Ryûichi Kuroda (Jô Shishido) is a henchman to a powerful gangster, but the appeal has well and truly worn off when he is ordered to perform a hit on a young woman. The problem? His conscience is utterly compromised for this woman was both his boss's mistress and Kuroda's lover, and he had bought a ticket for her to fly out of Japan to safety, yet in the car he escorts her in he is forced to go along with the big man's wishes and shoots her dead. As you can imagine, on returning to the nightclub where he works, he is not in the best of moods, but then neither are his two equally hindered brothers, Eiji (Tatsuya Fuji) and Saburo (Jirô Okazaki), the latter a boxer who told the boss where to stick his prospects for the championship.
And had his hands broken as a result, as nobody is meant to cross Mr Akazawa (Takashi Kanda), and it's this sense of suffocating constriction that the three leads were compelled to kick back against, though oddly for director Yasuharu Hasebe, here making his second movie at the helm, he preferred a uneasily laidback tone to his efforts which coupled with the sonorous jazz score by Naozumi Yamamoto made the bursts of violence all the more surprising in their intensity. This was still the nineteen-sixties and was not as brutal as certain types of cinema would become both in Japan and abroad, but nevertheless, when someone gets shot in this production they definitely stay shot, there's no doubt bullets have been fired.
Hasabe would of course proceed to direct some of the most intense thrillers of the seventies out of his homeland, often mixing bloody murder with gratuitous rape, all spelled out in the title more often than not, but if you had little taste for that sort of sensationalism yet still wanted to sample Japanese crime as a genre in this decade, and were not sure you could tolerate the culty but decidedly off the wall efforts of Seijun Suzuki, then you could do a lot worse than giving Massacre Gun a try. Minagoroshi no kenjû as it was called in its native tongue presented a plot that was already a cliché in the format, and not only gangster movies either, two rival gangs were pitted against one another for the duration of the running time until there was a victor.
Though a preferred ending would be the old survey of the corpses and a pondering on if there was any winner at all considering the amount of devastation that has been wrought on the characters, just the right element of nihilism to leave contemporary viewers satisfied they had not simply settled down with any old family entertainment, as a downbeat mood indicated as much as the violence did that we were dealing with a movie for grown-ups. Star Shishido was by this point an old hand at this, and a big face at it too as one of the most distinctive thriller actors thanks to his cosmetic surgery enhanced features he spent the sixties sporting, though he would later have his cheek implants removed, possibly because he realised it may have made him memorable, but it also made him look like a hungry hamster.
Shishido was playing the main man in the fight back, bringing pause for thought to the arrogant Akazawa who begins to twig these three brothers are no lightweight upstarts but deadly serious about taking over his racket. They begin by telling various nightclubs and businesses that they answer to Kuroda's boys, but the issue of who the real bad guys are arises when there's not much difference between the "goodies" and "baddies" as to who is using the most uncontrolled tactics to bring their moneymakers into line. Obviously we are supposed to be on Kuroda's side, but Hasebe doesn't make it easy for us as the more power they gain, the less well they treat those around them, slapping both men and women about, and worse - a skewer used as a missile offers a notable cringe moment. As the story drew on, the bullets flew with ever more ferocity, leading to a finale so heavy with lead it was almost a parody, only you were not laughing most likely, as that sombre ambience informed us indirectly this was not a matter for levity, there were people being killed here after all.
