Should you happen to find a basket floating in the river containing a baby with no eyes, arms or legs, don’t freak out — it’s probably just Hyakkimaru! As created by manga master Osamu Tezuka (Black Jack, Astro Boy) in the late 1960s, Hyakkimaru is a samurai whose real flesh was stolen by 48 demons. With each one he kills via the blade that subs for a left arm, he gets back some of that skin and those limbs, one piece at a time, be it an ear or the liver. Don’t ask — just go with it.
Fully grown, Hyakkimaru (Satoshi Tsumabuki, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) roams the countryside with wisecracking sisterly sidekick Dororo (Kô Shibaski, One Missed Call), looking for demons to slay. Among those they find include a spider-crab creature, girls who morph into oversized caterpillars, a woman who turns into some sort of witch butterfly, a living lotus tree with stretchy neck, something akin to those damned flying monkeys, a pair of talking monster dogs and one hopping devil on horseback. Our heroes gain an ally in a giant ghost baby.
Most of these beasts are all-CGI, but some come in the preferred form of dudes in rubber suits. Given the source material and the country that created kaiju cinema, I much prefer the latter. Regardless, the monster-slaying portions make Dororo quite a kick, but the more Hyakkimaru questions his origins, the more Akihiko Shiota’s epic slows considerably, eventually staying stuck in a 20- or 30-minute lag.
Even today, Tezuka’s Dororo enjoys a page-turning pace; this often-too-serious adaptation could have done that by ditching the dramatic introspection that wasn’t so heavy in the books and stick to the ghost-busting. It’s overlong at two hours and 19 minutes, and ends with no true ending, as Hyakkimaru has two dozen hellions left to stab. If a sequel gets made, I’d certainly like to see him do his thing, but I hope Shiota drops the music score that sounds like you’re being serenaded by a mariachi band in a Mexican restaurant while you’re trying to apply just the right amount of honey to that sopapilla. —Rod Lott
Here’s what you get in 
This overly rushed and poorly dubbed sequel to AIP’s hit 
Price actually gets two roles in this one, but he’s no Peter Sellers in 
A little game for you. Read the following, and think of who could best personify such a monster: “When he grins, birds fall off telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad, and your urine burns. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits. … He has the name of a thousand demons.”
