When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually bonkers masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired. This was probably inevitable for a too-cool renegade artist who gleefully embraced and sent up his “B-movie hack” rep within a ruthlessly efficient assembly-line studio system. Suzuki’s genre ambivalence and stylistic panache in his glorious ’60s spree burnished his legend for the rest of his lengthy, winding career.
What a way to flame out! Branded to Kill tells the ecstatically bent story of a yakuza assassin with a fetish for sniffing steamed rice (the chipmunk-cheeked icon Joe Shishido) who botches a job and ends up a target himself. This is Suzuki at his most extreme, the flabbergasting pinnacle of his sixties pop-art aesthetic.