Film review: Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx (1972)

The Lone Wolf and Cub films are legendary (there's even a Bob's Burgers episode about them) and I've wondered for years what they were like.  Well, thanks to the Criterion Channel (see, not all foreign films are classy!) now we know.  Essentially, the plot is that a (surprisingly tubby) Samurai Ronin wanders the countryside pushing his (charmingly tubby) toddler son in a fancy wooden pram (that is actually a DEATH MACHINE) searching for assassination assignments to pay for the hotel rooms and hot tubs.  Pretty much every five minutes they are attacked by would-be killers who end up sliced and diced.  And I mean sliced and diced.  Think the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail with the Black Knight - it's just like that, including the literal fountains of too-red fake blood.  But this being an exploitation film, there's also the odd bare breast thrown in (although the father never shows any interest, as he's too busy caring for his boy, but also because the owner has just tried to kill him - there are a surprising number of female assassins).  Having seen this one we don't really feel the need to watch any of the other five or six films, we get the gist, although apparently the pram (which features Ben Hur like retractable sword-blades coming from its wheels, that get to chop off a couple of feet in full gory technicolor) gets even more outrageously outfitted as the films progress.  I will say this: there are a couple of scenes in this film that are genuinely visually arresting (mostly featuring the wind blowing through the trees) and it certainly delivers on the Samurai/hand-claw/spiked mace/poles-with-blades-coming-out-of-the-ends (another pram feature)/thrown knives, thrown radishes-containing-knives action you could ask for.  But Jami worries about the speech development of Cub given the man-with-no-name-like taciturnity of Lone Wolf.  (The one piece of education we see him impart is when the kid is practicing counting and skips four.)  I personally worry about the amount of slaughter he's being exposed to, but he seems unfazed.  He also knows how to activate the various deadly accoutrements of his transport, so he should be able to take care of himself should something happen to his old man.