The Age of Assassins | |
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Directed by | Kihachi Okamoto |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Rokuro Nishigaki |
Edited by | Yoshitami Kuroiwa |
Production company | |
Distributed by | Toho |
Release date |
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Running time | 99 minutes |
Country | Japan |
Language | Japanese |
The Age of Assassins (殺人狂時代, Satsujinkyō jidai) is a 1967 Japanese film directed by Kihachi Okamoto.
A nerdy young college instructor named Shinji Kikyo returns home one day to find himself the target of a mad assassin. Surviving somewhat miraculously, he fends off other assassins and, with the help of the reporter Keiko Tsurumaki and the car mechanic Bill Otomo, eventually discovers that a "population control" association is really an assassination squad led by Shogo Mizorogi, who has been training patients in a mental asylum to become killers. Along the way, it starts to appear that Shinji may not be the mild-mannered academic he seemed at first, but a well-trained secret agent.
Tatsuya Nakadai | Shinji Kikyo |
Reiko Dan | Keiko Tsurumaki |
Hideo Sunazuka | Bill Otomo |
Hideyo Amamoto | Shogo Mizorogi |
Keiichi Taki | Ikeno |
Seishirô Kuno | Man with crutch |
Tatsuyoshi Ehara | Aochi (as Tatsuya Ebara) |
Yasuzō Ogawa | Mabuchi |
Atsuko Kawaguchi | Yumie Komatsu |
Wataru Ōmae | Oba-Q |
Shin Ibuki | Atom |
Hiroshi Hasegawa | Solan |
Masaya Nihei | Pappy |
The Age of Assassins was released in Japan on February 4, 1967.[1] The film was released in the United States by Toho International with an international title of Epoch of Murder Madness in 1967.[2]
The critic Chris Desjardins has written that "Age of Assassins is another sharp-edged lampoon that works just as well as an action film, and compares favorably with such other brilliant, tongue-in-cheek mod sixties masterpieces as Elio Petri's The Tenth Victim and Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill."[3]