“I’m not a demon! I’m a human being!”
Built on a fairly simple plot involving a mother/daughter team who scrape an existence by murdering samurai for their armor and possessions. A friend of the mom watched the daughter’s fiancée die and now boldly lusts after the daughter. The characters behave at the basest level of humanity. Their hunger for food is matched by their ravenous sexual appetites, and the story is bold, shocking and filled with layers of meaning. There is also a demon.
I hesitate to mention the demon since it doesn’t appear till the last half-hour, but that’s really what puts this film over the top. The entire thing gets better as it goes and by this point all of the great dynamics just explode. Even here, I thought I knew where things were headed only to be surprised by twists better than what I expected.
For a film from 1964, the subject matter is surprisingly adult. There’s a lot of nudity, so much so that it goes well past any titillation into more cavalier terrain. Even the way they sleep, spread on their backs with their robes half open defiantly paints their status and class as people who care little for modesty. In one scene the ladies find a small dog and viciously attack it like a couple of grizzly bears. They don’t say a word or think twice about it, hunger has made them animals.
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