LONE WOLF AND CUB: WHITE HEAVEN IN HELL is the final film in the LONE WOLF AND CUB series – six films released between 1972 and 1974. It has the same writer of the previous one, Tusutomu Nakamura, but a director who’s new to the series, Yoshiyuki Kuroda (THE GREAT YOKAI WAR).
This is a good one to watch in winter because, as poetically described in the title, a bunch of it takes place in the snow. It opens with our deadly assassin papa and child, Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayama) and Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa), skiing their weapon-filled babycart down a mountain. Must be a tall one because time passes, the sky turns dark, Ogami’s carrying a torch. Then the screen turns completely white and you see their silhouettes slowly become visible in the distance, like the opening of FARGO. And come to think of it I’m surprised this babycart doesn’t have a built in woodchipper. It has just about everything else you could need. Maybe it does and we just don’t see him use it. (read the rest of this shit…)
As a serial discusser of movies, I often run into this thing where I find that other people put a way higher premium than I do on things being logical, or realistic, or believable. They complain about characters making a bad choice or a strange choice or not doing the obvious choice. They seem to think it’s better for characters and stories to be normal, or sane.
LONE WOLF AND CUB: BABY CART IN PERIL is #4 out of six LONE WOLF AND CUB films, and comes pretty directly out of the stories from the late Kazuo Koike’s manga about the former Shogun’s-executioner who was framed by the god damn Yagyu Clan (fuck those guys) and now travels Japan with his young son Daigoro, working as a freelance assassin along his “Demon’s Path” toward vengeance and damnation. He usually ends up doing something very honorable that seems a little more like redemption, but he doesn’t see it that way. He thinks he’s the devil. This was before heavy metal, too.
This one’s kinda got an A and B plot. One of them (take your pick which letter it is) involves the badass Oyuki (Michi Azuma, who played a different character in 
When you’re the shogun’s executioner and your wife is murdered and you’re set up and your life is ruined and you choose to take your son on the demon’s path and become an elite assassin for hire, you do alot of wandering around having adventures. Part 3 of the 
