60's Asian Horror Part Nine

HOUSE OF TERRORS

(1965)

Dir - Hajime Satô

Overall: GOOD

An ideally atmospheric, supernatural horror outing, House of Terrors, (Kaidan semushi otoko), serves as Japan's answer to Robert Wise's seminal Shirley Jackson adaptation The Haunting.  Possession, a creepy, isolated house dubbed "Satan's Pit" that was bequeathed in a will, a psychic medium, ghostly apparitions, mysteriously violent winds, dead crows, a hunchback housekeeper, and even a locked wooden door bending inwards, the familiar tropes are piled on high and the tone is part William Castle camp/part early Mario Bava Gothic spookiness.  The sound design is relentless, with a ghostly choral motif and the aforementioned bellowing winds creating a perfect, haunted house mood as a handful of people enter a doomed abode to uncover the fate of an eccentric recluse who went mad inside its walls.  Things lose momentum a bit once the mystery is uncovered and it resorts to a cat and mouse game in the finale, but the script from Hajime Takaiwa has more than enough macabre ideas to work with, plus director Hajime Satô keeps up a kinetic pace that enhances such strangeness.

THE X FROM OUTER SPACE

(1967)

Dir - Kazui Nihonmatsu

Overall: WOOF

 

One of the least memorable kaiju films from the genre's most over-saturated period, The X from Outer Space, (Uchū Daikaijū Girara, Cosmic Giant Monster Guilala), serves no other purpose than to recycle both space travel and rampaging monster motifs in as pathetic of a manner as possible.  The absurd looking, over-sized creature does not even show up until over forty-five minutes in which is completely unacceptable since a couple of awful flying spacecraft shots set to up-beat, bippity-boppity jazz music hardly provide enough chuckles in the meantime.  As one could guess, the movie is overflowing with insultingly boring characters and their unfunny, uninteresting, and unoriginal dialog with each other.  The best worst of these movies can usually keep the exposition sequences down to a minimum while offering up amusing suitmation and toy army tank destruction, but such moments look particularly stupid here with no laughably dramatic stakes to care about.  Even with cheapo spaceship interiors that would make Roger Corman blush with embarrassment, what is bad here is too derivatively bad to be worth the price of admission.

 

THE SNAKE GIRL AND THE SILVER-HAIRED WITCH

(1968)

Dir - Noriaki Yuasa

Overall: GOOD

 

In between various Gamera movies, director Noriaki Yuasa switched gears by adapting Kazuo Umezu's manga Hebimusune to Hakuhatsuki for Daiei Films, here translated to The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch.  Intimate yet bizarre, there are some wonderfully unsettling dream sequences full of monster ladies, floating masks, various reptiles, and severed arms, plus the premise of an orphaned girl getting reunited with her parents only to find a creepy, nasty older sister living there who suffers from a deformity is a simple and disturbed one both on paper and in execution.  The heart of the story is an elementary, "It's who you are on the inside that counts" theme, but it is fitting in this context as the main character is a young girl who talks to herself and exhibits an unwavering sweetness, giving the whole thing a demented, contemporary fairy tale vibe.  Even in her normal appearance disguise, Mayumi Takahashi is effectively unsettling as the "bad" sister with glistening skin, glaring eyes, and a nasty demeanor that is immediately intimidating once we meet her.  The fact that she becomes a creature at regular intervals along with the Silver-Haired Witch of the title gives the production even more startling visuals.