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.

1960s Italian Horror Part Eight

WEREWOLF IN A GIRLS' DORMITORY
(1961)
Dir - Paolo Heusch
Overall: MEH

While it tries desperately to get by on its hooky title, Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory, (Lycanthropus), is a typically dull, B-Euro-horror movie with all of the standard hang-ups.  Bad dubbing, bad pacing, bad dialog, boring characters, a boring mystery, boring direction; it is what can be expected for better or worse.  To be fair, it is not exceptionally defective, just humdrum.  On paper, being conservative with a monster's screen time can be used to convey ever-mounting intensity, but Heusch's bland presentation here just consistently underwhelms.  Again, the werewolf make-up is not bad, but the whopping three scenes that he is properly shown in not only come too late, but are also unimaginative in their staging.  As it were, the movie is far too busy following around the head of a reform school, a handsome new teacher, a student who is clearly not a teenager, and the Italian Peter Lorre stand-in and genre regular Luciano Pigozzi as a caretaker, all fusing over missing letters and people's right arms.  It does makes sense when you see it.

THE EMBALMER
(1965)
Dir - Dino Tavella
Overall: MEH

Only two directorial efforts exist from Dino Tavella, both released in 1965 and one of them, The Embalmer, (Il mostro di Venezia, The Monster of Venice), is as mind-numbingly lame as any Italian horror film ever was.  Though it is not a direct adaptation of any Edgar Wallace works, it is certainly done in the style of the Krimis crime films made in Germany around the same time, most of which were based off Wallace's stories.  Well, at least it is done in that style when it is not wasting time showing a handsome detective talking to a non-stop barrage of unfunny people while hanging out with traveling college girls.  For whatever ridiculous reason, this is exactly what the movie spends almost its entire running time doing.  Tavella makes a few interesting visual choices such as freeze-framing the Grim Reaper-clad killer's intended victims, but this ultimately does nothing to lift the movie from its endlessly dull presentation.  The basic concept of a murder in scuba-diving gear is not frightening let alone even interesting and each time he kills, we are treated to virtually the exact same "I will preserve your beauty forever" speech from him, each one growing more laughably grating than the last.

AN ANGEL FOR SATAN
(1966)
Dir - Camillo Mastrocinque
Overall: MEH

The final Italian Gothic horror outing of several that Barbara Steele appeared in was Camillo Mastrocinque's An Angel for Satan, (Un angelo per Satana).  Once again in a dual role, Steele comes close to being a saving grace for the whole proceedings.  As a heiress to a noble Count occasionally getting possessed/tormented by a wicked ancestor who she of course looks exactly like, (or so it would seem), Steele gracefully balances being either innocent or a cold, evil seductress, sometimes within the same scene.  Though the film shies away from any actual nudity, Steele's diabolical persona spares no one, (wealthy, poor, male, female), in dropping her clothes in front of them and even in one instance, beating a mute village idiot who she dares to stare at her birthday suit.  Outside of Steele's bewitching and dynamic performance, the plot is meandering and the final twist rather dumb.  Mastrocinque keeps the first act moving along gracefully enough and the middle one is where Steele truly shines, but the third is an overall let down and gives off the feel of overstaying its initial welcome.  There is a fair share of memorable scenes and it is photographed as atmospherically as any other film of its kind, but it is still not one of the better examples of Gothic Euro-horror out there.

1960s Italian Horror Part Seven

ATOM AGE VAMPIRE
(1960)
Dir - Anton Giulio Majano
Overall: MEH

For anyone hankering for a cheap, laughably, and remarkably dumb version of Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, look no further than Atom Age Vampire, (Seddok, l'erede di Satana).  The penultimate film that Anton Giulio Majano would make before undergoing a rather prolific television directing career, the premise is close enough to Franju's masterpiece as to be plagiarized.  The mad scientist angle is revved-up though to include a monstrous transformation that is held together only by the flimsy logic of campy horror films.  For an English-dubbed, foreign B-movie, it is as bad as can be expected with every line of dialog no matter how dramatically insignificant being delivered as if it is profound.  Also, the film is primarily made up of drawn out scenes of characters talking that slows the whole thing down to a laborious crawl as well as exemplifying the melodramatic dialog in the first place.  Another Euro-horror trademark is in the misleading title; there is no vampire in any frame.  Though the movie at least poses the question of what psychological trauma befalls victims of nuclear deformity, it does not actually explore it past that.

THE BLANCHEVILLE MONSTER
(1963)
Dir - Alberto De Martino
Overall: WOOF

Out of the hoards of tired, Gothic, Italian horror films that spat-forth in the 1960s, one of the least remarkable and derivative was Alberto De Martino's The Blancheville Monster, (also released simply and amusingly as just Horror).  Not the first or last film to haphazardly claim to be an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation by just barely if at all borrowing arbitrary, basic themes from the author's work, nothing here is remotely original let alone compelling.  Another "returning to their creepy castle, there is a curse, shady house servants, guy in a mask, whatever" set up, several characters are in love, some are in cahoots, one gets hypnotized, and none of it matters.  The dubbing and pacing is as ruinous as ever, but it is telling that De Martino himself paid the movie little to no attention after the fact, (or by the looks of it, even at the time), calling it "a little film of no importance".  He ain't lying.  If the script had any kind of clever components and if De Martino put forth any kind of effort to not lull his audience to almost immediate sleep, then there would at least be something to appreciate.  Instead, it is a wasteful enterprise through and through and a bit of Euro-horror that assuredly deserves to be skipped.

