text: Reception From contemporary reviews, Vincent Canby of The New York Times, wrote Shogun Assassin "is as furiously mixed up as  What's Up, Tiger Lily?" and that outside "the little-boy's narration, the movie's not much fun once you've gotten the picture, which is that of a tubby, outcast samurai wandering the length and breadth of Japan, pushing an antique baby carriage that contains his tiny, remarkably observant son." John Pym (Monthly Film Bulletin) found that "the impetus of the original director's intention seems somehow to have been turned round by having the story related from the point of view of the uncomprehending Daigorō", whose narration he compared to that of Linda Manz's Days of Heaven). "What has evidently animated this American version is the packaging of ample bloodshed with the minimum of explanation. Thus, we never really learn why the samurai's wife is murdered; and such scenes as the one in which the headsman compels his son to make a fateful choice between a sword and a pretty raffia ball go for nothing." The review concluded that "the swordplay is of a high, non-exploitative order, and what narrative elements remain-the fire of the ship, for example-are handled with admirable vigour".
  From retrospective reviews, Stuart Galbraith IV of DVD Talk said, "A radical reworking of not one but two Japanese movies combined into a single action-filled extravaganza, Shogun Assassin floored audiences with its dream-like, poetic action and pressure-cooker bloodletting." Tim Lucas (Sight & Sound) described Houston's version as an "ingenious and deeply imagined reinterpretation also turns out to be a conspicuous example of a beloved grindhouse experience that was in fact rewritten, [rescored] (by Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders) and disembowelled in the cutting room"
  In popular culture
  Dialogue excerpts from the film have been sampled in hip-hop music, with samples from the film being prominently featured in several songs from the 1995 album Liquid Swords by GZA. Dialogue from the film was also sampled in the song "Agent Orange" by rapper Cage, from his debut album Movies for the Blind (2002). In the 2004 film Kill Bill: Volume 2, Beatrix Kiddo and her four year old daughter watch the film as a bedtime story.