Along With Ghosts

Chanbara Of Horrors

Along With Ghosts
aka Tôkaidô obake dôchû
Japan 1969
Directed by Yoshiyuki Kuroda & Kimiyoshi Yasuda
Daiei Blu Ray Zone B
From Arrow’s Yōkai Monster Collection Blu Ray set

Along with ghosts is the third and final part of the loose Yōkai Monsters trilogy from the late 1960s, following 100 Monsters (reviewed here) and Spook Warfare (reviewed here). As far as I know there have been at least two more Yokai Monsters movies made since these, the first of which is also included in Arrow’s Blu Ray set Yōkai Monster Collection.

This one has very little in common with the previous entry in this series. Indeed, almost none of the various Yōkai in this movie have anything to do with those in the previous two movies. The one exception being the early appearance, with an even briefer screen time than its last appearance, of the big cyclops bear of a creature, the Tsuchikorobi. Other than this quick cameo, the other spooks on show here are pretty much new (maybe some background creatures used as ‘extras’ could be recycled but certainly none of the main creatures you associate with the first two parts of the trilogy, it seems to me). However, where it differs greatly from Spook Warfare, it does share one small DNA link with 100 Monsters... and that is in terms of the story content.

The story, such as it is, follows what happens after a boss kills both two rival clan members and an old man, the latter warning them not to kill anyone on the sacred ground of the forest less the inevitable curse follows them. The boss is after an incriminating document and after two of the bodies are disposed off, they chase after a seven year old girl who has witnessed events and who steals the document but soon throws it away. The old man, mortally wounded, returns to his house and dies but it turns out he’s her grandfather, who let the father believe his daughter had died seven years prior, because he was a ‘no good’ sort of gambler. The grandfather gives the daughter specific dice made from her dead mother’s bones so her father will recognise her and, just before dying, sends her off to find him, pursued by the evil gang. From then on it becomes a kind of road movie with the girl meeting various heroes and villains on her quest to find her father. There is also a slight twist in the identity of the father (of course) and, towards the end, the Yōkai monsters intercede although, frankly, the wandering ronin she befriends could just have easily taken care of matters himself.

And this is where it harkens back to the original movie. Unlike Spook Warfare, which has a plot revolving around the Yōkai themselves as they fought against an invading, foreign demon... this film, like 100 Monsters, has a standard kind of chanbara plot and the monsters themselves just seem to be plugged in here and there to remind everyone that this is a Yōkai movie. They are not at all integral to the plot and, honestly, don’t really do much other than turn up in a few instances where the little girl, finding herself in trouble, suddenly appearing in deus ex machina moments which aren’t, I have to say, a patch on the previous films.

That being said, the spooks in this one do feel a lot more sinister and aggressive... so tonally having things like the umbrella demon in this one might have detracted massively from the more serious tone the film seems to be going for. This film also happens to have a flying head attack... two flying heads, in fact. Which is strange because I’m not used to seeing flying heads in Japanese films. I mean, severed heads flying off necks in various directions sure but, honestly, self powered floating heads drifting in for a bite is a trope I’d more expect to see in the rich legacy of Indonesian cinema than in films like this, I would say. Not that this was an unwelcome occurrence... it certainly helped pep up the muted supernatural shenanigans of this one, for sure.

The film is well shot with some nice, smooth sequences with moving camera and also a few shots where the action of the movie is shot behind other things, such as bushes, to add a sense of depth to the composition. There are, once again, no great gouts of arterial spray when anyone gets slashed with a samurai sword but, at the same time, the directors don’t shy away from using blood to show the aftermath of various bits of sword violence throughout.

So, yeah, really not much to add to this third in the trilogy, which seems to have more in common with a Zatoichi movie than it does with anything else. Along With Ghosts is certainly not my favourite of the original Yōkai films (I think that would be Spook Warfare) but it’s certainly not a bad movie and fans of standard chanbara should get along with it just fine. Certainly, the Arrow box set collecting these three plus the first of Takashi Miike’s modern takes on the Yōkai is worth picking up.

