pretty quick, and the movie concentrated more on the relationships between the characters involved in some gangster intrigue around a new year's festival. I wasn't convinced about Shintaro Katsu's depiction of blindness, but he was likable enough. I may pay a little more attention to trying to watch more of these as long as IFC is playing them.