I saw Rutger Hauer's “Blind Fury” sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. I remember thinking that it was charming but very strange. Why would Vietnamese villagers teach swordsmanship to their blind American POW? Who came up with the plausibility-bending idea of pitting a blind man with a cane sword against an army of redneck gangsters?

Then, around 1996, I rented the first movie in the Zatoichi series starring Shintaro Katsu. (In case you haven't heard, the Beat Takeshi version is not the original!) I immediately noticed that Zatoichi was basically the same as Rutger Hauer's character- a bumbling, good natured blind man with a cane sword who can kill about twenty gangsters a minute in an amazing display of martial arts skill. Unlike Rutger Hauer's version, though, Zatoichi is also a masseur, and the first Zatoichi movie gives almost as much screen time to his massage skills as his sword-fighting. Plus, he's a Yakuza himself. I remember thinking “that was kind of interesting, but even weirder than the Rutger Hauer movie.”

Several years later I saw the second Zatoichi film, which focused (wisely!) more on sword-fighting than massage. For some reason, I got hooked. The Zatoichi character was just so appealing. He's just this kind, unassuming, almost submissive guy one second, then someone pushes him too far and the next thing you know everyone in Japan is dead.

Alright, so that's an exaggeration, but the body count in these movies is extremely high, to the extent that a later entry in the series indulges in a little self-parody by having the blind swordsman walk down a road that is literally lined with the gravestones of men he has killed. Of course, since he's blind he has no idea.

Zatoichi is the ultimate under-dog hero, and even though almost all of the 26 movies in the original series have the exact same plot, I'm not sorry to have watched them all. The reason for the similarity to “Blind Fury” became obvious when I saw #17 in the series. Hollywood, in its infinite wisdom, simply took the seventeenth Zatoichi movie and decided to remake it and set it in the 1980s. You know, because of all the sword-fighting going on in Reagan America!