100 Monsters

Yōkai In The Pack

100 Monsters
aka Yōkai hyaku monogatari
Japan 1968 Directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda
Daiei Blu Ray Zone B
From Arrow’s Yōkai Monster
Collection Blu Ray set

100 Monsters is the first of a trilogy of films which are included as the first three films in Arrow’s recent, four movie Blu Ray set, the Yōkai Monster Collection. The set also includes the first of Takashi Miike’s two Yōkai Monster movies (I believe the second one premiered in Japan sometime in 2021). I’ve been wanting to see these for a while and, well, I won’t go into the story of how a relatively ‘easy to purchase’ new Ltd edition was a bit of a chore to get a hold of but, thanks to Arrow for finally putting these things out (I hope they’ll consider putting the Crimson Bat series of films out there at some point too... I really want to see them).

According to that modern font of all knowledge... Wikipedia (whether it’s accurate information or not)... the term Yōkai comes from various kanji which mean, between them, such terms as ‘attractive; calamity’ and ‘apparition; mystery; suspicious’. Which sums the spirit of this first film up as nicely as writer Kim Newman does on the accompanying featurette on the Yōkai, where he prefers the broader, catch all term of Monsters as a collective companion name as the various spirits, ancient advertising creatures and personifications of places or inanimate objects can be easily dealt with in such a manner.

The film itself is... well it’s certainly charming but it’s also quite strange. Not because of the off kilter, surrealistic inventiveness of the creatures themselves (reintroduced into Japanese culture from stories passed on down the years to a successful and popular manga writer) but because of the way the film seems to take a standard, corrupt official exploiting the downtrodden ‘little people’ for his own profit and gain cliché of a story... and then kind of grafting on the aforementioned Yōkai as the downfall of all the corrupt plans, bringing their own brand of retribution.

So, very briefly, the village shrine and tenement building is about to be torn down by the local corrupt official with the support of his equally treacherous and rich friends. To get what he wants, he entraps the local landlord and even, eventually, ends up murdering him when he finds he has the means to buy himself back out of an arrangement whereby the tenement would be demolished... also nefariously plotting to take the landlord’s daughter as his own slave in the process. However, a government spy is causing hell for him to stop this. Parallel to this, some of the villagers are from the society of 100 Monsters, who tell stories of their own first and second hand experiences with Yōkai and who burn out a candle in ritual to ensure the spirit does not visit them after the telling of the story. Their leader tells the stories to the bad guys at a ‘pay off’ party for the villanous central deed but none of the bad guys can be bothered to participate in the ‘cleansing ritual’ afterwards. Thus, the various Yōkai manifestations in the film come after the villains to thwart their plans and reward them with their just and sometimes terminal deserts.

So, yeah, it’s the kind of plot you would see in, say, a regularly Zatoichi movie (and director Kimiyoshi Yasuda was no stranger to the Zatoichi movies, having directed several of them and even some of the Zatoichi TV series episodes)... but with added monsters/vengeful spirits grafted onto the story where the lone avenger of a movie of this type would traditionally take on all the bad guys and, more often than not, beat them on their own turf. There is, indeed, such a character in this, the government spy... but his resistance plot as he tries to help the surviving tenants is kept completely separate from the Yōkai and the two factions fighting off the evil oppressors are kept completely oblivious to the existence of the other.... with the ‘good humans’ benefitting from the Yōkai justice when everything just seems to fall apart for the villains of the piece.

The strength and, indeed, charm, of the film is definitely the various shapes and forms that the Yōkai monsters take. I had four favourites from this one. Firstly, the giant head manifestation of the Kuchisake-onna or Slit Mouthed Woman (think, giant Black Dahlia head lady, maybe?) who is very much a malevolent spirit and who seems to be making herself known again in various manifestations in the ‘J-Horror’ scene in recent years (I need to get into those movies... if I can find any).

Another great one is the Rokurokubi, who is a lady with a kind of telescopic, Mr. Fantastic style neck, who looks truly fiendish as her snake like neck with her head on the end terrorises those humans who have an encounter with her. Thirdly, the Tsuchikorobi, who is basically like a big hairy bigfoot cyclops creature who can ‘tractor beam’ a person into it’s paws by the use of some kind of mental telepathy.

