(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.
(1968)
Dir - Tokuzô Tanaka
Overall: GOOD
Another adaptation of the Japanese Yuki-onna yōkai legend, (which was also utilized as one of the segment's in Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan from four years prior), The Snow Woman, (Kaidan yukijorô), was prolific director Tokuzô Tanaka's more fleshed-out take on the folklore source material. The design of the title spirit and all of her appearances are quite striking. Both beautiful and terrifying in frosted white with gold eyes, ethereally gliding instead of walking, the music blares with howling winds and the terrain becomes unworldly frostbitten during the small instances where her true form is revealed to the doomed individuals who gaze upon it. The story plays out with a handful of details added, namely a villainous bailiff who goes to great lengths to have the humble sculptor apprentice's wife to himself. This does everything to make the inevitably bleak finale more tragic after having witnesses such happiness become ultimately unsustainable. Tanaka spent the later half of his career primarily working in television by making jidaigeki dramas, with very few horror entries in his catalog. His work here is highly commendable though.
(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.
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