1970s Czech Horror Part Two

HRABE DRAKULA
(1971)
Dir - Anna Procházková
Overall: MEH

This television drama serves as the only cinematic Dracula adaptation made in the Czech Republic.  Shot in black and white with soap opera lighting, Hrabe Drakula, (Count Dracula), is certainly a low budget affair, but not in a adverse way.  While the film jumps set pieces rather abruptly at times, it still condenses Bram Stoker's novel rather impressively since it does only run seveny-six minutes.  Naturally, it is rather void of gore and emphasizes virtually no sex appeal, but that is solely a fault of the television medium from the era as opposed to any byproduct of the filmmakers.  On that note, some of the effects are well-executed despite the meager production values.  The vampires speak telepathically and appear transparent at times and all of the scenes at Dracula's castle fare better than the more stagey, interior set ones.  It is not without some other issues though.  The ending is underwhelming and suffers the most from the minimal length, Ilja Racek does not get enough screen time to properly establish himself as a worthy on-screen Count, and the stock music is frequently more silly than spooky.  Acceptable for what it is, but still deservedly a more obscure outing.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
(1978)
Dir - Juraj Herz
Overall: GOOD

This take on the French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve's much-filmed Beauty and the Beast tale is both lavishly stylized and quite dark.  For the better part of about a decade's time, filmmaker Juraj Herz was easily the most persistent purveyor of the horror genre in his native Czechoslovakia.  It is not surprising then that his Beauty and the Beast, (Panna a netvor, The Virgin and the Monster), embarks on a much more gruesome and dank trek than many other versions.  The grotesque, bird-like Beast's castle is a crumbling, quintessentially macabre abode full of broken statues, bubbling ponds, overgrown and dead foliage, decrepit furniture, and melted candles.  The whole establishment looks like it has been abandoned for centuries after being burned down.  There are numerous, freaky touches in the form of a charred, legless man either living in or being part of a chandelier, a person made of gold operating the fireplace, and at one time a stone statue appears to be mobile.  With a musical score that exclusively bounces between a romantic violin melody and dramatic, minor-key organ bursts, visually the moments of sinister weirdness are equally offset by robust dream sequences full of blinding white and soft lighting.  The story is left positively vague and follows a type of fairytale logic that Herz spends very little time explaining, but this is less frustrating than it is essential to the movie's odd, surreal nature.

THE NINTH HEART
(1979)
Dir - Juraj Herz
Overall: MEH

Closing out his most prolific decade, Juraj Herz ended his 1970s input with an original fairytale co-scripted by Josef Hanzlík.  The horror components in The Ninth Heart (Deváté srdce) are sparse, limited mostly to the mere concept of an evil, cross-eyed astrologer who needs a series of human hearts to do...something.  Sadly, this is not one of the director's more engaging works.  We are treated to an entire puppet show by a vagabond troupe in the very beginning, only to witness different parts of it again several more times throughout the movie.  Elsewhere, a smug, unlikable "hero" bamboozles an innkeeper with an elaborate meal that he cannot pay for, gets thrown in jail, escapes jail, joins the traveling riff-raff, gets arrested again, and then finally the actual plot kicks into gear.  From then it still overstays its welcome though with long, ballroom dance scenes and an underwhelming ending where three characters appear trapped in the astrologer's magical castle for what feels like eons.  As it explores the fantastical themes of Herz' other films in a more whimsical way, it is a compelling watch only for those looking for a more comprehensive intake of his work.

1970s Kihachiro Kawamoto Animated Horror Shorts

ONI
(1972)
Overall: GOOD

This adaptation from one of the stories present in the ancient anthology collection Konjaku Monogatari was the third from stop-motion puppet animator Kihachiro Kawamoto.  Oni, (The Demon), is done somewhat in the Yamato-e painting style and utilizes horizontal sets against a black background which are then shot from an elevated position.  While still effective, Kawamoto's work would continue to grow more embellished over the years.  Here, it is more stark and not just in a visual sense.  In place of any dialog or narration, the story is explained via title cards which is more akin to silent films, with the only sound therefore being the traditional Japanese score by Seiji Tsurusawa.

