(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.
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.
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