Godzilla VS Megalon

Maim, Jet & Scratch

Godzilla VS Megalon
aka Gojira tai Megaro
Japan 1973
Directed by Jun Fukuda & Yoshimitsu Banno
Criterion Blu Ray Zone B

This is another one of those films which I loved in my twenties but, looking at it now, just seems like one of the lesser and most disappointing entries in the Godzilla series, although there’s also lots to enjoy and it’s still a heck of a lot more interesting than the previous movie, Godzilla VS Gigan (reviewed here).

Okay, so we hear that those pesky humans have been testing bombs again on a remote island.. the consequences of which can also be felt on Monster Island. You might ask why this would be the case and the answer seems to me to be two fold. Firstly, Godzilla doesn’t properly turn up in this movie until almost 50 mins into the 80 minute running time... so it’s kind of a way, I believe, of pacifying the audience, showing that it really is a Godzilla movie they have come here to see. There have been a lot of rumours that, in response to a young boy who won a design a creature competition for Toho, that his drastically changed creation (to the point that the crying young prize winner was inconsolable at the changes Toho made to the design), renamed Jet Jaguar, would be the sole headliner of the movie. Although that makes sense in many ways, there is apparently no real evidence to suggest that was the case, from what I understand. So yeah, they show Godzilla to remind the audience and, the other thing the studio gets to do is to use old footage from Monster Island at this point to pad out the running time.

Then, after this footage we have the opening credits and a kid in a wonderful little robot boat in a lake, which looks like three colourful dolphins, with the two side dolphins acting like paddles. However, his inventor dad and his friend almost can’t get the kid back after a fissure is opened in a series of earthquakes, one of which drains this lake. Luckily, the inventor friend has his handy “rope launcher” with him on the picnic because, yeah, this is just what you would take on a picnic, right? Anyway, the three escape the disruption and go back to the scientist’s pad where they fail to stop two thugs who are interested in the father’s latest project, the robot Jet Jaguar. But they do leave behind a red button and some red sand which, on scientific investigation... and I’ve no idea how this is science but I’ll suspend my disbelief here... they figure out comes from 2000 miles beneath the sea and is similar to sand found on Easter Island (which, as I said in my review of Gamera VS Jiger - right here), was all the rage at the time.

It turns out that survivors of the ancient cities of Lemuria and Mu (Atlantis), which were swallowed up by the Earth’s oceans, have built an underwater kingdom called Seatopia, complete with silly costumes and dancing girls. They are fed up with the horrible land dwellers testing bombs which have disastrous consequences for them, so they unleash Megalon... a giant bug with a star on his head that makes him look like a badly dressed Christmas tree that can spit bombs out of its mouth... to destroy humanity (later on, he accidentally swallows one of his own bombs when it fires straight up at Godzilla but lands back in his own mouth, which slows him down for a bit).

For some reason, the Seatopians need Jet Jaguar to tell Megalon what to do for about a quarter of an hour and there’s also a sub-plot where the scientist and his little nipper are kidnapped and driven in a container to be dropped in the cracks where the sunken lake... um... sank... only to be rescued by their friend in a highly non-sensical car and bike chase. Actually I have to ask how ocean dwellers suddenly got so proficient at riding motor bikes and cars. I mean, not quite so good that they can stop the guy they’re chasing but, still, pretty good for people who lived for thousands of years under the sea.

Finally the scientists regain control of Jet Jaguar but then, because he’d had his mechanical brain ‘stimulated by battle’, he gains free will and battles Megalon himself while waiting for Godzilla to arrive, whom he summons for aid. However, the Seatopians have also summoned help, this time from space, as the previous movie’s main villain, Gigan, arrives to help Megalon destroy humanity and its defenders. This is also, of course, in order that lots of footage of Gigan fighting Godzilla could be recycled from the previous films, along with various building carnage which, perhaps not surprisingly, is hardly ever in the same shot as the monsters inflicting the damage. Well, at least day and night footage doesn’t fluctuate so dramatically like it did in the previous movie but budgets at Toho were really stretched by this point in the cycle.

At one point, to make the ‘big fight’ more interesting, Jet Jaguar suddenly grows to giant kaiju size. Now I thought we were going to get some kind of bizarre pseudo-scientific explanation of how he manages to change size at will, such as organic metal or redistribution of molecules but, no, according to his creator... and I quote... “His determination made him grow this big.” Oh, well that’s a neat trick then. Must make a mental note to be more determined.

The fight scenes themselves are ludicrously bad, with Godzilla and Jet Jaguar teaming up to fight Megalon and Gigan and with all the beasts making signs and waving at each other etc like they’re human. A lot of the footage is recycled and spliced in with new stuff but it’s all just a bit dull to watch for any real amount of time, truth be told. It doesn’t help that Megalon’s signature move is to jump instead of walk. A really terrible, bizarre looking, series of progressive two legged hops which look about as credible as... insert least credible thing you’ve seen here...and which will probably make your eyes roll out of their sockets while you laugh at the unintentional hilarity. Things took on more poignancy about the sad state of affairs at Toho when I was researching this after watching it and found that the Megalon suit was extremely heavy and so it took the suit actor and the technicians huge efforts to manage those stupid looking jumps.