DOJOJI TEMPLE
(1976)
Overall: GOOD

A more elaborately decorated work from Kihachiro Kawamoto, Dojoji Temple, (Dôjôji), was still shot in the same method as the artist's other movies, but incorporated more traditional animation and detailed sets.  A reworking of the Kabuki play Musume Dōjōji, (The Maiden of Dojo Temple), it follows a wrathful temptress who takes the form of a demon and a giant snake monster to capture a monk she becomes smitten with.  At nearly nineteen-minutes in length, the beautiful visual presentation and spectral score keep it from becoming too laborious.  Though with no dialog of any kind, more than one viewing may be necessary to fully grasp what is going on for those not familiar with the traditional tale.

KATAKU
(1979)
Overall: GOOD

Kihachiro Kawamoto's final film of the 1970s was an adaptation of the Noh play Motomezuka (The Seeker’s Mound, House of Flames) and it continues the animator's Bunraku-inspired work in stop-motion.  While still chasing similar themes of doomed characters undergoing supernatural occurrences, Kataku, (House of Flame), has a curious, well-meaning traveler that ends up praying for a damned maid that has suffered the guilt over her two suitor's deaths from half a century ago.  Narrated by Tetsunojo Kanz, (whose only film credit is this one), it is more conventional overall in structure.  In addition, the film is intricately designed and shows a continuing growth in Kawamoto's talents with the medium.  The puppets are more meticulous and the fusing of drawn animation is more emphasized, with the depiction of hell benefiting the most from the latter.

1970s Yoji Kuri Animated Horror Shorts

THE BATHROOM
(1970)
Overall: GOOD

While he never indulged faithfully in the horror genre, surrealist independent animator pioneer Yoji Kuri's work would occasionally feature macabre visuals to compliment his darkly comedic style.  His first film of the 1970s The Bathroom is a quintessential, counter-culture flavored bit of pretentiousness, but also one that is in on its own joke.  It is a series of random, stop-motion set pieces that mixes animation with live actors and props.  Most of it takes place in a single living room, (not a bathroom, oddly enough), except for a short detour to an art museum full of ass and leg statues flipped upside down, which eventually find themselves back to the living room with a brass instrument simulating flatulence.  Do not think about it too much.

THE MIDNIGHT PARASITES
(1972)
Overall: GOOD

Back to his traditional though primitive animation template, Yoji Kuri's The Midnight Parasites, (Kiseichuu no Ichiya), is a loose, surreal nod to Dutch/Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.  For roughly ten minutes, a bunch of abnormal drawings devour and then defecate gold or something and if they are not doing that, things are coming out of or entering their bodies in some other way or another.  The synthesizer score by Kaoru Tomita is more eerie than the visuals which are just positively weird, though they both assuredly enhance each other.  Though it grows a bit tiresome by the time a few minutes are left, overall it is pretty agreeable, avant-cinema.

MANGA
(1977)
Overall: GOOD

The final work from Yoji Kuri before retiring from commercial filmmaking to become a teacher at Laputa Art Animation School is unmistakably a rather silly one.  Manga emphasizes the artist's juvenile style front and center and is nothing more than a handful of playful sight gags, each vignette given its own title.  Some are more amusing than others with the book-ending chapters "The Strange Sound" and "The Door" providing the most chuckles.  The latter of those also serves as the most satisfyingly morbid.  Kuri's drawing style here is so crude that it is unassumingly charming and once again, his wit is pretty grim.  This is a good thing as each of these traits on their own would not be quite as enjoyable without the other.

1960s Asian Horror Part Four

ONIBABA
(1964)
Dir - Kaneto Shindo
Overall: GOOD

Harsh, merciless, atmospheric, and cripplingly slow at times, Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba, (Demon Hag), utilizes its horror components in a bare, metaphoric way.  The story is remarkably simple; in fact too simple to justify long stretches where nothing is propelled further and particular scenes grow monotonous.  In a miserable, hopelessly uncertain time of civil war when begging and pillaging is all one can do to desperately survive, no one here comes out ahead.  Having already been forced to live such loathsome lives, humans and demons become interchangeable indeed.  The odd-ball score from Hikaru Hayashi mixes tribal drums, screams, and jazz instrumentation, making for an eccentric component when it is sparingly used.  Another plus is Kiyomi Kuroda's shrouded cinematography which obscures entire characters in shadow and makes the wild, overgrown reeds surrounding undisclosed huts seem all the more labyrinth-like.  None of the characters are likeable, but this gives its grim ending a moral footing as well as a tragic one. 

