Good and entertaining samurai and demon movie. This is more based on a supernatural concept than samurai, so this may not be the treat for people that want a samurai movie. On the other hand you are not seeing so much to the demons either.

I liked it and it is fairly good acting and an okay story. But be aware it is not a full blown samurai or demon movie.

In his third film, reliable period film director Tanaka Tokuzo gets a budget to work with, granting him not only great color cinematography and competent visual effects, but also three major jidai-geki stars: Haseagawa, Ichikawa AND Katsu. The film is fairly confident that this alone is enough to win the audience to its side.

I recently watched Tanaka's later Kaidan yukijorô (The Snow Woman, 1968),which is the best film I have seen from him to date. Like The Snow Woman, The Demon of Mount Oe is a supernatural tale set in distant centuries. However, the narrative here is more broad and everything is massive. The supernatural elements of the story are interesting enough, but the story doesn't really develop a flow, making this film feel super slow and stand-still.

The narrative has Ichikawa and Katsu fighting against a shape-shifting demon, played by Hasegawa. Though there is romance, action and a bit of horror, this folk tale never chooses an overall tone, which again makes it feel more tedious. There is potential in the scenario just like in the visual effects and the all-star cast, but the film would have needed a more determined visionary to helm it. Paradoxically, it's unlikely that Daiei would have financed the film, had it featured a director capable of turning the material into a lasting masterpiece.

Forces loyal to the Mikado are under assault from an army assembled by a demon who lives atop Mount Oe. There is chaos in the streets of the capital, and loyal samurai Shintarô Katsu has been attacked by the demon and cut off its arm.... only for it to show up inthe guise of his aunt and take it back. Three women seem to be key to the demon's downfall: Katsu's sister, who insists on spying on the demon herself, a disgraced woman passed around like a bottle of wine, and the women who is the demon.

At first I thought this was going to be another fantasy with swordplay, special effects that called attention to themselves and suitable for children. Well, the special effects were there: the clumsy camera halts for teleportation or the transformation of giant spiders into dead men, and rolls of streamers to turn into webs. It certainly had those, but it also had a fairly complicated plot as good guys struggled to remain good despite the worst their allies could do, and some lovely camerawork under the supervision of cinematographer Hiroshi Imai. I was particularly taken with his graceful, panning group shots, even if the mountain sites seemed to be set in abandoned quarries, like DOCTOR WHO. While the cheap special effects may put off the high-browed, it's a well written, directed and shot samurai movie.