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Tiger Lily Okatsu is a assassin for the Okido family, but her last
assignment not only sewnds her to jail for murder, it also makes her a new
enemy, the dead man's daughter Onaka, who vows to kill her once she's out. Several
years later, Okatsu is actually released, and she immediately breaks up
with the Okido family, who treat her like little more than a liability
after all she has done for them - and she easily fights off an attack of
Onaka, who desperately tries to kill her but lacks the skill to do so.
However, she promises Onaka to let her kill her once she has fulfilled her
mission - to find the warrior who has saved her life many years ago during
civil war. First though, she goes to visit her friend Ohide, who owns a
lumber business and who is at odds with two conflicting yakuza clans, and
on the way tries to save a girl from being sold off into prostitution, and
she befriends a blind master swordswoman, Omon. Eventually, Ohide gets
killed by one of the yakuza gangs, and to Okatsu's horror the man
responsible for this is Gokenin (Bunta Sugawara), the very man who has
saved her in the civil war she has set out to find. Gokenin and Okatsu
start to consider each other as enemies soon enough, but somehow they feel
drawn to each other. Onaka, who still wants Okatsu's hide, becomes
Gokenin's lover and tries to fuel their animosity, but to no avail: When
Okatsu goes on an all-out offensive against all the yakuza in town,
Gokenin rushes to her aid to guard her back, even if she has never asked
him to do so, and even if that costs his own life in the process (as well
as Onaka's). In the end though, Okatsu has her revenge on everyone who
ever wronged her or her friends - which pretty much leaves her the last
woman standing ... In many ways, this is a typical Teruo
Ishii-movie: It's rich in sex and torture, but brought to the screen
elegantly and imaginatively enough to avoid utter sleaziness, it'S swiftly
directed and perfectly paced, and it features outbursts of ultraviolence
but always has a hint of irony to it. And that said, this is not one of
Ishii's better films, mostly due to its over-convoluted and over-populated
story that seems to go nowhere in particular and only confuses the
audience with every new plottwist, without ever resolving most of its
narrative threads. This all still makes it an ok movie, at least on a
visual level, but Teruo Ishii has done so much better ...
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