SNAKE WOMAN'S CURSE
(1968)
Dir - Nobou Nakagawa
Overall: GOOD

Several aspects of Nobou Nakagawa's Snake Woman's Curse, (Kaidan hebi-onna), are curiously realized, but it is an interesting work at the very least from one of Japan's most prolific filmmakers in the horror genre.  It is another vengeful ghost premise this time set in the Meiji period where an unfeeling landlord and his brutish son meet their comeuppance at the hands of a bad omen via snake mischief.  The ghost appearances are quite frequent and often very abrupt, as are some of the transitional choices between scenes.  One such instance occurs when the camera randomly fades to black halfway through only to come right back to where the action was taking place.  These moments where the pale, ghostly dead show up to repeat the same dialog they said to the people that they are haunting, (followed by hallucinations of snakes and then much yelling and breaking things), becomes rather repetitive after awhile.  Nakagawa still pulls off some unique tricks along the way, especially by the finale where a religious exorcism ceremony of sorts goes predictably very wrong.  There is also some tense, hand-held camera work and striking images that while arbitrary, do reinforce the supernatural nature.

BLIND BEAST
(1969)
Dir - Yasuzo Masumura
Overall: GOOD

One of the earliest cinematic adaptations of a Edogawa Rampo work was Yasuzo Masumura's Blind Beast, (Mōjū).  A morbidly strange examination of Stockholm syndrome and depravity, the film lays on its metaphors at point blank range.  The characters theorize each other's behavior out loud and along with steady narration from one of them, this leaves the viewer with no choice but to just have a voyeuristic experience of the whole thing.  Set primarily in an almost laughably bizarre "art" studio with the walls made up of molded body parts surrounding a giant naked woman's torso the size of a truck, things only get increasingly alarming from there.  By the time the third act kicks into high gear, the rails come off and the film brilliantly manages to let the viewer share in the disturbing numbness the way that the characters now have.  Masumura expertly maintains a tone of seriousness even as nearly every detail of the film is ridiculous.  While it could be seen as a precursor to torture porn, it never becomes too visually explicit to be uncomfortable, instead even taking the opportunity to pile on even more symbolism in its very last act of violence.

1960s Asian Horror Part Three

ILLUSION OF BLOOD

(1965)

Dir - Shirō Toyoda

Overall: GOOD

Released six years after Nobuo Nakagawa's enduring The Ghost of Yotsuya, the Toho production company revisited the often filmed, kabuki play source materiel of the "Yotsuya Kaidan" ghost story, here titled Illusion of Blood, (Yotsuya kaidan, Yotsuya ghost story).  For those familiar with the previous film versions alone, this may not offer up much of a fresh take, but it is significant for the time as being the most nihilistic interpretation.  The rightfully doomed, lead character Iuemon Tamiya, (played here by the consistently solid Tatsuya Nakadai), is less sympathetic than ever and represents a cynical, "life without love" villian whose exclusively selfish nature has cursed him to an existence where almost everyone that he comes in contact with is granted a suffering fate through his doing.  While some of the side drama could afford to be either omitted or trimmed for a more agreeable flow, director Shirō Toyoda maintains a fitting, primitive presentation that makes excellent use out of only occasional musical enhancements, plenty of sinister, ghostly imagery, and some mild bloodshed.

 

THE PUBLIC CEMETERY UNDER THE MOON 

(1967)
Dir - Cheol-hwi Kwon
Overall: MEH

The first of only three movies directed by Cheol-hwi Kwon, The Public Cemetery Under the Moon, (Wolhaui gongdongmyoji, A Public Cemetery of Wol-ha), is problematically structured, with nearly the entire middle hour made up of a melodramatic flashback involving infidelity, a poison-prescribing doctor, a sick wife, and her imprisoned brother.  This comes after a garish and macabre intro where a corpse introduces himself as the movie's infrequent narrator and we get some tacky color schemes, sinister noises on the soundtrack, and shots of long-haired skulls to give the genre enthusiast false hope.  The film has a tacky and atmospheric quality, but the story that Kwon has come up with is painfully dull despite the actors giving it their wailing and exaggerated gestures-all.  Lots of blaring sound cues, flashing lighting, blood, fog, vampire fangs, a severed hand, and other supernatural psyche-outs in the final act are hardly enough to make up for the dysfunctional squabbling that is at the center of things.  Punctuate the script with actually compelling drama and at least a few intense set pieces, and all of the other ingredients are here to make for a campy and vengeful ghost story.  In other words, take out everything except the first and last ten minutes and you got yourself a winner.

