From the Rental Vault: Strange Views

Japanese director Seijin Suzuki made his reputation turning out low-budget, crowd-pleasing crime thrillers called "yakuza movies," ostensibly chronicling that organized crime outfit in 1960s Japan. He regularly relied on tough-guy stalwart Jo Shishido, and he also regularly went a little wild within the limited conventions of his genre, throwing in scenes, characters and symbolism more at home in an art film.

He did all of those things in 1967's Branded to Kill, which features Shishido as Goro Hanada, a top-ranked hit man forced to defend his life against his own syndicate when he fails on an assignment. The movie bombed, with audiences having little patience for Suzuki the auteur. And so it got him fired from Nikkatsu Studios, whom he successfully sued, and who in return helped keep him from directing another feature film until 1977.

The simple plot -- Hanada must contend with his own criminal bosses, his money-loving wife and the mysterious assassin Number One -- is wound around a lot of weirdness. There's the fact that Hanada really, and I mean really, likes the smell of boiling rice. There's his falling for the mystery woman Misako, and the unreliability of his wife, whose expensive tastes get more expensive at just the wrong time. And there's the psychological warfare waged by Number One, which confuses the viewer almost as much as it does Hanada.

Suzuki is hailed as an influence by several modern action directors, including Quentin Tarantino and John Woo. And today Branded is seen as a stellar example of absurdist satire and of creativity within the low budgets of genre filmmaking in the 1960s. It is all of those things, but like a particularly ugly ancient statue from a lost civilization, its value outside of that context is critically limited.

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The era of the "spaghetti Western," or Western movie made in Europe with mostly European actors and a sprinkle of American stars, had largely run out by the mid-1970s. But that didn't stop Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus from hiring Italian director Gianfranco Paolini, tough-guy B-actors Lee Van Cleef, Jack Palance and Richard Boone and stirring them together with one of the lamest narratives to come from any country in 1976's God's Gun. Warning, I'm going to "spoil" this one in the sense of telling what happens. But in another sense, nothing could really spoil a movie like this.

Palance and his gang of robbers -- the more disposable of whom actually wear bell-bottomed jeans to go with their 1970s salon haircuts -- descend upon the small town of Juno City to wait for a money-laden stagecoach. They bully townspeople, have their way with the womenfolk and threaten anyone who tries to stand against them, including the sheriff (Boone). Father John (Van Cleef), who has tried to bring a gang member to justice, is killed and the saloon owner (Sybil Danning)'s young son (Leif Garrett) flees town to bring help. Which happens to be Father John's twin brother (Van Cleef), the gunslinger who reformed a little bit less than Father John did: He put down his guns but did not take up a cassock. Oh, and it turns out that Leif Garrett is actually Jack Palance's son, because Palance had assaulted his mother during the Civil War. Palance inexplicably now warms to the idea of being a father, even though he's "under the gun" of Van Cleef.

It's sillier than it sounds, and was so awful that Boone actually walked off the set before his dialogue could be dubbed. Another actor -- who sounds just like Richard Boone in the sense that Gilbert Gottfried sounds just like James Earl Jones -- provided the voice.

There could have been a couple of interesting ideas somewhere inside this story, and the cast members could probably have pulled it off. All of them except for Garrett were old pros with enough experience to get the job done and even he had more than a dozen roles under his belt. But for whatever reason, the only thing that happened was the version of God's Gun that came out in 1976, and if you need a final proof of its quality, the DVD release is from Troma Entertainment, home of The Toxic Avenger, The Class of Nuke 'Em High and Redneck Zombies.