MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*
There's no good reason to have Sonny Chiba's name plastered on top of this movie when he's only in about ten minutes at the start. Real star Etsuko Shihomi had already starred in four excellent chopsockies in the SISTER STREET FIGHTER series (1974-5), any one of which outclasses this relatively feeble effort.
Though PRINCESS is, like the SISTER films, set in 1970s Asia, the plot feels like a period-piece, specifically LADY SNOWBLOOD, which concerned a woman trained since childhood to avenge the wrongs done to a parental figure. One small difference is that in this scenario, the female child witnesses the wrongdoing. Isshin (Chiba) is a karate master who's attacked by an ambitious rival, Nikaido (Bin Amatsu) and Nikaido's henchmen. One of the henchmen supplies the film's main metaphenomenal presence, as well as seeming to belong to a period-chopsocky: a white-haired man who, though blind, can hear well enough to fling darts with deadly accuracy. One such dart puts out one of Isshin's eyes, and when the assailants leave Isshin in his humiliated state, Isshin commands his little daughter Yumi to pull the dart from his eye-- one of the movie's few memorable scenes. Isshin then takes Yumi to the US, where he trains her in karate until she reaches young womanhood and is played by Shihomi. She spends most of her young life being trained to gain revenge on Nikaido. One other minor divergence from LADY SNOWBLOOD is that she protests the rigorous training in her youth, but for the rest of the movie seems to be okay with having been so constricted. She and her father spar a little in this sequence but eventually he gets sick and dies, after which Yumi travels to Japan for vengeance.
Shihomi looks great as she pursues Nikaido and the various henchmen, and she gains aid from another martial artist (Yasuaki Kurata) in her quest for revenge. However, though Shihomi had already proven herself a charismatic fake-fighter in the SISTER films, here the fights are sloppily coordinated and are hindered by pan-and-scan in the only available print. I note that the director only helmed eight other films, so maybe the producers got what they paid for. Some scenes are draggy and some move too fast to have any emotional impact. Only at the end, when Yumi and her buddy square off with the villains do things pick up. The film's other memorable scene, taking place in a field of wheat-stalks, shows a wounded Yumi finding a way to neutralize the blind killer's hearing-advantage, by attaching tiny bells to the wheat-stalks, so their jangling of these diabolical devices drives the killer to distraction. (One online review had the notion that the white-haired man was simply going berserk for no reason.) The henchman's hearing is still so acute that he manages to knock down the bells with his darts, but then Yumi attacks and kills him. She also duels Nikaido to the death, but this isn't nearly as impressive. PRINCESS looks like a rush job and has little to recommend it, even compared to many of the lesser HK chopsockies.
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