TOKUGAWA ONNA KEIBATSU-SHI
(1968)
Dir - Terua Ishii
Overall: MEH

One of Terua Ishii's earliest pink films, Tokugawa Onna Keibatsu-Shi, (Shogun's Joys of Torture), helped set the template for the later exploitative work that he would become most known for.  An anthology set during the Edo period in Japan, it is a serious of torture porn excursions, as the title would accurately dictate.  While the sequences are not quite as graphic by modern sensibilities, they are still uncomfortably disturbing and positively violent for the time.  By an enormous margin, women are the primary victims who are tormented by anything from sleeping with their brother, sleeping with another woman, sleeping with the wrong man, or just being Christians.  Incorporating such levels of incest and lesbianism, Ishii successfully pulls no punches in addressing taboos outside of just the visual nastiness on display.  Of course for a film whose primary objective is to shock and be distressing for the audience by showing numerous people suffer extreme physical agony, it is an exercise in sadism that one cannot sanely call entertaining.  In that regard it deserves to be missed just as much as any torture porn, despite its mild historical importance.

1960s Asian Horror Part Two

JIGOKU
(1960)
Dir - Nobuo Nakagawa
Overall: GOOD

One of the most intensely harrowing depictions of the abyss probably ever brought to the screen, Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku, (Hell, The Sinners of Hell), is an off-beat, near masterpiece, purposely unwelcome in any proper sub-genre.  It was the last film produced by the Shintoho studio, one which specialized in low-budget, exploitative B-movies that usually depicting more extreme gore than was commonly acceptable.  On that note, Jigoku predates the splatter works of Herschell Gordon Lewis by a few years, making its overt violence even more shocking for its time.  Before the long, utterly fabulous set piece in hell emerges, (which takes up the entire third act), the story is often awkwardly structured.  There is a barrage of characters to keep track of, the editing is disruptive, and the main protagonist is curiously unsympathetic as he needlessly sleeps or falls in love with virtually every last woman he encounters, all the while playing the role of a pitiful, spineless pawn in the diabolical manipulation at play.  That said, there is a relentless theme of atoning for ones sins and that no human anywhere gets off unscathed when it comes to their just desserts.  In any event, Nakagawa and his crew concocted a visual representation of the Japanese Buddhist concept of hell that is absolutely to be reckoned with and the final thirty-eight odd minutes alone represent indisputable, essential horror filmmaking.

THE LIVING SKELETON
(1968)
Dir - Hiroshi Matsuno
Overall: GOOD

This contemporary-set, kaidan horror outing from the prolific Shochiku production company was only the second and last directorial effort from Hiroshi Matsuno, who had been an assistant director on other projects for the studio.  On the one hand, The Living Skeleton, (Kyūketsu Dokurosen), seems to splice together different concepts rather erratically.  Vengeful ghosts, skeletons chained together on the ocean's floor, bats, a disfigured priest, a mad scientist playing a tape recording of a moaning woman for no reason, and machine gun-wielding pirates all regularly intermingle.  Even the soundtrack which incorporates sexy saxophone and harmonica is unique in this regard.  Some of these incidental details connect better than others, but at worst, the more silly ones do not derail the movie as much as they perhaps should.  The flimsy, almost scatter-brained story in fact ends up being sort of freakishly charming.  This is mostly do to the accomplishment of Matsuno, who maintains a serious enough mood throughout, even when some of the set pieces, effects, and props fail to be all that convincing.

