Evil Of Dracula

Things That Go
Vamp in the Night

Evil Of Dracula
aka Chi o suu bara
Japan 1974 Directed by Michio Yamamoto
TohoArrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

So Evil Of Dracula is the third and final of the movies which Arrow have chosen to collect together as The Bloodthirsty Trilogy, although, as I mentioned in my reviews for the previous two films in the series (here and here) it’s really just a collection of films from around the same period by the same director who just happened to be shooting vampire films (although the first is not necessarily about vampires) and which are stylistically similar... much like Sergio Leone’s so called ‘Dollars Trilogy/Man With No Name Trilogy’, which is comprised of films that are actually not sequels to each other.

Now, once again, this film has nothing to do with Dracula (the other problem with the titling on this trilogy... even the first one which was originally titled Legacy Of Dracula for some of the overseas market), although the back story of the vampire characters here could, arguably, be said to be formed from a possible Dracula story... although the original vampire is both unnamed and has absolutely nothing to do with the Bram Stoker character either.

This one is about a psychology teacher called Shiraki (played by Toshio Kurosawa) who arrives at a school at the request of the school’s principal, as the principal wants him to take over from him at some point in the near future. You’d be forgiven for thinking Shiraki has stepped out of a Western of some kind as the opening titles are pitched over an image of a station with the platform to the left of screen and the train tracks running up to the camera view. A train slowly approaches and, after a cut or two, Shiraki steps off... the stranger in town, so to speak. Pretty soon the soundtrack by Riichirô Manabe, who scored both the previous two movies of this loose trilogy... not to mention the score for one of my favourite Godzilla movies (Godzilla Vs Hedorah)... turns into what I can only describe as a low key, jazz funk stew. In fact, the music for this film of the series, especially, is a little overpowering but this is also kinda commented on early in the film when the music seems to be mixed too far into the background. Suddenly, though, as a door is slammed shut, the music cuts out at the same time... almost like a French nouvelle vague moment of deliberate ‘immersion sabotage’.

As he is being driven from the station to meet the new principal, Shiraki observes a car wreck and he is told that the principal’s wife died only a few days before. Of course, if you’re as suspicious as any audience member who’s watched more than one vampire movie in their lifetime would be, you’ll know straight away that both the principal and his good lady wife are, indeed, bloodsucking vampires. Once the penny drops for Shiraki, it’s up to him, his newfound professor friend with a penchant for vampire mythology and a trio of teenage schoolgirls (who get whittled down as the usual, bloody vampire collateral damage while the film progresses) to discover just how many of the vampires there are and to thwart their deadly plan which, in this instance, involves plotting Shiraki’s death while the principal takes on his identity, literally his face, in a way which I shall make clear in just a moment.

And, if nothing else, it’s consistent with the previous two movies in that it’s a stylishly shot ride and incorporates some nice ideas. For example, we have a scene where one of the girls is captured by the undead principal’s wife and has her face cut off so she can wear it over her own... absorbing her features and becoming the young girl, effectively... as far as her identity goes, at least.

Another thing the film has which is a little different to a fair number (though not all) vampire flicks is that the lady vampire tends to bite her victims in the top of their breasts. Indeed, this is made even more explicit in a scene near the end where, after tearing the robe of her next meal and biting down in the general area, we get a close up shot which is held for quite a long time, of the naked breast with blood running down it past the nipple. Which is a really strange insert, actually, because when we cut back to the long shot, it’s clear that the actress still has her dress fully on with everything covered up. So not so great an insert and neither is a shot of the actresses’ naked body, laid out on a flat surface, as a post obscures her face... so I’m pretty sure the actress had a body double for these scenes (which kind of takes the fun and credibility out of it, to be honest).

Another nice idea is when Shiraki develops the discarded camera of his missing professor friend to find that, after the professor had taken a shot of the ‘principal’ vampire fanging up a young lady, only the victim has come out on the shot, holding onto her (unseen by the camera) vampire master in a hug. So it’s nice that the main protagonist uses photographic evidence or, rather, the specific lack of photographic evidence, to confirm his suspicions that there is vampirism afoot.

Once again the main male vampire is played by Shin Kishida and, although he’s definitely playing a different character to the vampire antagonist he played in Lake Of Dracula, he still wears the long white scarf/black suit combination in this one. So, a fashionably dressed vampire at least... who takes absolutely ages to die when his number is up at the end.

