[KFCC] Owl's Castle Review

Story: The populace of Ida are renowned for their skills in the ninja arts, but the High Lord of the land does not approve of these ninja people and views them as a possible danger in the maintenance of his power. He orders their villages raided and all of people murdered, some of the children are hidden away by the ninja's. In the end only a handful full of ninja's survive along with some children. Then years later the High Lord's only heir dies, one of the old villagers from Ida seeks out one of the last surviving Ninja's. He convinces him to go and take revenge for the people of Ida finally, on his quest he meets a few interesting characters like a female ninja who tried to have him killed or a fellow Ninja from Ida who has become a samurai and serves one of the lords. But none of these distractions will stop him from the final goal of his mission.

Review: This is a traditional Japanese Ninja/Samurai movie, the movie offers an excellent looks at medieval Japan. The use of color in the scenery is very rich, from the colorful costumes to the deep greenness of the forest. This movie is visually stunning, it seems no detail was spared in replicating an ancient Japan. As elaborate as the decor was the story does not only match the elaborateness but doubles it. This is one of the most stretched out and confusing stories we have ever seen. You must really pay extreme attention else you will be left spinning in confusion.

There are a lot of different characters in this movie, in fact too much to keep track of. It seems there were a lot of important characters that were only in the movie for 15 minutes. Instead of enriching the movie it took away from it, as some of these characters were similar and we kept wondering who was who. You could even also say that the main character was almost a secondary character with all the other characters and their stories. There is a fair amount of background for several of this characters no to mention a good deal of development. But then again there is just too much going on to really be able to follow what is going on.

We were disappointed with the lack of fights and ninja action, for a movie of this length there was really very little going on. The fights were simple and cold cut but the exaggerated sprays of blood each time someone was killed gave an impression of an anime. There was very little ninja action, we expected to see a whole bunch of ninja secrets as they went about their sneaking around. The ninja's were hardly even out sneaking around or doing anything interesting, a real big disappointment. There were a lot of long and boring parts during this movie.

The subtitles were of a very good quality be ready for a lot of reading since none of this characters seems to value silence much. The movie may have a rich beauty to it but the complete lack of an interesting and entertaining story line and the lack of anything interesting happening during the movie really brought it down. It is true that we had high expectations of this movie but it really did not meet up to them. Another negative thing about the movie is its length, its over 2 hours long and you feel it. Maybe they tried to create a large epic story because there was lots of material and characters in the movie that could have been exploited but they tried to show it all. So in the end it all seemed pretty ordinary not to mention too much dialog there is this one scene where a ninja is about to kill an old guy but instead decides to have a long talk with him. We wondered if the ninja tried to bore the old man to death before killing him. The only redeeming value of the movie is the scenery, if you cant find this movie do not worry you are not missing much.