Later on, when Godzilla is throwing Megalon around, it’s pretty obvious that there’s no actual actor in the Megalon suit because every time The Big G throws him onto the ground, his floppy legs bend the wrong way. Other than this, when the military get involved, it’s just the usual live fireworks fired at the suit actors as a stand in for the shells of the cannons and, yeah, it just doesn’t look great.

One last thing I’ll menton is the music. Riichirô Manabe’s score doesn’t recycle any of Ifukube’s old themes and it’s not anywhere near the masterpiece of a score that the same composer supplied for Godzilla Vs Hedorah (reviewed here), although it does recycle a Godzilla theme from that one. It’s also interesting in that it’s a lot lighter in tone and, for a lot of the time, really doesn’t match the drama of the action, instead playing through the scenes with a kind of elevator pop muzak style. It does, however, have an interesting theme for Jet Jaguar which gets expanded into a full blown song for the film’s final minute or so. Which for me was probably the best part of the movie... a song very much in the style of the Gamera song found in rival Daiei movies around this time.

And that’s me just about done with Godzilla Vs Megalon. It’s not a film I could recommend to most people but, obviously, you can’t miss this one if you are into Godzilla movies. It’s definitely not Toho’s finest hour and their would be only two more films in the series before the first cycle of Godzilla films had run their course.

Godzilla VS Hedorah

Hedorah Skelter

Godzilla VS Hedorah
aka Gojira tai Hedora
aka Godzilla VS The Smog Monster
Japan 1971
Directed by Yoshimitsu Banno
Toho/Criterion Collection
Blu Ray Zone B

"Promising new director" Yoshimitsu Banno (who in a roundabout way is responsible for the current American cycle of Godzilla movies) only directed this one entry into the Godzilla series. After seeing this one, the producer promptly banned Banno from ever working on another Godzilla movie again. However, rewatching it in a beautiful transfer in the Criterion Collection’s boxed (booked?) edition of The Showa Era series of Godzilla films only confirms, once again, what I always knew about the movie which, frankly, is my favourite of all the films to feature The Big G. Godzilla VS Hedorah is, frankly, the Citizen Kane of Godzilla movies as far as I’m concerned. It’s a little unique and only has two wrong notes in the whole film.

Although Godzilla is still the upright, slightly comical defender of the human race here, the tone of the film is much darker than many of the others and, coupled with an irresistible soundtrack and a mixture of different narrative styles, it’s easily the most entertaining one in my book.

There’s a brief prologue which ponders the ‘origin’ of Hedorah (who has apparently arrived from space) as a parasitic creature living in the sea. However, immediately it starts it pushes the message of the movie, as the sludge and toxic waste which we dump in the oceans and our air gives the creature strength to grow and transform into a larger, even more dangerous creature. And it’s a welcome return, in some ways, to the first movie of the series, in that it pushes a more serious social message about mankind’s stupidity as part of its main message. Indeed, one could almost go on to say that the film is a little too preachy as the message is hardly a sub plot and trumpeted on throughout its entire length.

We then go straight into the psychedelic title sequence with an absolutely fantastic, rocking pop song that is performed by the singer over the main credits in front of a multicoloured series of wax projection lamp slide displays (common to movie party scenes in the 1960s) a little like the way Sheena Easton appeared on the opening credits of For Your Eyes Only (reviewed here). And, yes, of course the song is all about man’s terrible pollution of the planet and, thankfully, it re-occurs a few times in the film so my toes can keep tapping along as I take in the beautful images. I love the rocking title sequence so much and then the director pulls the rug and we’re left with an old clock with no hands, floating in the sludge of the river in an industrial area as a huge downer and darkening of the mood.

This is one of only a handful of Godzilla movies which highlight a child as the main human protagonist (possibly Toho were reeling from the competition with ‘The Other Big G’, Gamera, seen by this point as a defender of children everywhere) but, considering the bleak nature of this movie, where the threat of Hedorah is not downplayed and almost pushes the movie into horror territory, it’s unusual to have a kid as the human viewpoint. But the story doesn’t spare the kid any of the dark... as he promptly sees his scientist father disfigured on half of his face with acid burns when he encounters Hedorah under the sea (think Harvey Dent and you’ll have some idea of what I’m talking about here).

