Kill!

Kill! (斬る, 1968) is a Japanese samurai action-comedy directed by Okamoto Kihachi for Toho — watch it online on iFILM. Based on a novel by Yamamoto Shugoro, the film follows two wandering ronin who arrive in a dusty provincial town: one a former farmer desperate to earn samurai status, the other a former samurai who wants nothing more than to disappear.

Both get pulled into a clan feud built on betrayal and bought loyalty. Tatsuya Nakadai leads with the detached sardonic edge that made his work in Harakiri and Sword of Doom so memorable — here turned comic, which makes the whole thing stranger and more alive. Okamoto wrings real wit from the gap between samurai mythology and the grubby reality on screen.

Released at the height of the 1968 student protests in Japan, Kill! arrived at exactly the right moment to skewer hierarchies and codes that had long outlived their usefulness. Stream Kill! (1968) online on iFILM — chambaras that deserves a wider audience than it has found.