An fourthly, my absolute favourite and almost a comic relief monster... the Karakasa Obake, who is basically an umbrella demon with a single eye and a big, lolly licker of a tongue that dances about on one leg and befriends the ‘mentally challenged’ young son of the prime bad guy. I’m looking forward to seeing more of him in the next one and his first appearance in this is quite startling... especially for a 1968 movie. The young man is painting line drawings of him all over some screens and one of them comes to animated life, jumping down and dancing around as a line drawing before switching to a more realistic puppet version of the character, while Chumei Watanabe’s comical scoring for this creature plays addictively in the background as it dances around (Watanabe is still composing scores for films, it seems, despite being born in 1925).

Asides from this, the film is fairly well made with the director and cinematographer making great use of blocked areas thrown up by the verticals... which can be a common but effective choice in Japanese films set in the Edo period, where the paper screen walls often throw up big, rectangular blocks which can be used to delineate the space on screen. Indeed, there is some use of dead areas of close ups of wall screens in certain places where the screen is pulled open to show a slit of a vertical rectangle with one or other character’s head in close up peering through. This is an aesthetic which actually has a great narrative pay off later in the film, when the bad guy slides open a screen door to be confronted with a giant head manifestation of the slit-mouther woman taking up the whole area beyond the screens.

And that’s me done with this one but, thanks to Arrow’s new limited edition set, I’m just getting started on the Yōkai Monsters, I’m glad to say. 100 Monsters is a nice introduction to some of the monstrous characters but, looking at the accompanying documentary, there’s a lot more good stuff to come so, yeah, I’ll get back to you very soon with the review of the next one in the series, for sure.

Daimajin

Daimajin all the people...

Daimajin
Japan 1966
Directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda
Daiei Studios/Mill Creek Entertainment Blu Ray Zone A

I’ve been wanting to see this trilogy of pictures fusing ancient Japanese culture stories, reminiscent of classic chambara, with the kaiju eiga movie craze of this (and many other) periods in Japanese cinema for quite some time. Now, thanks to Mill Creek Entertainment, people are finally able to see the Daimajin movies in a restored transfer and, most importantly, with all the films in the correct aspect ratio. Which I’m very pleased about.

After a really fiery but beautiful set of opening credits ending with a quite surreal, eyeball shrinking into a mountain moment (which kinda makes sense in a way when you hear the legend of the Maijin and the Daimajin), we have a really creepy atmosphere evoked as the camera tracks a landscape near a small community. We hear the legendary Majin stomping about and the people of the village start their prayer ritual to keep the Majin locked in the hillside, where the giant statue of Daimajin keeps watch over him and ensures this God is trapped.

We then see the viewpoint of the ruler of the village and... he’s a pretty sympathetic guy and a supporter of his people, which is almost a rare thing for a Japanese period piece. Alas, he and his wife are killed in a coup (the noise of the alleged Majin a distraction which allows this to happen easier) and his young son and daughter (played by Yoshihiko Aoyama and Miwa Takada) flee with their guardian, Kogenta (played by Jun Fujimaki). Hunted, they make contact with the high priestess, who has been told to stop all the religious malarkey by the new and ruthlessly evil ruler of the village, Samanosuke, played by Ryûtarô Gomi. The new guy enslaves the good people, makes them work for him and takes away their livelihood in the name of taxes etc. The three main protagonists of this story, the guardian and the two heirs, are hidden in the forbidden mountain in a ‘cave with a view’... a view of the Daimajin guardian.

Then, as if by the magic of a scene transition, ten years have passed. The son and daughter are grown up but all three still live in the cave and are still wanted by the head of the village so they can be put to death. Then, things start to rapidly go wrong for everyone and, eventually, all the main characters are either dead or in the process of being crucified except for the daughter and a young boy from the village. The priestess who was helping them is killed but the new chief orders the Holy Daimajin statue destroyed in order to stop the people from believing in something. However, it’s not as easy as it looks, even when a giant nail is driven into the statues forehead to try and get some kind of damage done, frightening all the bad guys as it starts dripping blood. They leave the mountain as the powers of the elements are unleashed upon them and the daughter preys for the Daimajin to help... which it does by standing up and going on a bloody rampage through the village until justice prevails.