Anyway, despite a wonderful psychedelic disco scene (where the singer performs some of the title song again... yay!) and a scene where the youth of Japan have a big love-in rock festival on Mount Fuji while the tired old ‘old people’ hide in the bushes and watch them with disdain (hmm... think some kind of point is being made here), the film is quite relentless in its darkness. The main gist of the rest of the story being... Hedorah kills a lot of people in the various forms he can mutate into at the drop of a hat (such a a rocket propelled flying saucer of himself or a more Cthulhu-like creature that can shoot laser beams out of its big, red, dead and staring eyes), with mostly just his natural polluting ways (often just flying by them so his noxious fumes reduce people’s bodies to skeletons) and Godzilla tries to stop him. The Big G gets seriously beaten up a number of times (honestly, he loses every fight until the last one quite badly and gets pretty injured throughout) before he utilises a failure of a human invention, built to try and stop Hedorah... and helps it work properly with his radiation breath. This is then converted into anti-Hedorah lightning via these massive electrodes invented by the young whippersnapper’s disfigured father. So, yeah, this is a rare film in which Godzilla actually really needs the aid of humanity to help him protect them from the evil monster. So that’s also an interesting twist.

But there’s so much going on that this simplistic story becomes a feast for the kaiju friendly senses. The director uses a kind of multi-media mish mash of narrative forms to tell the story... such as a number of really interesting and sometimes quite surreal animated sequences, the text and voice-over narration of young kids’ essays on pollution to push a point on screen and the intrusion into the narrative of various newscasters reporting on what’s going on. Indeed, one animated sequence where two women wearing anti-Hedorah gas masks are dissolved has a wonderful transition as the fusion of their dissolved faces becomes the shaded area on a map which demonstrates what the newscaster is relating. I can’t help but think that Frank Miller must have been at least a little familiar with Godzilla Vs Hedorah when he wrote the classic DC mini series The Dark Knight Returns, which uses a similar juxtaposition of ‘newsreel reports’ to invade the narrative and shape it.

Other things of note are the fact that the young protagonist plays with Godzilla and Hedorah action figures... and a selection of wonderfully powerful visual moments such as a yowling kitten being left unscathed but very dirty in the wake of one of Hedorah’s attacks... plus various shots of the actors viewed through the opposite side of an aquarium with the fish floating around in front of their faces. There’s even a black and white scene setting up the kids on Mount Fuji, which pushes the gloominess until they get the guitars out and the scene explodes into colour (a short burst of optimism which suddenly turns tone in another polluting attack from the movie’s antagonist).

There’s also the villain to talk about. If you look at a still of him he looks quite comical but, I dunno, he has an interesting and very threatening presence in the movie. The way he reacts to things with his eye movements actually gives us a kind of window into his alien thought processes on some kind of primitive level and, honestly, the scene where he marches into the industry centre of Tokyo and just stands over a big, industrial chimney belching fumes so he can loudly inhale them while getting stronger, looking like some kind of monstrous Cthulhu junkie deadened by the high of the fumes, is totally unsettling.

The fights are interesting in this one too in that... well, for a start, they’re almost totally unscored. The music which is used in this film is amazing as composer Riichirô Manabe fills it with weird instrumentation and sinister, creepy themes (except for one, I’ll get to it in a moment). And the choreography of the fights themselves are a little like a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. They’re all about squaring off and out-staring the other, less about punching each other out and more about the gravitas of the inevitable conflict. Which is just as well in a way, for Godzilla, because he gets really damaged almost every time he trades blows with the smog monster. There’s also more anti-pollution messages pushed in these encounters and more than once The Big G is left in the dust, coughing toxic fumes while Hedorah runs rings around him or fires globules of disfiguring acid at our giant hero. Indeed, he looks a little like Stallone at the end of Rocky in terms of being none too good for wear from his various, harrowing encounters. So, yeah, it’s less like a regular Godzilla movie in many ways.

The only two noticeably ‘out of tone’ elements also involve music to some degree. Firstly, while Hedorah’s personal musical landscape is quite minimalistic and horror-like, Godzilla has a bizarrely comical theme lumbering onto the soundtrack every time he turns up. It completely wrecks the sombre mood built by the surrounding themes. Secondly, there’s a moment at the end of the film where Godzilla flies, set to triumphant but equally comical music, where he uses his fiery breath to propel himself backwards through the air in controlled flight to catch the ‘spawn of Hedorah’. In a lot of the Godzilla films made just before or after this one, it would have been fine but, here, it’s housed within a film which really doesn’t fit with this kind of inventively comical addition and, strangely (considering the tone wasn’t upheld for the movies that came after), its the first and last time the character flies in this fashion in one of the actual movies.

And there you have it. Godzilla VS Hedorah is, for me, the absolute best Godzilla film ever committed to celluloid. If you’ve never seen a Godzilla film before and want to be hooked by the series then this one is definitely a contender to jump start your obsession. I am loving the new Criterion transfer of this and it certainly won’t be the last time I watch this slice of kaiju genius, for sure. Absolutely incredible. It’s a shame the sequel to this one was scrapped. 

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. 

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.