(1975)
Dir - Lo Wei
Overall: MEH
A detrimentally slow boil ghost movie from prolific filmmaker Lo Wei, The Bedevilled, (Sum moh), lumbers through most of its running time with drawn-out melodrama before eventually delivering some supernatural activity well into the last act. Disturbed by Golden Harvest who specialized in martial arts movies as has writer/director Wei, the film boasts some nudity, (courtesy of pink films actor Reiko Ike), as well as an impressively spooky synth score from Joseph Koo, which springs to life right away during an opening credit scene full of skull heads with foggy green backlighting. Unfortunately, nothing remotely horror-adjacent happens for almost fifty minutes after that, which would not be a problem if Wei's story had enough hooks in it. Instead, we are treated to an unfortunate scenario where corrupt individuals bribe a desperate yet good-natured magistrate into wrongly executing an innocent man, only to eventually be haunted by said man and his wife who commits suicide in her despair. A simple enough morality tale where people are punished from beyond the grave for their morally askew mistakes, the stagnant pacing undermines the agenda and some truly fun, last minute sequences where specters finally do some creepy things with their severed heads.
(1977)
Dir - Nobuhiko Ôbayashi
Overall: MEH
Filmmaker Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's immediate follow-up to his celebrated cult film Housu is comparatively not as strange, (Since how could it be?), but it still boats plenty of bizarre whimsy. The Visitor in the Eye, (Hitomi no naka no houmonsha, The Haunted Cornea), borrows the manga character of Black Jack, who is portrayed by Jô Shishido and given an enigmatic presentation without context. He has a Two-Face-styled makeup job, lives in a remote house on the edge of a cliff, is prone to bouts of fury, is a brilliant surgeon as well as an unofficial detective, and has a live-in companion played by a small child who claims to be his wife. The actual story though revolves around a young tennis player whose eye is damaged in the opening scene, only to get the good ole mad scientist treatment of a replacement eye that used to belong to a murdered woman. While the plot is easy enough to follow from there, Ôbayashi's presentation is still singular, with an incessant and annoyingly repetitive musical score that blares through many scenes that it has no business being in, on-the-nose sound cues, soft focus photography that enhances the film's fairy tale aspects, and lingering shots of characters delivering their backstories. The pacing regularly suffers and the climax is too stretched-out, but this is almost a fitting companion piece to its wackadoo predecessor.
(1979)
Dir - King Hu
Overall: GOOD
Only for the most accommodating of viewers, wuxia filmmaker King Hu's sprawling Taiwanese/Hong Kong fantasy epic Legend of the Mountain, (Shan-chung ch'uan-ch'i), is low on story and measured in pace, but it is also exquisitely shot and mesmeric in its lava-like flow. Based on Song Dynasty folklore about an unassuming scholar who is tasked with translating a Buddhist sutra and in turn gets caught up with dueling magic practitioners who are either trying to protect such a task or are out to thwart it for their own gain, little happens as far as plot development throughout its three-hour and twelve-minute running time. In place of this, Hu establishes the beautiful isolated setting via long montage sequences, so cinematographer Henry Chan deserves star credit in this respect. Even with a couple of intense, mystical drum battles between opposing forces and some bouts of kinetic acting on the performers parts, the film is mostly subdued, which is what gives it such a hypnotic aura. It is only within the last thirty or so minutes where more pronounced supernatural elements come into play as Hsu Feng is outed for her wicked ways and willingly becomes a demon to reap her revenge. For modern day viewers that are indoctrinated on more agreeably hurried presentations, the movie will be difficult to get through in a single sitting, but met on its own terms, it is a lush and unique work.
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