‎Conton (1987)

 

Director: Takuro Fukuda

Screenplay: Takuro Fukuda

Cast: Kazuhisa Kawahara

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Beginning with a reference to Chuang Tzu, the Chinese philosopher who dreamt he was a butterfly dreaming they were a man, this concept will be evoked in this 45 minute film which starts with Gou, a young man having weird dreams of monsters fighting, with Tzu being evoked openly by his female love interest, who is reading about this dream for her own studies. He has bigger issues however, waylaying this existentialism, as he owes money to a criminal gang, the Kanto Dragon Club, for an obvious set up where he “accidentally” colliding cars with theirs. When they buy up his loan debts, they being to terrorize him for money as the shady hoods they are, all whilst the blurring of realities for poor Gou is going to become worse, arguably as much from the stress caused by these three criminals.

Conton is part of a wave of lo-fi, micro-length horror film sadly difficult to access for the most part, alongside the likes of Death Powder (1986) and Cyclops (1987), the first film of Jôji Iida, a director with a curious filmography including the once "unknown" Ringu sequel Spiral (1998). They come from the same place as the anime straight-to-video era did in the eighties, the Japanese economic bubble of prosperity and the development of the videotape as a medium creating a market for these productions to be made and sold within. Even the short length of Conton can be explained, as with so many anime works from this time, even episodic, which were forty or so minutes long; they were likely in mind to the videotape medium itself and how much you could put on a tape without the additional cost of a longer length video or compromising the quality of the material on them. The ones I have seen or heard of, as Conton is, were also built around practical effect scenes and gore, with even a self referential nature to the proceedings, as a low budget production, in Gou’s side job between study being on a film set. It is a production which has to clearly work with its limitations, and exploit what they could get their hands on, such as Gou’s side job leading to the film suddenly having a music video sequence with dancers and motorcycles for the sake of it.

It starts to escalate when Gou pukes up a face with an alien phallus mouth, possibly in a nightmare within a nightmare, but with the realities blurring and all of this the beginning of the micro-feature rendering its impressive and elaborate body horror. Like later films from Japanese horror, this thankfully has the mood I came to appreciate of shooting in regular Japanese urban locations, the greater intimacy (even when obvious CGI was being used) of any circumstance no matter how unnatural existing just in the right back alley of a Japanese metropolis or even a small town. This is contrasted, in this case, by the hyper gory and elaborate horror when it does appear, and there is also a clear influence from tokusatsu hero shows, the kind imported into the West with the Westernized Power Rangers franchise, in how Gou’s nightmares, where he is creating the monsters within them as models in his bedroom, are all men-in-rubber-suit costumes.

Conton takes a while in its short story, but it is fascinating even when it is blatantly imitating the famous werewolf transformation from An American Werewolf in London (1981), all because the film commits to making that replication with its own practical effects stand out. For a slight production in length and content, there is a lot of hard work on display, which can be seen in just the final shot, distorting reality back to models on a desk, showing director-writer Takuro Fukuda and the crew were to be as creative as possible. Whilst this was sadly the sole film Fukuda directed, thankfully his career is prolific. The tokusatsu references were apt as, over the decades after, Fukuda has spent his career, alongside work in other genres, working into such shows, into the 2020s on the Kamen Rider franchise. Conton itself is an ultra obscure production, but like their American micro-budget cousins, this would immediately win people who like those films (as it did for me) for its homemade qualities and living up to what it could attempt.