We have entered the hottest part of summer, and things have already reached a boiling point. Tensions are at an all-time high going into another traveling freak show of an election season.
Everyone is finding a reason to fight over the Olympics that they won’t even watch, lines are being drawn all over the place (some overlapping), and my White Sox have the most pathetic record in the entire league (27-85).
Oh, yes…it is safe to say that some folks are a little pissed right now. The bad blood has turned to stone, and it’s dragging us all into the fiery depths of roiling animosity which only burns brighter with every downward doomscroll, or clickbait article (Hi!)
It is time for revenge, ladies and gentlemen. No more turning the other cheek, or waiting for Karma to work its slow, unreliable magic. This month will be one of savage retaliation, spiritual corruption, and sweet, bloodied satisfaction.
Get your affairs in order, and prepare to meet The Wrath Of August.
The Nightingale (Causeway Films/Made Up Stories/Bron Creative/FilmNation Entertainment)
The first tale of retribution is this brutal period piece from 1825 in the Land Down Under by writer/director Jennifer Kent (The Babadook). Irishwoman Clare Carroll (Aisling Franciosi) is an inmate at the penal colony Van Diemen’s Land (aka Tasmania) where she lives with her husband and their infant daughter and works as a servant for a vile British colonial Lieutenant named Hawkins (Sam Claflin).
One day, a high-ranking officer visits the unit to see if Hawkins is fit for a promotion to aid in a conflict with the Aboriginals in what would be known as the Black War, and Clare sees this as the perfect opportunity to ask the Lieutenant for a letter of recommendation for release. Catch him in a good mood, ya know?
What she gets instead is raped for having such audacity, and this sparks her husband Aiden into action. He pulls up on Hawkins, and his men with fists ready for them all, but it gets shut down fast – just not fast enough for the visiting officer to notice, and change his mind about promoting Lt. Dirtbag. In true dirtbag fashion, he decides to chase down the officer to see if he can change his mind, but not before making a little stop first.
Hawkins and his men pay a visit to their attacker’s home for some payback over the public humiliation. Hawkins rapes Clare again, makes one subordinate do the same, shoots Aiden dead, and then makes the other one permanently silence the wailing baby Bridget. They leave Clare for dead and hit the road to catch up with the officer.
She wakes up the next morning to the complete desolation of her life. With barely any hesitation, Clare sets out into the wilderness for the men, and Hell is coming with her… and an Aboriginal tracker named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr). He’s looking to carve his own pound of flesh. The hunt is bloody and brutal, and the nightingale sings a grim song of death till the end.
This film is not easy to watch, but that is the point. Kent was going to historical accuracy during a time when terrible acts were commonplace, and she pulled no punches. It’s raw, bleak, and expertly crafted. Aisling Franciosi brings Clare to feral life with a powerful performance that brings the movie that much closer to the horror genre, and that is never a bad thing. The Nightingale can be found on Prime.
Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (Toho)
After the last movie, it’s time for a palette cleanser in a movie to remind us just how fun violent revenge can be, and one of the best examples is this undervalued gem of Japanese badassery from 1972. Based on the classic manga of the same name by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, the story takes place in the Edo period and tells the epic saga of Ogami Ittō (Tomisaburo Wakayama).
Ittō was famous. He was the greatest Samurai in the empire, and he was the Shogun’s decapitator. He cut off the heads of 131 lords for the Shogun who just stayed inside his castle, and he never came out. People said his brain was infected by devils and that he was rotting with evil. Ittō wasn’t scared of the Shogun, but the Shogun was scared of him.
Maybe that was the problem, and another was the Yagyū clan setting up Ittō for treason. Then, one night the Shogun sent his ninja spies to his house. They were supposed to kill Ogami, but they got his wife instead. That was the night everything changed. When Ogami and his infant son, Daigoro, begin their “Demon Path in Hell”.
Thus begins the long journey of a traveling ronin for hire pushing his son in a baby carriage across the landscape. Taking jobs where he can, but always on the path to revenge. This is a movie for people who like swords, blood, and severed limbs. Tomisaburo Wakayama owns that role and continued to do so for five more movies. Short, stocky, and completely stoic, in other words, he looks like a killer… and he certainly acts like one.
This is the first of six great movies that were extremely difficult to find in the US until recent years. Before then, we foreign devils have had to settle for Frankenfilm released in 1980 which is twelve minutes of this film, and the rest is the second film. This edit-fest was called Shogun Assassin, and you have full permission to ignore that mess. The real movies are on MAX.