Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72383 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-03-16
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Black & White, Colour, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Japanese
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 103 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
If Hammer Studios had ever set up a Japanese franchise, the outcome might have looked rather like this. Kaneto Shindo's film has something of the lurid, full-throated relish for the horror of Hammer at its best, plus a visual elegance all its own. The story is based on a folk tale, set in Japan's war-torn 14th century. The action takes place almost entirely in a riverside marshland overgrown with tall swaying reeds. A woman and her daughter-in-law living in a hut prey on wounded samurai warriors fleeing from a nearby battlefield, killing them and selling their armour for handfuls of rice. When the younger woman falls for a handsome young deserter, the mother decides to put a stop to the affair. But the method she chooses demands a terrible price. Shooting in lustrous widescreen black-and-white, Shindo creates an eerie, atmospheric world haunted by the ceaseless dry whisperings of the reeds. None of the characters is loveable, or even likeable, but the thorough rapacity of the women, and the raw sexuality of the lovers, convey a fierce determination to survive even at the lowest scavenging edge of a violent society. --Philip Kemp

Customer Reviews

The Sensousness of Shindo
The deconstrunction and demystification of the samurai myth had been a project Akira Kurosawa had taken upon himself and that had seemingly reached a conclusion in YOJIMBO (1962), but Shindo's ONIBABA (1964) takes it a step further by presenting them as bedraggled and exhausted, hungry and at the mercy of two seemingly innocuous women. Shindo's world is hot and sultry, the characters weak and vulnerable. This is a very good depiction of the affects of war on the fringes of society and the lengths certain parties must go to in order to survive. As well as exploring this theme Shindo also adds several intriguing layers, sexuality and jealousy make a potent combination, as does the inserion of old Japanese folk tales. The result is a film that shows the eroticism of human beings in their most natural and stripped down state. Be hypnotised by the swaying grass fields and the sumptious black and white cinematography in this Japanese gem. Criterion's disc is very good.

Really gripping
This is a very intense film, a very deep plot, but quite scary in parts. It is especially good because the moral doesn't detract from the tension