That’s a much simplified version of the story but its enough to give you a taste and the film is beautiful to look at with some gorgeous cinematography and some not half bad special effects to boot. When the boy proceeds up the ‘haunted mountain’ to prey fro help at one point, the wispy bits of cloth denoting ghosts are very nicely done and the skeleton’s hand which grabs the boy is also another nice touch, as he looks around again and it’s just a hand-like branch tugging at his clothes.

What’s interesting is that it’s almost, but not quite, bloodless compared to some of the other Japanese films coming out at the time. It’s almost like it’s a children’s film in that respect. You won’t find any arterial sprays of traditionally energetic, Japanese blood fountaining out of bodies on this one and very few wounds, life threatening or not, actually visibly bleed (aside from the spike which stays firmly lodged in Daimajin’s head for most of the last act and a few, slight, bloody wounds to the heroes)... even during a torture scene. That being said, and perhaps I’m giving it away by mentioning that it even has a torture scene, the film is actually quite nasty and violent in its attitudes and one wonders whether the target audience for this was actually a family audience or not... especially since their are some quite prominent child characters in the story.

For instance, even the come uppance of the bad guy at the hands of Daimajin at the end is a curious blend of bloodless viciousness. After smashing the house in which Samanosuke has fled into, he picks him up (in the same way King Kong might have picked up Fay Wray in the 1933 original - reviewed here... and there the similarity ends), holds him up to one of the wooden crosses, slowly and lingeringly pulls the giant nail from his own head and then impales the villain against the cross with it. This last moment plays off screen but the act in itself is quite nasty, although not entirely unexpected because I was waiting for Daimajin to do something fatalistic with that giant nail sticking out of his ugly bonce since Samanosuke’s men first drove it into his vengeance filled noggin.

As I said, though, the film is not really a violent picture compared with many others made around the time and it's full of some nice, tidy compositions and bright colours which are a pleasure to watch. And the slow build to the final resurrection of the Daimajin from his stone drenched sleep is nicely paced and a good pay off for the long build up. The film even has a typical score from legendary composer Akira Ifikube which is quite appropriate and, like a fair few of the cast and crew here, Ifikube was also someone who worked on a number of Zatoichi films over the years.

And that’s all I’ve got on this one, really. I was half hoping that the film would be set in the 1960s so I could see a full on Tokyo stomp but, even so, it’s a pretty cool attempt at doing something a little different to the large influx of giant monster movies the Japanese were presumably being inundated with at the time and I had some good fun with it. Looking forward to seeing the other two in the original trilogy sometime soon so... yeah, more Daimajin reviews to come in the near future.


Daimajin at NUTS4R2

Daimajin      

Return Of Daimajin   

Daimajin Strikes Again

On The Road (Zatôichi kenka-tabi)

Ichi Keen

On The Road (Zatôichi kenka-tabi)
Japan 1963 Directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda
Daiei/Criterion Blu Ray Zone A 
 
So I’ve been inadvertently neglecting my Zatoichi watching and reviewing of late. Hopefully I can get back into the swing of that with this, the fifth of the 26 Zatoichi films starring Shintarô Katsu as the blind swordsman (not including his 100+ episodes of the TV show) and the first of the films to be directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda.

The film opens, pre-credits, with Zatoichi rumbling a gambling con. He slices a candle down the middle, extinguishing the light so he can get the upper hand, and deals with the whole roomful of gambling antagonists stating, in a shout out to the subtitle of a much later Zatoichi film in the series, that “Darkness is my ally.” As he finishes with his enemies, the title of the movie comes up and composer extraordinaire Akira Ifikube’s four note Zatoichi theme swells on the soundtrack. As the music and credits play out, we then follow Zatoichi’s progress 'on the road' as he encounters a fellow traveller and stops at the Edo period equivalent of a roadside diner with him to eat as the opening titles finish.

The traveller is on a mission to take Zatoichi to his boss so that said boss can negotiate for Zatoichi to join his side in a stand off against another boss in his town. Alas, it’s not long before this man becomes a casualty as three swordsmen kill him trying to take out Zatoichi. The blind man learns from the widowed wife of one of the men he has just despatched that they were just hired on the spot to get rid of Zatoichi. She seeks vengeance on Zatoichi but is obviously in no position to do anything about it... at least not right now.