LA VENDETTA DI LADY MORGAN
(1965)
Dir - Massimo Pupillo
Overall: GOOD

For a single year, director Massimo Pupillo was prolific enough to make his first three horror films before never returning to the genre again.  By his own admittance, he only went into horror in the first place to get out of making documentaries, but once he found himself immediately pigeonholed, he essentially gave up and only got behind the lens a small handful of times over the next decade and a half.  His final horror effort then, La vendetta di Lady Morgan, (Lady Morgan's Vengeance), is a curious one that still drags and provides some unintentional chuckles do to its occasional clumsiness, but the structure is rather pleasantly bizarre.  At first, the complete disregard for creating any kind of mystery seems lazy, but once it is revealed that this was all in service of getting to the increasingly oddball third act, the movie's fiendishly silly charm is rather enduring.  Gianni Grimaldi's script cannot make up its mind what kind of supernatural rules it should abide by, so instead it just throws as many as it can into the mix at once.  This includes ghosts that can turn wine into water or acid, water into blood, spontaneously blow up ceramic decor, be either transparent or flesh, also be vampires, and also be afraid of fire.  Knowing Pupillo was hardly passionate about such a project to begin with, it is kind of a captivating film perhaps in an accidental sense, but it positively stands out at least amongst other vanilla flavored ones of the era.

1960s Italian Horror Part Six

THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA
(1960)
Dir - Renato Polselli
Overall: MEH

The gimmicky, mildly exploitative The Vampire and the Ballerina, (L'amante del vampiro), was the first of several horror outings from writer/director Renato Polselli.  Not altogether a remarkable one, it manages to feature a handful of somewhat sexually charged and astonishingly boring dance sequences in a small living room where a troupe of leggy ballerinas flay their limbs about while swinging jazz music plays on the soundtrack.  Enough other opportunities are taken to show scantily clad women without going full frontal, giving it a deliberately sleazy feel for its day, if not an explicit one.  Polselli makes a few commendable attempts at creating a tense atmosphere, playing most of the scenes of characters walking around creepy places to no dramatic music.  These scenes go on for ages though and nothing exciting ends up happening anywhere else as the awful script is full of stock, lazy reasons for characters to venture into deserted castles, go off on their own, and become vampires in the first place.  The Gothic locations are well used and it is photographed acceptably, but the lead, caped undead baddie, (who is also given the worst dialog), wears a mask that a six year old would be embarrassed to don on Halloween, so it inevitably comes off more ridiculous than probably intended.

THE MURDER CLINIC
(1966)
Dir - Lionello De Felice/Elio Scardamaglia
Overal: MEH

Lionello De Felice, (who only directed a small handful of films over less than a two decade period), was unofficially behind the lens here as producer Elio Scardamaglia ultimately took credit for what may have been just a few days shooting near the end.  To confuse matters worse, Scardamaglia used the Americanized alias Michael Hamilton anyway.  Regardless of who is responsible, The Murder Clinic, (La lama nel corpo, The Knife in the Body), is in many ways an oddity that is certainly rooted in Gothic horror, but stylistically on the cusp of the newly emerging giallo.  A killer with a switch-blade wearing black gloves whose identity is only revealed at the very end certainly hits all the giallo check marks.  Likewise, the colors are striking, but cinematographer Marcello Masciocchi's use of shadow is formulaic for the creepy castle setting that would have worked just as well had the movie been in black and white.  The film is easily strongest from a visual standpoint and even features a grotesquely deformed woman in a black hood.  Violence wise, it is tame by the standards that Mario Bava would popularize at the same time, but still relatively jarring when it occurs.  It is the script that ends up sinking the ship though not so much by being laughable, but by being so mundane as to barely be worth paying attention to in the first place.

LA BAMBOLA DI SATANA
(1969)
Dir - Ferruccio Casapinta
Overall: MEH

A torture chamber, a woman suffering hallucinations, a mysterious figure wearing black gloves, a conniving governess, day for night scenes galore, a Scooby Doo-worthy, faux-ghost conspiracy to gain ownership of a property, and even the stock howling sound that Deep Purple used at the beginning of "Hush", La bambola di Satana, (Satan's Doll), certainly pulls no punches in embellishing in as many horror trappings as it sees fit.  The only cinematic effort of any kind attributed to writer/director Gerruccio Casapinta and one that was never released in the US or dubbed into English, it is not an awful excursion into Gothic horror by any means.  Yet it is assuredly not a very unique one either.  By 1969, flashy giallo thrillers were gaining much momentum and a handful of Italian directors had already done, (and were doing), more visually compelling works in the genre, making Casapinta's rather flat, uninspired presentation here stick out in an unremarkable fashion even more.  The shots are all static and in lackluster lighting, plus roughly eighty-five percent of the movie is characters sitting around in chairs talking anyway.  A random fist fight, a random sword fight, some mild nudity, and a couple would-be nightmare sequences are not really enough to propel it over its mediocre status.