Battle Heater (1989)

 

Director: Jôji 'George' Iida

Screenplay: Gorô Nakajima and Jôji 'George' Iida

Cast: Akira Emoto, Hisako Hara, Masao Imafuku, Kenichi Ishii, Pappara Kawai, Gorô Kishitani, Takayasu Komiya and Shigeru Muroi

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #233

 

In cinema, we tend to lionise the director, hence the auteur theory; even when people have argued against the theory, directors hold an important place as the helmsperson, the captain, of a production. Think of those directors who have not developed cults, for all those maligned or leaving the director's seat after a short career, and wonder what they contributed. Jôji 'George' Iida is an example, whose filmography is fascinating to look at, of an obscure director with a very eclectic career just in genre cinema.

Starting among the boom of low budget, straight-to-video horror which developed in the late eighties, only to continue on with the likes of Another Heaven (2000), a flawed and convoluted horror murder mystery which nonetheless had a lot to admire, he worked into the modern day as a screenwriter in television, or an original creator. Spiral (1998), the once-forgotten sequel to Hideo Nakata's Ring (1998) released theatrically at the same day in Japan and taking a huge step in a different territory¹, is likely his most famous work as that has become of more note in the modern day. Iida makes interesting films, even Another Heaven now having a fonder air to it for me now.

We will begin with the obvious - this is entirely about a demonically possessed onsen, a type of heater-table hybrid, meant to keep one's legs warm and that is entire unique to Japanese culture. They are an object you learn about when their pop culture imported globally, and you have the absurd fact that, yes, this is as ridiculous on the surface as an American horror film called The Refrigerator (1991), a real film about a flesh-eating refrigerator. Also idiosyncratic to Japanese culture however, and referenced in voiceover at first, is that their folklore talks of how an object that lasts for over a hundred years develops a consciousness, hence why even a film like this which is intentionally comedic is still not as ridiculous as it would have been if a Western film. When your folklore has horror tales about possessed umbrellas, it is not something that breaks credibility even if meant with humour, which Battle Heater proudly wears on its sleeve. When the title is literally depicted as a giant foam object of rock in the beginning, and a Buddhist monk is eventually crushed by the "End" title of the final shot, Battle Heater is deliberately silly, without irony but playing up to a gleefully morbid sense of humour.

The evil onsen happens to be acquired by two equipment salvagers, the youngest accidentally removing the seal that keeps the malicious table dormant. He happens to live in an apartment complex full of eccentrics: the punk band who bully him and whose singer wants to steal his love interest from; a woman and her lover who have killed her husband, and are secretly (and slowly) disposing of the body; and an elderly couple revealed, in the darkest of humour, to have built a contraption to kill themselves with alarm clock timed electrical current. Immediately Battle Heater stands out as, rather than dragged out and a dull tale of an evil heater table, all the subplots are interesting up to the point the onsen acquires enough energy to become a giant monster, occasionally killing someone by tricking them to sleep by it like a Venus Flytrap. The dark domestic humour is really interesting - particularly the lover and murderous wife as, casting an actor as the torso of the dead husband who does an exceptional job of acting with his mouth open in rigor mortis, their bickering relationship of a soured adulterous couple is (even of a different culture) comparable in the best ways to similar characters in British comedy.

All of Battle Heater, as a result, is incredibly broad but an advantage in that there is a style to the material, straddled between modern Japanese life and its own world. One minute you are in a scrap yard wasteland in a Lucio Fulci approved phantom zone, covered in fog to match his own history of using fog machines, the next minute the school the female love interest goes to where, in machinations, the mass crying student populous awaiting the final concert of a beloved music teacher will provide the mass screaming populating fleeing a demonic table as it eats a drummer. Probably the best aspect of this is that, in actuality, it is still a small production that relies on some silly production design with care. The murdered husband is an actor clearly propped up in a hole pretending to be half a corpse, but it works; the onsen itself is wobbled, rattled and shaken about; there is even a scene of its plug, moved about likely on a string (and even having first person shots hunting for a socket) that adds a sense of play.

In Iida's career, this marks a different direction from the more serious films he would make in the horror genre, which makes it a distinct production. He is good at comedy, broad and with a lot of slapstick, but the visible dark humour stands out too. The surprise of seeing this film, which I hated the first time I ever encountered it as an immature viewer, to the point of being on the lowest 1/10 tier for an inexplicable reason, comes with a greater admiration now of this obscurer genre director. It is an impressive little gem, and to think once ago I hated the film that much feels embarrassing in hindsight.  

 

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1) Especially helped, when they re-released the original Ring trilogy of the 1998 to 2000 films, that physical media distributor Arrow Video included Spiral as an extra film restored in their 2019 (late 2010s) box set. Spiral is fascinating as its own curiosity, especially in mind that the re-canonised sequel, Hideo Nakata's own Ring II (1999), is a perplexing creation in itself that would divide people. Not surprising when Nakata would admit he was influenced by the infamous Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), the strangeness of his own sequel against the bleakness of Spiral make them a fascinating duo to exist.