The main star of the show, though, is the director of photography, working with the director to come up with some nice shot designs. I love the way they’ll deliberately shoot from halfway up some stairs and into a room so the long, upright post coming off the bottom bannister can be used to split the screen up with the left hand third sliced vertically to give a more interesting space. He uses the camera in similar ways in the labyrinth of corridors in the school, facing out at junctions to split the screen into a trio of textures. There’s also a lovely long shot of two of the main protagonists walking towards the centre of screen, more or less in silhouette, as they walk through the long horizontal stretch of crosses which make up a graveyard stretching the full width of the frame with a huge mountain on the horizon behind them.

There are a few oddities too, however, with some of the camera work, such as the odd ‘point of view’ shot from the main protagonist’s perspective which seem like kind of an odd choice when compared to how the rest of the film has been made. I’m not sure why that was there but it is at least used effectively and it doesn’t hurt the film any.

The long and rather unimaginative and anticlimactic double vampire death scene at the film's conclusion is, if anything, way too drawn out but, again, you can forgive the odd bit of over-the-top melodrama of the long dead lovers holding hands which crumble to dust when the rest of the film is reasonably entertaining. And that’s probably my final conclusion on Evil Of Dracula, truth be told... that it is ‘reasonably entertaining’. This whole, loosely marketed trilogy of Japanese vampire films are not exactly the best vampire movies you are going to see but they are of interest, especially to fans of the sub-genre of horror dealing with vampires and, absolutely, Arrow’s Blu Ray collection, The Bloodthirsty Trilogy, is the best way to see these films as they have got some nice transfers and some okay extras on the first disc. And they’re a bit of an education, too, in terms of Japanese cinema’s attempt to culturally absorb and assimilate the kind of horror cinema being put out by the likes of Hammer, Amicus and American International Pictures around the same kind of time, for sure. 

Lake Of Dracula

The Stake’s Progress

Lake Of Dracula
aka Noroi no yakata: Chi o suu me
Japan 1971 Directed by Michio Yamamoto
TohoArrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

So here we have Lake Of Dracula, which is the second, tentative, entry into what is nowadays being called The Bloodthirsty Trilogy on the recent Arrow films release. Again, a bit of a misnomer because the films really don’t have a lot of blood in them, at least the first two films don’t (I’ve yet to see the third one but plan on getting to it before this review is published). So, barring the occasional blob of blood on the mouth of an undead creature of the night or dog, don’t expect too much in the way of goriness from this one until you get to the final sequence here which, even compared to the previous movie The Vampire Doll (reviewed here), is not really in any way gruesome, it has to be said.

This film stars Midori Fujita as Akiko, the films main female protagonist. We see her character first as a little girl in a pre-credits sequence which is referred to for most of the rest of the film as the recurring dream this character has in real life. After her dog Leo escapes her, she finds him in a ‘vampire house’ but we don’t find out what happened to her when she goes in here until the finale of the film, more or less. However, after the credits finish we find her some... I dunno... maybe twenty years later, living with her sister Natsuko, played by Sanae Emi. They live right by Lake Fujimi which, I’d like to say is the Lake Of Dracula but... there are some things which stop me from making that connection, it has to be said. For a start, it turns out that the lead vampire harkens from Akiko’s home town which is a coastal town and not by a lake. And though he has his coffin delivered to Akiko’s new locality decades later, the lake has no real tie in to the story in any way, it has to be said.

Another reason why I’m hesitant to call this place the Lake Of Dracula is because, like the previous movie, Dracula isn’t actually in it. He gets a mention at least once in the English subtitles but he’s nowhere to be seen. At least, though, the unnamed vampire character is actually a true vampire this time, unlike the character in The Vampire Doll, around which there seemed to be a fair bit of doubt. There’s also a bit of back story to his character which does, at least, suggest that he is the great grandson of Dracula so, you know, that’s something. Perhaps ‘Dracula’s Heir’ may have been a better title.

Anyway, after his coffin arrives and the locality suffers some sinister, vampiric goings on, it’s up to Akiko and her doctor fiance Takashi, played by Chôei Takahashi, to investigate the unexplained shenanigans and get to the truth of her connection to the vampire. And also find out why her sister is suddenly acting so strangely, too. Actually, the fact that she begins wearing a scarf half way through the movie after she starts acting as sinisterly as she was sisterly should be a dead giveaway, I’d have thought, that she is hiding fang marks. As would be the fact that her face seems to be several shades paler than usual after a certain point in the movie but, hey, what do I know about siblings?

