Tuesday, June 6, 2023

60's Asian Horror Part Five

THE GHOST CAT OF OTAMA POND
(1960)
Dir - Yoshihiro Ishikawa
Overall: MEH
 
Screenwriter Yoshihiro Ishikawa takes his first stab at directing with the typical bakemono ghost story The Ghost Cat of Otama Pond, (Kaibyō Otama-ga-ike), which is merely a mediocre entry into the sub-genre. Numerous films were made in such an era which were period set and featured vengeance from beyond the grave being served up via feline demon.  All of the story beats here are common, (doomed lovers, landowners who brutalize their subjects, a cursed body of water, samurai warriors being tricked by possessed women and supernatural visions which cause them to frantically and awkwardly swing their swords around, ladies in evil cat makeup, etc), and Ishikawa and cinematographer Kikuzô Kawasaki dip into the same bag of visual tricks that Mario Bava would from the other side of the globe during such a time.  This is to say that there is much use of colored gel filters in place to enhance the more ghastly visuals, giving the film a fittingly garish aesthetic at times.  Sadly, such spooky window dressing only becomes prominent in the third act, and the tale is too derivative and slow moving up until then.

DAYDREAM
(1964)
Dir - Tetsuji Takechi
Overall: MEH
 
The second cinematic work from controversial filmmaker Tetsuji Takechi, Daydream, (Hakujitsumu), is a notably early entry in the pink/eroduction genre and the first to garnish a sufficient budget as well as a mainstream release.  The story line, (if one can argue that there even is one), was based on an idea from famed author Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, here given a stark, avant-garde treatment where almost the entire running time is made up of hallucinatory scenes involving a woman getting mildly, sexually tormented.  Opening with an almost twenty minute dentist scene, things remain stagnant once the anesthesia kicks in where a man fantasies about another patient he is in the room with.  The dialog is minimal and largely pointless when it does arrive since the main attraction is the bizarre perversity where said woman rives around uncomfortably while moaning and occasionally being naked.  Some sequences have an effective, unsettling strangeness to them which is enhanced by Akira Takeda intimate, off-kilter cinematography, but the pacing is persistently dreadful and the whole production is tame even by the standards that would be raised within the sub-genre in the closely following years.

GENOCIDE
(1968)
Dir - Kazui Nihonmatsu
Overall: MEH
 
A strange entry in post-war science fiction, Genocide, (Konchû daisensô, Great Insect War, War of the Insects), has laughable characterizations yet is far more bleak than most tokusatsu movies ever allowed.  The last of only four films to be directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu, its "insects out for revenge" plot line is goofy on paper, but it is fueled by both the ever present threat of nuclear devastation brought on by the Cold War as well as concentration camp and H-bomb atrocities from World War II.  American military personnel justify setting off yet another atomic weapon to rid the world of killer swarms of poisonous bugs while a bombshell American woman suffers all-consuming trauma from her family's torture and murder at the hands of Nazis, thus providing her with a mad scientist scheme to unleash Armageddon on a humankind that she finds unworthy to live.  Such heavy ideas at play are a far cry from the usual giant monster and/or alien takeover scenario commonly found in such Japanese, B-movie exports from the era, but the film still has a melodramatic energy that is unintentionally silly.  A sudden, grim ending has the same kind of combination of dark, real world potency and comical absurdity, but the movie's tonal inconsistencies are at least interesting in fits and starts.

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