Lady Snowblood

I like violence in movies. Specifically, I like cartoonishly bloody violence perpetrated by attractive women with good reasons.

The Japanese movie Lady Snowblood (1973) meets all these criteria. The title character, who also goes by Yuki, is born to a woman in prison. As we later find out, four criminals brutally murdered the rest of Yuki's family -- her mother's husband and her brother. In prison, Yuki's mother aggressively slept with prison guards to beget a child who could carry out revenge.

Yuki spends her early years learning to fight, in a training sequence so kick-ass that I won't describe it here. Later, she mild-manneredly hunts down the criminals in her pretty kimono, with her sword hidden inside a parasol.

Folks in the US may know this movie as a source for Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, but it deserves a bloody vengeful screening of its own.