Demon Spies is one of a number of popular and excessively violent movie adaptations of master manga artist Kazuo Koike’s comic creations that also includes Lone Wolf and Cub and Lady Snowblood. Like Shadow Hunters, another Koike adaptation, the film deals with the efforts of Shogunate spies to reduce the power and influence of regional daimyo.

Anyone who has seen Ryuhei Kitamura’s Azumi will find striking similarities to this story. Under harsh conditions, five orphans including one young woman are trained in seclusion from childhood to become oniwaban, demon spies working for the shogunate to root out potentially subversive or rebellious activity among the country’s clan lords. After graduating in a particularly savage and bloody ceremony, lady oniwaban Koboshi and her intended lover Uzuhiko are assigned to infiltrate the Kishu clan as a prostitute and pimp respectively. Their mission is to destroy the clan’s stockpile of illegal firearms, rumored to be hidden within its territory. Jimushi and the other two oniwaban pose as monks and are used as bait to distract Kishu’s crafty superintendent Shogen Yobobue. The plan appears doomed, however, when their infiltration is uncovered and their skills as demon spies are tested to their utmost limits.

Like most of Koike’s stories, Demon Spies follows a common theme of reluctant warriors forced to commit the most violent acts for an ideal that often goes against tradition and authority. What this means for the average moviegoer are gratuitous scenes of extreme violence depicting severed arms and impossibly high-powered geysers of blood exploding from nearly every lethal cut from a blade. This isn’t exactly uncommon among the 1970s-era samurai films. The distinction comes with the use of traditional masks.

The oniwaban are expected to be oni, Japanese for demons and are forced to wear oni masks and forgo all vestiges of a normal human existence. In other films these shogunate spies are usually depicted as common ninja, but with their frightening masks these oniwaban use myth to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies and keep themselves separated from the laws of man. Other masks also appear in the film, including the long-nosed and phallic Tengu mask and the white okame mask, which appear during a ceremony that crudely and graphically introduces sex to the oniwaban’s arsenal of weaponry.

There isn’t much to say about the film’s lesser-known leading cast, at least to this reviewer. They’re playing comic book characters and fill out their roles adequately to that effect, which is to say they’re generally shallow stereotypes depicting young men and women questioning authority and struggling to find their place in the world.

The Japanese actor who plays Uzuhiko bears a passing resemblance to Chinese kung fu actor David Chiang.

I’m guessing the female lead was chosen more for her looks and willingness to appear nude in the movie than for her acting ability. With her weak performance, and almost frail movements, she’s thoroughly unconvincing as a specially-trained fighter.

Takashi Tsuboshima was a comedy director so the choice of putting him in charge of this grim and violent tale was an unusual one. Of course, violent samurai genre convention was so vividly defined by this point within the studio structure that it would have taken substantial effort to steer off course. Unfortunately, any strengths Tsuboshima may have do not seem to present themselves here. His direction is routine at best. With the focus on assassin spies taking on the guise and mentality of demons, the potential for a symbolic blurring of the supernatural and reality is great. But this is only partially exploited.

Production standards are up to par with typical period films from Toho. Fans of samurai bloodletting will no doubt savor the generous and well staged carnage. Demon Spies provides many excellent examples of the air-compression blood sprays that came to define the genre in the ’70s, despite their absence from the vast majority of Japan’s samurai movie output.

Prolific film composer Masaru Sato contributes another fine soundtrack to add to his massive filmography up to this point.

As previously mentioned, extreme violence is the order of the day. Coupled with gratuitous bare breasts and what is essentially a gang rape, the action proves to be geared especially for grind house movie audiences. This becomes most apparent during a scene where an oniwaban performs a gruesome face destruction technique upon himself that is not suggested viewing for the faint of heart. But all this doesn’t mean the swordplay and action sequences are any less proficient than the more high-brow action of an Akira Kurosawa samurai film for example. One of the great things about Japanese cinema is that filmmakers have long taken their genre entertainment, no matter how potentially offensive, as seriously as anything else.

Demon Spies is average viewing by genre standards. The thin plot devolves from a simple ninja-esque adventure into something almost more in common with a survival horror movie as our captured heroes attempt to overcome the tortures they’re forced to endure for a rather weak reason. There’s more than enough violent swordplay, yet it doesn’t surpass the more stylized and epic destruction unleashed in Shintaro Katsu’s Lone Wolf and Cub series. Anyone who enjoys the other Kazuo Koike adaptations will probably enjoy this as well, but it’s not at the same level.

by