The vampire himself looks very good and he is played here by Shin Kishida, who was apparently quite often cast for his sinister looks. Readers may recognise him for his excursions in other famous Japanese movies including roles in entries in the Zatoichi, Lone Wolf and Cub, Hanzo The Razor and Godzilla movies... not to mention the Zatoichi TV show. He doesn’t have a lot to do in this film, to be sure but he does look good and wears a long white scarf to offset his dark clothing, making him look the very height of vampire fashion in most of his scenes. Neil Tennant wears a very similar costume in the Pet Shop Boys movie It Couldn’t Happen Here (reviewed here) and I wonder if he caught this film back in the days when he used to go to Scala screenings.

The film looks as good as the last one, with the director slicing the screen up a lot into slats and placing his characters into situations where natural or often unnatural (this is a movie after all... everything is as controlled as you can get it) verticals and horizontals box them into their own area of the screen. He also does something a few times which gives me pause to think in that, sometimes, when all the characters have exited the screen, he will choose to hold the shot for a couple of seconds with nothing else going on. Not sure why he does that but it isn’t jarring in any way and doesn’t detract from the pacing too much.

Okay, so lets talk about the dog. I’m firmly convinced that the film-makers threw the ‘dream’ angle in there for a bit... before it’s confirmed as a true memory and not a dream... to stop the audience realising something is very wrong with Leo the dog. When he runs away at the start of the film he definitely seems to be a different breed of dog to what he eventually grows up to be. Which is pretty strange casting if you ask me. Also, the fact that this dog must be over 20 makes no sense as it’s still running about everywhere and getting into trouble... I would say the ‘grown up’ version of Leo is no older than 10 so... yeah, it’s a pretty tenuous version of doggy reality/continuity if you ask me. Maybe Leo always wanted to be some kind of Alsatian when he grew up. Who knows?

This does seem to be one of those films where, as brilliant as the technical stuff is, there’s always something really silly going on in the main narrative content to counter the remarkable achievements of the crew. For example, there’s a fight sequence in the car where Takashi has a fist fight with this film’s version of a kind of Renfield character... as in a character who has been vamped up to serve his new master. It goes on for a while and takes place completely in the car with a lot of juddery, handheld camera work... and it must have been a really tough thing to shoot. I have no idea how the cameraman was able to get in there with them and keep himself out of the way of the action... but it’s pretty good stuff.

However, as I said... lots of silly stuff too. For instance, when Akiko and Takashi are reading the notebooks of the completely non-vampiric but dead father of the film’s lead vampire... they get to a point where his narrative voice stops because our two heroes are discovered and cornered in the room they are reading this from by the vampire himself. However, the vampire carries on the narrative on the back story for them at the exact moment that they left off reading. Seriously, how does that happen? How would he know which part of the story the inner voice of these two characters had gotten too? Makes absolutely no sense.

So there you have it. All said and done though, I really enjoyed this one almost as much as the previous as it gives off that kind of Hammer meets Amicus meets AIP kind of vibe which the first one had in spades. As does the musical score. Lake Of Dracula is a minor vampire film but fans of the conventions of the genre should be happy enough with this, is my guess. Grab it while you can and fangs me later.

The Vampire Doll

Thirst Blood

The Vampire Doll
aka Yûrei yashiki no kyôfu
aka Legacy Of Dracula
Japan 1970 Directed by Michio Yamamoto
TohoArrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

The Vampire Doll (aka Legacy Of Dracula) is the first of a loose trilogy of films in the same spirit, perhaps, that the Clint Eastwood Dollars trilogy actually share no common characters but go for a common atmosphere and deal with similar subjects. At least that’s my understanding of things as I’ve never, until this moment, seen any of these particular vampire movies before... Arrow’s Blu Ray set from a couple of years ago is definitely the way to go with these, though, if you want to see uncut versions with a decent transfer... unless you happen to live in Japan, of course. I would guess.

The other two films following on from this, in quick succession by the same director, which form what is now being marketed as The Bloodthirsty Trilogy, are called Lake Of Dracula and Evil Of Dracula but it’s quite apparent from watching this one and hearing Kim Newman describing the other two in a nice interview on the first disc of this trilogy set by Arrow, is that none of these films have anything to do with Dracula. I was surely being naive thinking I was buying Japanese Dracula movies but at least they are, kinda, Japanese vampire movies so I’ll settle for that. Even though the vampiric properties of the titular ‘vampire doll’ in this first film are only tentative in that respect.

Despite the collective name for the trilogy, it has to be said that this film barely scrapes by in the ‘bloodthirsty’ department apart from one scene of typically Japanese over-the-top arterial spray in the film’s final scene, as one of the characters gets their jugular sliced with a sharp knife. Instead, the film goes for a shot of good old, quite western style gothic atmosphere, the likes of which wouldn’t have looked out of place in an old Roger Corman AIP movie or, indeed, a Hammer Horror film of the time. It certainly seems to share a more sedate pacing and softly, softly approach to the horror of the subject matter in its genetic make-up.