We then stumble into another unrelated, at this point, subplot where our hero finds a dying man in a forest. A group of samurai are looking for a lady called Omitsu and have mortally wounded him as he was protecting her. The dying man begs Zatoichi to see Omitsu safely to Edo, just before he passes away. Zatoichi stumbles into her and, eluding the chasing samurai, takes her under his protection.

Like pretty much all of the Zatoichi films starring Katsu in the title role, as far as I can remember, Zatoichi always talks to himself, rendering his inner dialogue as an external monologue. Voice overs are rarely used in the Zatoichi movies, to let you know what he is thinking... Katsu always does it himself, in shot. This always has the trick of making him a much more likeable, easier to identify with character from the audience’s point of view, I suspect. Having these things rendered as such on the surface makes him seem less devious and more friendly... at least that’s how I always interpret these many instances of talking to himself that the character exhibits in the Katsu versions and he’s enough of a great actor to pull this stuff off without the audience, as far as I know, ever once questioning it. Works for me, anyway.

That being said, I think I spotted a rare, slight mistake in this one because, after Zatoichi has killed two of the pursuing samurai, he reaches around for Omitsu’s hand to lead her out of harm’s way. Since she is holding her hands up near her head, one wonders how Zatoichi would know to reach up there rather than drop his hand to where her hand would normally be expected to be. Now one could, of course, argue that the deductive radar system he has set up in his head from having his sight taken from him and which allows him to avoid or block the killing blows of his self-styled enemies could, in fact, easily tell just where someone’s hand is when they are at rest. I don’t know though... I think this is a bit of a stretch and a rare slip in the actor’s concentration which just got by the director at the time. Frankly, who can blame him or begrudge him that. Katsu does such a great job of playing a blind man over the decades that I think you have to cut him a little slack in the odd moment like that.

After this, of course, the two different sub plots become linked and Zatoichi is left to fight both sides of the big fight with one of the bosses, as they both try to gain the girl, who they believe is of some value, to use for either a reward or as a bargaining chip to buy the services of Zatoichi. It all gets integrated with various other plots threads dropped down in the early stages of the film and, of course, the widow of the samurai Zatoichi was forced to dispatch also plays a hand in the unfolding drama.

It’s a nice enough story with big flashes of action and Zatoichi taking out a heck of a lot of opponents towards the end... the majority of both warring factions. However, it’s not as flashy or overt in its cinematography as some of the more visually spectacular episodes in the film series and although there are some nice touches like a dragonfly taking off of a plant and then landing again (in reverse footage), bookending the flash of Zatoichi’s sword as he effortlessly takes out one or two of his enemies... the majority of the direction and camerawork is pedestrian. It doesn’t detract from the pacing and intrigue in any way... although I have to say that the actual through line on the story does seem a little fragmented and jumpy in certain stretches of the film. Almost like there were supposed to be more connecting scenes which never made it into the movie.

That being said, I did notice the occasional interesting shot at certain points. There's a cool shot on a transition where the camera is looking up and around the tops of the trees, almost as if searching for a sense of focus of the shot before meandering down to Zatoichi and Omitsu and then cutting to a tighter frame of them. That’s a pretty wild way of doing an establishing shot and I wonder what the reasoning behind shooting this one like that was. Another interesting visual flourish I noticed or, visual method at any rate, is that a fair few of the external location shots are taken from very low down, like the camera is in a ditch or a specially dug hole, to mask the bottom of frame with the landscape while the action plays out in top fifth sliver of the screen. It’s kinda interesting but it didn’t particularly, to my mind at least, gel with any of the other camerawork used in the movie, which seemed less special or focussed to a particular artistic expression than those sequences I just described.

At the end of the day, though, this is still a solid Zatoichi film and the director went on to helm a fair few more as the series progressed. The performances, as you would expect from this, are all pretty much faultless and Ifikube’s music, one of many scores he did for this series of films, while not particularly inventive or striking as some of the other composers who worked on these, is pretty reliable and packed full of emotion. On The Road is a pretty watchable entry in a truly magnificent series of movies about the blind swordsman. As I’ve noted before, the Criterion Blu Ray/DVD combination box set is the way to go when watching these films. If you haven’t seen these classics of Japanese cinema before, then... it’s definitely worth a purchase.

