(1960)
Dir - Tokuzô Tanaka
Overall: GOOD
One of the first films to be directed by Tokuzô Tanaka, The Demon of Mount Oe, (Ōeyama Shuten Dōji, Shuten Doji of Mount Oe), leans on the epic side as far as samurai movies go. At nearly two hours in length, it deals with rival clans and warriors, brutalized women, and the supernatural entities working both with and against them. A minor plot line here was borrowed eight years later in Kaneto Shindo's outstanding Kuroneko where a severed hand from a onryō spirit, (or a demon in this case), is meant to be guarded over as to loose its power, only to be obtained via trickery from said spirit. Elsewhere, there are various sword fights, some big, dopey monsters, and a prominent theme of women in feudal Japan being "tossed around like dolls without a soul" as one particularly poor lady proclaims. While the men prattle on about honor, dignity, and restoring peace, (or just wiping out their enemies so that they can live in luxury), the comparatively small number of females are treated as property and either successfully attempt or threaten to attempt suicide. This makes one of the clan leaders being the aforementioned, shapeshifting female demon interesting as she is the only one to possess any physical or diabolical power. Though the movie feels its length at times, it is an impressive production with some wacky elements, costumes, and violence.
(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.
(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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