Once the servant regains consciousness, he attempts to beat them with his bamboo pole, but is slaughtered by Kanbei, who also slays the two women to insure their silence. The three stooges knock the servant out and summarily rape both the mother and daughter. Three of them run off to cause some mischief, but one of the band – Kanbei, the most honorable of the four – refuses to get involved. Hot, bored and stupid, they spy an attractive young woman, her mother and their servant walking down the road. A group of four watari-kashi is idling at a rest stop next to the road. In the next scene we find some of the lowest of the low-class of samurai termed watari-kashi – small bands of fighters who move from one daimyo to the next, depending on who’s hiring, and do the dirty work that most samurai would not touch with a ten-foot pole. So much so that when Daigoro is relieving himself in a bamboo glade, Ittō slices into some bamboo stalks, causing several ninjas to fall from their perch - they don’t last long near Ittō’s blade. Their pursuit forces Ittō to constantly look over his shoulder and never let his guard down. The father and son assassination team is being followed by soldiers of his sworn enemy, the Yagyū Clan. Ittō, meanwhile, draws his sword part way and notices in the reflection on the blade that some bamboo reeds are also trailing the boat. A young woman at the front of the boat, clearly hysterical, drops a bundle holding all of her worldly possessions into the water, and Daigoro retrieves the bundle. The boat captain tells Ittō that he can’t take the baby carriage on a boat Ittō was prepared for this eventuality and putts the wooden baby carriage into the water so it floats in tow with Daigoro in the cart. We find Ittō and his son by a river getting on a boat. The baby cart, in which Daigoro sits most of the time, has even more secret weapons and gadgets than in the previous films. He voluntarily submits to torture in order to help out a prostitute and his son Daigoro, who is also of growing importance to the series, is developing an equally deep character progressing with each one of the movies, including even starting to engage in battles. Ittō appears more selfless in this film than in the other movies. Unlike Nemuri Kyoshiro, not only is Ittō fearless in battle but he also follows a strict moral code. Ôgami Ittō, (after Raizo Ichakawa’s Nemuri Kyoshiro) is my personal favorite anti-hero and is, as always, completely fearless and almost invincible. On their way through 17th century Edo Japan, the father and son are again confronted with a colossal number of enemies (above all the Yagyu clan and their cronies), and the ‘Lone Wolf with child’ is once again hired as an assassin (as always for 500 ryo). Ôgami Ittō (Tomisaburo Wakayama) is still following the ‘path to hell’ with his only son Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) in order to avenge his wife’s death and clear his name. Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades (or, in Japanese: Kozure Ôkami: Shinikazeni mukau ubaguruma, literally Wolf with Child in Tow: Perambulator Against the Winds of Death), is the third in a series of six Japanese martial arts films based on the long-running Lone Wolf and Cub comic book series about Ogami Ittō, the wandering assassin for hire who pushes his young son, Daigoro, around in a wooden baby carriage.
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