For movie review #600 I thought I’d pick something designed to appeal to everyone. The only logical choice, obviously, was a movie about a German Samurai in a small town. Der Samurai works because it doesn’t attempt to do anything except deliver on exactly what you want to see, and strip away everything else. I didn’t know I wanted to see a sword wielding German cross dresser, but here we are…
The story is not really about the samurai. Our main character is Jakob (Michel Dierks), a police officer in a very small German town. In an effort to stop a wolf from messing with the townspeople, Jakob finds himself delivering this sword to an abandoned house, where der samurai (Pit Bukowski), a transvestite, collects his weapon of choice, going on a rampage through the town. Jakob then must summon whatever courage he has to track down this force of nature to try to bring him to justice…but does he want to?
What makes Der Samurai successful is how elemental everything feels. All great horror movies tap into some base fear or feeling, and revolve the whole story around this emotion. Jakob is a townie; worse than that, he’s laughed at by all the other townies. Meaning, he’s isolated and repressed, with only his aging grandmother to keep him company. The samurai, if you can’t tell, represents all of Jakob’s fears about who he might become: excessively violent, sexually different, far afield from the familiar. However, Jakob slowly realizes that the samurai one ups him every time he tries to arrest the samurai, forcing Jakob to confront all of those feelings he’s scared might be inside of him. The terror the samurai unleashes on the town gets more and more graphic, starting with an animal’s head and leading to several murders, which go the way a sword related death is supposed to go. Jakob has to figure out if that level of violence is inside of him, and more importantly, is he attracted to it? The samurai keeps letting Jakob follow him around, making it clear he’s interested in the boy; Jakob is so repressed, he’s unsure if he is attracted back or not, which complicates the story in a fun way.
Also helping Der Samurai’s essence is the merging of 2 horror settings. There’s a large forest that Jakob chases the samurai through for a good, scary chunk of time, letting the audience see how overmatched Jakob is, and how dark that forest is. Then we enter this tiny, tiny town of….10 houses? It’s really small. Those villages famously contain something malevolent ready to spring out, or are wide eyed innocents awaiting unimaginable terror. In Der Samurai’s case, the samurai is Michael Myers, wreaking havoc on the small town of people clearly unprepared for a wolf in women’s clothing, leading to Jakob sprinting after the samurai down a dark, empty, street with scared people barricaded inside their houses.
Looking for a scary movie that’s familiar and different at the same time? Der Samurai will give you exactly that, keeping the story simple and straightforward, going straight for the screams. The sequel should be the samurai time traveling into feudal Japan, where we can see his skills put to the test.