Lady Snowblood
Lady Snowblood is a 1973 film from Japan, directed by Toshiya Fujita, running 97 minutes. reelscum files it under pinky violence and chanbara.
- Year
- 1973 · 1970s films
- Country
- Japan
- Runtime
- 97 min
- Director
- Toshiya Fujita
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- known (31/100)
- Also known as
- Lady Snowblood: Blizzard from the Netherworld
Defined in the glossary: Pinky violence, Chanbara
Where Kill Bill got most of its ideas, including the snow.
A woman is born and raised for the single purpose of avenging her family, and Meiko Kaji plays her as a blade that occasionally wears a kimono. Snow, arterial spray shot in bright unreal red, and a structure told in chapters like the manga it came from.
Tarantino took the snow, the revenge structure, the yellow and the theme song straight into Kill Bill, which has sent a lot of people back to the source. The source is better.
Elegant, cold and very bloody.
Trailer
The numbers
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Where to watch
Legal options in USA
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Written about
- Meiko Kaji and the art of not blinking
Toei hired her to headline prison quickies. She built the most-copied performance in Japanese genre cinema out of about forty lines of dialogue.
The cycle in depth
- Pinku eiga and the rules that shaped it
Pinku eiga is a Japanese trade category for cheap independent sex features, sized for small theatres and shot to fit Eirin's rule on what a body may show.
Filed alongside
Samurai Rebellion
Kobayashi and Mifune against feudal authority again. It builds slowly and then it does not stop.
Sword of Doom
A swordsman with no morals and no motive cuts his way through the film. It stops rather than ends.
Shogun Assassin
Two Lone Wolf and Cub films chopped into one English dub. A grindhouse legend regardless.
Zatoichi: The Tale of Zatoichi
The blind masseur who is also the deadliest swordsman alive. The first of twenty-five-plus.
Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance
A disgraced executioner and his toddler take the assassin's road. The pram has blades in it.
Goyokin
A samurai returns to stop the massacre he could not prevent the first time. Shot in real snow.
Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion
Sold as a women-in-prison quickie. Shot like an art film. Meiko Kaji barely blinks.
Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx
The best of the series. A pram, a snowfield, and a small army that should have stayed home.
Harakiri
A ronin asks to commit suicide in a lord's courtyard. What follows dismantles the whole code.
School of the Holy Beast
The Japanese entry, and formally the most accomplished of them.
Sex & Fury
The naked snow swordfight. Everyone remembers it; the rest is decent Meiji melodrama.
Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable
Ito's last. Kaji drags a severed arm through Tokyo in the opening minutes.