The film opens with a particularly atmospheric scene as the person who seems to be set up to be the main hero of the piece is driven in a taxi through a heavy thunderstorm at night, talking to the driver as it’s established he’s been away and is coming to visit his lover Yûko (played by Yukiko Kobayashi from Destroy All Monsters) at what is, it turns out, a sinister mansion she shares with her parents. Alas, after he arrives there and is attacked by the man-servant Genzô, the girl’s mother breaks it to him that Yûko died a couple of weeks earlier in a car crash. He stays the night but, during his nocturnal investigations around the grounds of the house, he meets the reanimated corpse of Yûko who pounces on him.

Cut to his sister, Keiko, waking from a nightmare of, presumably, something similar to what we have just seen play out. She is played here by Kayo Matsuo who was in a fair few of Seijun Suzuki’s movies, not to mention entries in the Sleepy Eyes Of Death and Lone Wolf And Cub films... and TV versions of Zatoichi and The Water Margin. She and her ‘suitor’ Hiroshi are set up as the main protagonists who are investigating the disappearance of Keiko’s brother and, by default, Yûko’s death. Akira Nakao plays Hiroshi who was, himself, in one of the Zatoichi TV episodes, not to mention numerous of the ‘post Showa era’ Godzilla films.

When they arrive at the same sinister building that we saw Keiko’s brother go to at the start of the picture, they also arrange, by a deceit, to stay the night... where various spooky things happen. The next day they investigate further in a local town before both returning independently to the house and getting themselves into more trouble. The vampire line which the film has been taking kind of strays back into Japanese ghost story territory at this point and, though the term vampire is used, it’s clear that the undead and vicious body of Yûko has merely been hypnotised to rise after her death and just wants to kill people, for the most part. Oh ,well, that’s alright then? The film’s links to the vampirism suggested by the title is very tenuous if you ask me.

However, what the film has going for it far outweighs the silliness of the plot line and so this one is well worth a watch for horror lovers...

For a start, it looks incredibly good. Not just in terms of the transfer by Arrow but in terms of the wonderful shot compositions by the director. He does tend to split shots up into sections and use his actors by having them placed inside those lines and plains. In the interior shots, this is fairly easy and the compositions are, for the most part, fairly centred and, quite often, split into thirds. However, he also has some great splits and patterns on exterior shots too.

For instance, there’s a shot of the head and shoulders of Keiko and Hiroshi facing camera and we see, in the distance, a small figure walking behind them. When he reaches the middle point of the screen in the area made by the split where their upper bodies create a natural gap, he stops and we see it is Genzô, perfectly framed in his own section between the two of them. Or sometimes, the director will split the exterior screen into a one third and two thirds shot... as he does with the vertical line of Yûko’s grave marker going from the bottom to top of the screen with Keiko framed in the left third and Hiroshi in the larger area to the right of shot. As I said... it’s a good looking film.

Another thing he does is occasionally use what I will describe as slightly angled, almost but not quite birds eye views of the characters in certain moments... to give you a full overview of the placement of a person within the environment.

There’s also an amazing visual moment in the early stages of the picture where a flashback occurs and it is seen with what I can only say film stock which has either been filtered or treated so it looks like a blue/grey graduated effect. Eerily done and I don’t remember quite seeing this particular treatment done on film before. It’s quite astonishing and I’ll have to see if he does it in either of the next two movies in this ‘trilogy’, over the next week or two.

Overall, then, the atmosphere of ‘something not quite right’ in the film is palpable and interesting and it’s re-enforced by a quite baroque, minimally spotted harpsichord style score by composer Riichirô Manabe, who composed the music for one of my favourite kaiju eigas, Godzilla VS Hedorah. The score for The Bloodthirsty Trilogy is (or at least was) available on a CD from Japan and I can thoroughly recommend this one.

So yeah, not much more I want to say about The Vampire Doll... nice acting, some gorgeous mise en scène, fantastic music, beautifully chill atmosphere to counter the ridiculous story development and a gory demise for one of the film’s human villains in the final scene. A scene which, incidentally, carries on in silence as the credits roll on a bleak shot of the film’s survivors in much the way a late 1960s/early 1970s Hammer movie would linger on a real downer of an ending. Not quite what I was expecting from the film but I’m certainly looking forward to watching the other two in this ‘unofficial sequence’ very soon.