The 2002 Fantasy Action Techno Satanic Thriller Samouraïs is Crazy, But Not Quite Crazy Enough
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
The patron who chose the oddball 2002 martial arts fantasy Samouraïs said of it, "Whenever I try to explain the plot to anyone (usually, admittedly, in a pub), it comes out sounding like a made-up fever dream.”
I don’t know what she’s talking about. For me, there could be nothing remotely confusing or far-fetched about a movie about a timeless demon who enters women’s wombs, is reborn via a protective sack, and then grows to adulthood in about a minute before murdering the woman who had just given birth to him.
The demon in question is Kodeni (Santi Sudoros), an ageless figure of Satanic evil who is foolishly summoned by a member of a clan that was destroyed in battle to help them defeat their enemies.
Kodeni wipes out the opposing army but curses the foolish soul who sought out his sinister services. He invades the womb of a terrified woman in fifteenth-century Japan, then becomes a top mobster over the ensuing five hundred years.
I want to state this right off the bat: I don’t care how seductive or irresistible the offer might seem or how charming the bargainer: NEVER make a deal with the devil. You shouldn’t enter into a pact or negotiate with any manner of demonic entity. This includes demons, assistant demons, demons in training, and demons who train other demons on how to be demons.
Cut to the present. Commissaire Fujiwara Morio (Yasuaki Kurata) is a tough detective on the trail of organized crime figures who brutally murdered a brilliant designer of magical video games. Depending on the user, the magic is either black magic or white magic.
The detective thinks the murder might be related to something a ghost of one of his ancestors warned him about, involving an ill-considered pact with pure evil.
The demon cursed the family by using their wombs to become reborn. The ghost helpfully explains that Kodeni is nearly done with his current body, which is five hundred years old, and plans to get a new one by invading the lawman’s virgin daughter Akemi (Maï Anh Le)’s womb so he can be reborn through her.
This convinces the cursed lawman that he will need to murder his virgin daughter and the evil life within her in order to keep Kodeni from coming back and running amok.
The detective hops onboard a plane to Paris to engage in a little filicide. You know the deal. Ya fly in, stop at the hotel, take a shower, buy your child dinner, and then murder her for the right reasons.
The father does not want to be a grandfather, particularly to Kodeni, who has had beef with his family for a solid half-millennium. Thankfully, Akemi has the kinds of good friends who intervene when your father appears out of nowhere, intent on slicing you open as part of the family’s age-old battle with a powerful demon.
When wearing a hat, the demon looks like Freddy Krueger. When stripped down to skivvies, he seems alternately like Yul Brenner or Dhalsim from the Street Fighter series.
Akemi can more than hold her own, but she has unlikely allies in video game buffs, Marco (Cyrill Mourali) and his wacky sidekick Nadir (Saïd Serrari).
Webster’s defines definition as “the formal statement of the meaning or significance of a word, phrase, idiom, etc., as found in dictionaries.”
Accordingly, its definition of nadir is “the lowest point; point of greatest adversity or despair.” That’s appropriate since Nadir marks a low point for the film and for humanity as a whole.
He’s the kind of comic relief you want relief from. He’s a brutal, un-funnyman who looks like the late Dustin “Screech” Diamond. Even more horrifyingly, he acts like Screech as well.
The world did not need one Screech. One Screech was too many. We barely survived the Screech that we were afflicted with. We certainly do not need a French action movie Screech.
Sometimes, when you’re watching a movie, you can tell that the director and/or the editor fell in love with one of the performers and that every ad-lib, improvisation, or weird choice they made ended up in the finished film.
That’s how a surprising number of filmmakers who really should have known better treated Dom DeLuise: as the funniest man in the world, a peerless wit whose every wisecrack begs to be preserved for posterity.
Unfortunately, that's Nadir here. His role begs to be thrown into a flaming garbage can on the cutting room floor, yet Samorais can’t get enough of him.
Samourais has many juicy, ridiculous, larger-than-life elements. It’s perverse and unfortunate that the one it chooses to focus on counter-productively is the wisecracking wannabe gangsta who attains a level of obnoxiousness that is downright Jar Jar Binksian.
A lot of adequately staged, if forgettable, and interchangeable fight scenes later, the movie climaxes bizarrely with a last battle between bland hero Marco and Kodeni the Demon.
That’s not the strange part. For reasons I cannot begin to understand Marco and Kodeni turn into video game characters being controlled by little French children who do not realize the magnitude of what they are doing.
At its best, Samourais reminded me of the 1977 Japanese mind-melter Haus, the Japanese cult classic that somehow manages to fit every genre simultaneously. I can legitimately say that Haus is the craziest fucking thing I have ever seen in my life, and I have seen a lot. Too much. More than anyone really should, and I’m not just talking about movies.
Samoraiis offers a similarly deranged clash of genres, themes and tones but it lacks the spark of divine madness that makes Haus an all-time cult classic, not just another crazy b-movie.
I wished that the film had leaned into the ridiculousness of its premise more instead of getting distracted by unnecessary subplots and comic business involving a would-be funnyman who is never funny.
Samourais is crazy but it could and should be even crazier.
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