Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood is the ultimate revenge film, clearly a ripoff of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume 1. Oh, wait – I got that backwards. Lady Snowblood came out exactly thirty years previous.

I usually hate to hear about how such-and-such a film is a ‘blatant ripoff’ of another film, stealing its basic setting or the outline of its plot – i.e., Star Wars was basically Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood in outer space, Independence Day is George Pal’s War of the Worlds redone with a bigger budget, etc.

Still, with Snowblood and Kill Bill the – um – homages are pretty damned obvious. The blood spurting from the victims of the heroine’s sword (though a lot of 70’s swordplay films featured this effect – see Shogun Assassin for lots more of this); the wounded Japanese woman walking in the silent snowfall, blood staining her kimono; the direction of the action sequences; etc. And the plots are very nearly alike: a young woman dedicates her life to hunting down and killing a handful of people, for the sake of revenge. Sure, the motives are different in each film - Kill Bill’s Beatrice is hardly an innocent doe – but the tale of the lone woman with a sword, with vengeance her only goal, is a theme broad enough to accommodate more than one treatment.

And, it’s not as though Tarantino is trying to hide his influences: he even includes a song from the Snowblood soundtrack, “The Flower of Carnage” [“Shura no Hana”] (sung by Lady Snowblood herself, Meiko Kaji) in his film, along with a few other musical cues.

In any case, Tarantino need not worry about unfavorable comparisons – although Lady Snowblood is certainly considered a classic of the cult/Japanese/revenge film circles, Kill Bill remains the better movie.

But, enough of that. Lady Snowblood is almost the perfect revenge film: its lead character was conceived for the purpose of killing the criminals who raped her mother, after having killed her stepfather (her mother had gotten pregnant on purpose after the horrible events, bedding so many different men that she never knew which one was her real father). She hunts down the four persons one by one and dispatches them, aided occasionally by the woman who raised her, the priest who taught her martial arts, and a really filth-looking, motley gang. When her final victim is dead, she stumbles out into the night, wounded by the man’s pistol; and she is finally done in by a young woman whose father had been one of her targets. Her entire life – twenty years – had been spent in pursuit of this one goal, and having accomplished it, she perished.

Lady Snowblood, like many popular Japanese films, was based upon a comic book series; apparently in the comic version it takes quite a while for the heroine to get to her victims, and along the way she becomes a sort of outlaw folk hero (a plot point used in the film to bring out the last two victims from hiding). There’s even a sequel, Lady Snowblood: Grudge Love Song, that came out a year later.

Star Meiko Kaji is also the lead in the Female Convict Scorpion and Alleycat Rock film series.