Sleepy Eyes of Death 6: Sword Of Satan

Devilled Edge

Sleepy Eyes of Death 6: Sword Of Satan

aka Nemuri Kyôshirô 6: Masho-ken Japan 1965

Directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda

Anime Eigo Region 1

Warning: Spoilers slicing satanically into your brain!

Director Kimiyoshi Yasuda follows on from directing the ninth of the Zatoichi movies, Adventures Of Zatoichi, with this quite strong entry in the Nemuri Kyôshirô cycle and, I have to admit I was surprised I enjoyed this one so much because I thought the same director’s work on the third movie in the series was less than stellar (reviewed here...).

Visually, this one seems to be a lot more engaging than his previous Nemuri Kyôshirô movie, Full Circle Killing but it also retains the strong story element which many of the earlier movies were a little lacking in. This one starts off very well in the pouring rain and for quite a while there, it does maintain its own unique and sinister little atmosphere when compared to previous installments.

In this story, a mysterious masked lady begs Nemuri to sleep with her for money but all he does is listen to her story (after paying her) and casts scorn on her misfortune. The next day she has killed herself, leaving behind a young son who a clan have been trying to kill as an heir to the shogunate but who now want the boy to stay with their clan and be th next shogun in line... or their clan is doomed. This is the first film in the series where Nemuri Kyôshirô actually develops a real conscience and is actually regretful of his earlier words which were, ultimately, the words which convinced the boys mother to end her own life.

As the clan comes to take the boy, he leaves him in hiding while he pursues a few other things, including a black mass to which the boys appointed guardian is kidnapped to for ritualistic, naked slaughter. This movie is “all about the boy” as they say, and with Nemuri as his protector, you can be sure various factions in this movie want Nemuri dead and the boy for themselves.

And if that wasn’t enough, Nemuri is also being pursued by a vengeful lady assassin who was related to somebody he killed in an earlier picture. She is easily stoppable but relentless and tries varying methods to bring down our hero, such as having a bald headed nun seducing him and trying to sleep with him, which really doesn’t work out that well for all parties concerned, as you can imagine.

There’s also the old “small deadly creature let loose in the room” ploy (a snake in this case) which, to be fair, has always been a requisite ingredient in pulp fiction (I personally tend to associate Fu Manchu and Sherlock Holmes with being experts in this field). Given the timing of the movie in close proximity to the first cinema-released James Bond film, I suspect this element owes more to the box office success in Japan of Dr. No and its tarantula scene than it does to anything else. It’s not a very good snake scene, I should probably add, and it’s over very quickly and without any real menace or worry on the part of both our main protagonist or the audience, is my guess.

The assassin is quite fixated on her revenge against our angst-ridden hero, even trying to kill him after saving her life from a bunch of samurai who want her dead. And she’s not the only one to hate Nemuri. The little boy who he has sworn to protect hates samurai and would much rather grow up to be a carpenter. What’s more, and this is quite understandable since Nemuri is kinda responsible for his mother’s death, the kid does not want Nemuri’s protection and shuns and rejects our main protagonists noble intentions towards him as much as he possibly can.

This is a Sleepy Eyes of Death movie like no others before it in that the hero is not just on a journey as typified by the traditional “road chanbara” of the time, but also a journey within himself as he realises the way his actions have affected others and is given, in some cases, physical manifestations of these consequences... such as the orphaned boy and the vengeance filled assassin. And the most haunting and taunting of these manifestations is the mask of the boys mother who killed herself after her scornful rejection by Nemuri, which he carries around with him on his belt as a reminder of the harm he has caused due to just a few unkind words.

This is a film which is as much about a small journey of redemption for our lead character as it is about the numerous action sequences which pepper the movie. One of the more satisfying entries in the Sleepy Eyes Of Death movie series and one which has left me looking forward to the next one. Only two more left to watch out of what’s been released so far, though. I hope Anime Eigo get around to bringing out a third box soon.