Funny things, these cult movies. They command the fiercest of loyalty from their fans, who will forgive any nonsensical plot twist, lack of characterization and other flaws that may pop up.

That's the sense we got from a recent screening of the Japanese samurai flick The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, the latest in a series of movies about a wandering, sightless masseur who has all sorts of bloody adventures in 19th-century Japan. That's right: A masseur.

While the film was overlong, with weak characters and script, the audience of obvious Zatoichi-philes were whooping it up at every goofy gag, spillage of blood and far-fetched twist.

Yet, despite its flimsy plot and screenplay, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi is indeed entertaining, and is one of the more bizarre -- and bloody -- foreign films to hit mainstream North American theatres in quite a while. The story follows the titular blind masseur (played by the director, legendary genre filmmaker "Beat" Takeshi Kitano), an ostensibly kindly old man who hides a blade in his walking stick. When he gets ticked off, he starts slicing apart his enemies with an uncanny accuracy -- and he gets ticked off a lot.

The Blind Swordsman's meandering storyline sees Zatoichi befriending the bumbling Shinkichi (Gadarukanaru Taka) during one of the masseur's frequent nights out gambling. They encounter a pair of geishas, Okinu (Yuko Daike) and her sister Osei (Daigoro Tachibana), who are not what they appear: It turns out the pair are seeking revenge on a clan of gangsters who slaughtered their family years ago.

Coincidentally, these gangsters have enlisted the services of young samurai Hattori (Tadanobu Asano) in order to take over the remote mountain town in which the film is set. There are some potentially fascinating glimpses behind Hattori's motivations for becoming an assassin-for-hire (he has an ailing wife, for example) that, sadly, never quite get the development they deserve.

Still, this film comes down to an eventual showdown between Zatoichi and Hattori, two master swordsmen who hack up countless bodies in between. And it does take a long time to get to that last sequence. In the meantime, Kitano goes on all sorts of digressions that -- while often amusing -- don't advance the story. And when we do get the final showdown, it's over so quickly that it's a huge letdown.

The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, though, has enough going for it that it's never boring. The frequent low humour is a crowd-pleaser, the battle sequences have enough blood to make it impossible to look away from the screen, and there's even an unexpectedly poignant flashback -- the film's best moment -- to the geishas' tragic past. Toss in a big dance sequence and a charismatically low-key performance by Kitano, and you can at least appreciate why the film won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2003 -- and why Quentin Tarantino is such a big fan of Kitano's films.

The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi is far from perfect, in our books, but we get a feeling that, for its cult following, love is blind.

(This film is rated 18-A)

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