HORRORS OF MALFORMED MEN
(1969)
Dir - Teruo Ishii
Overall: GOOD

Beginning at an insane asylum where a (rubber) cell brimful of naked women writhe around a lone man trapped inside, Eru guro/pink eiga filmmaker Teruo Ishii's Horrors of Malformed Men, (Edogawa Rampo Zenshū: Kyoufu Kikei Ningen), stays the baffling, curiously disturbing course throughout.  The plot (which fuses several Edogawa Ranpo stories together into one), cruises along in a manner as to leave as many areas open as possible.  Though once the film switches locations midway through and goes full Island of Dr. Moreau, the gloves are off.  Naked women attached to goats from their vaginas, naked women painted either gold or silver, (dancing erotically and/or serving as human boat decor), naked, different sex Siamese twins where the male has a deformed monster face, naked spider-web covered human pets eating grass and drinking blood from each other via tubes, etc.  The story-line does eventually wrap itself up in a silly, "I've secretly been a detective all along so now I'll explain everything" way, but it only gets more odd from there, including one of the most insane fireworks displays ever included in a movie.  As an example of visually bonkers, exploitative cinema played straight enough to be even more disturbing, it is a vital experience.

1960s Asian Horror Part One

KWAIDAN
(1965)
Dir - Masaki Kobayashi
Overall: GREAT

Doubtlessly one of the most outstanding Japanese ghost movies ever made, Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan is epic in both its reach and literal length.  An anthology film based on Lafcadio Hearn's collection of folk tales Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, each of the four tales vary in duration with "Hoichi the Earless" being the longest and the following "In a Cup of Tea" the shortest.  None of the segments dip in quality though and Kobayashi paces them all in a purposeful, lethargic way.  The music by famed composer Tōru Takemitsu contributes thoroughly to the film's hypnotic quality, only emerging at particular intervals to provide a fully-formed, ethereal element.  Shot by Yoshio Miyajima with sets designed by Shigemasa Toda, if there are more beautiful looking supernatural horror films out there, the number of them cannot be many.  Nothing on the screen seems entirely real, from specter-inhabited graveyards, to snow storms, to red oceans full of samurai, to eyeball clouds in the sky.  It is gorgeously lush, otherworldly, and uncompromising in its presentation, all of which makes it a masterpiece exceeding most others of its kind.

GOKE, BODY SNATCHER FROM HELL
(1968)
Dir - Hajime Sato
Overall: GOOD

Assassins, war trauma, UFOs, vampires, hypnotism, bomb threats; a lot of arbitrary nonsense finds its way into a story about air crash survivors arguing about what they should do about their predicament for roughly ninety-minutes.  If anything else, the last feature-length film helmed by Hajime Sata, Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, (Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro, Body Snatcher from Hell, Goke the Vampire), is a positively unique one.  Characters come to ridiculous conclusions and behave in ridiculous ways, the dialog is mostly pure poppycock, ("I hate war!  During war, everyone is miserable."), and the special effects are charmingly dated  The results may be pure camp, but the fact that it all tries to make a statement about mankind bringing about their own demise through selfish and unnecessary bloodshed proves that it has some sort of noble, thematic intentions common to the sci-fi genre as a whole.  The amount of bickering between characters does take up too generous an amount of screen time to the point of some minor annoyance, but for the most part, the movie is quirky and ultimately dark enough to work.

KURONEKO
(1968)
Dir - Kaneto Shindo
Overall: GOOD

Writer/director Kaneto Shindo returns rather elegantly to the vengeful ghost film with Kuroneko, (Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko, Black Cat).  Based on the supernatural folklore of an evil god granting cat-like powers to wronged souls now bound to revenge and set during the Heian period where respected samurai wielded considerable prestige, the story pits its foes against each other by impossibly tragic means.  There is no sense of mystery and in fact the film is readily predictable.  The specters seeking retribution make minimal attempts if any to disguise their faces from the protagonist, but he routinely seems to struggle emotionally with this fact, especially during his final bout with them which would otherwise seem preposterous since he is presumably "duped" so easily.  Beautifully photographed by Kiyomi Kuroda, the set pieces are stark and unearthly.  Reality weaves in and out as ghosts slowly dance, fly through the air, and occasionally show their true, feline form for a moment's notice.  Some of the sequences and much of the dialog, (including more than one montage of doomed samurai meeting their end), is repetitive, but the deliberate flow and ethereal presentation makes these elements more mesmerizing than not.