Vampire Princess Miyu (1988-89)

 

Director: Toshiki Hirano

Screenplay: Shō Aikawa

Based on the manga by Toshiki Hirano and Narumi Kakinouchi

(Voice) Cast: Naoko Watanabe/Anne Marie Zola (Manga UK dub)/Pamela Weidner as Miyu; Mami Koyama/Stephanie Griffin as Himiko Se; Kaneto Shiozawa/Zach Hanner as Larva

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Series)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

The personal project of its director Toshiki Hirano, as he is one of the co-creators of the source manga alongside his wife Narumi Kakinouchi, this definitely wins you over with its style and in terms of its melancholic tone. For the OVA anime period, it stands out for this, if with the issue like a lot of them that this feels slight for a premise which could have been taken further. This is emphasised when you know the original manga, not including the spin-offs, lasted from the year this anime was created to 2002.

Tellingly he would return to this in the late nineties for a full animated television series, but for what we got here, including the episode following the students being turned into marionettes which turned into the most successful story for its tone and emotional turns, I was glad to finally get around to this.

For the full review, follow the link HERE.

Marquis de Sade's Prosperities of Vice (1988)

 

Director: Akio Jissoji

Screenplay: Rio Kishida

Based on the work of the Marquis de Sade

Cast: Renji Ishibashi, Seiran Li, Kôji Shimizu, Yasumi Hara, Kimiaki Makino, Kumiko Tachibana, Minori Terada and Miwako Yonezawa

Canon Fodder

 

Prosperities of Vice takes us to the Taisho era of Japan in the 1920s. A group of upper class men and one women, Sadean figures of power, are being served at a long dining table by topless, submissive female maids, and they recount their tales of sin and debauchery, be it turning a public officer's wife into a pet, or executing an innocent man as a judge and being aroused by it sexually. One of them, a nobleman calling himself a Marquis (Kôji Shimizu), runs a theatre and sets about adapting the novel Justine by his namesake the Marquis de Sade using real criminals, murderers and sex workers as the cast. It is all with the intention to show the deepest desire of people secretly to commit crime, to "teach the pleasure of vice" to audiences.

His wife, the beautiful Seiran Li, a former sex worker herself bought by him and playing the titular character, is shown mirroring Justine herself, having become a sex worker out of losing her family and being left an orphan, a real life example of the character without needing to live in a world of period appropriate French dress costumes. The Marquis however made an ill-advised decision in doing this, as he decided to cast a thief in the lead male role (Renji Ishibashi), even going as far as have him seduce and take his wife for his voyeuristic pleasures behind a peephole. The thief and wife fall in love, undercutting the ideology of vice with their true love beyond Sadean ideas. Also significant is the historical date as, with the thirties approaching, here as in real life Japan, there would be a military uprising would lead to the end of the Taisho era, and the push to a far right wing military leadership.  They would invade other countries and, leading the Pacific and Second World War's aftermaths, and would cleave through dissidents considered "anti-Japanese" to the new leaders the moment they got power.

An eighties Japanese film with a very glossy look that is unique to Japanese cinema, it is a late era Roman Porno and still as much an erotic film if undercut by its melancholic air. This is in mind to its director Akio Jissoji, whose style completely takes the period erotic drama here into a fascinating direction. He was a fascinating director in general still needing more attention given to him. With his debut This Transient Life (1970), and his other films for the Art Theatre Guild, he created very striking existential dramas, the debut itself with each image and scene playing out with continual movement of the camera or with something important and distinct in each shot. Yet he was also directing tokusatsu films and television series like for the popular Ultraman franchise. He would juggle genres and themes over the years, even adapting Edogawa Ranpo tales by the nineties, and here he presents many distinct, eye catching images and sequences, all centred around this illusion which is broken by a real murder in the theatre midway through.

The film is very subdued and is drawn back in its plotting, its sensuality and even the sense of depravity marked against its mood, which slowly re-tales Justine against the inevitable tragic end to the tale. Even in mind that the Sadean lot are not good people, the irony of their depravity to the militarisation that comes, and how its defeat radically scarred Japan literally and culturally, is not lost. There is a lot to take in that would need multiple viewings, which makes the rarity of the film more disappointing, its elusive tone pulling the plot further from being fully conveyed conventionally on purpose.

The film is more fantastical than This Transient Life, of clocks and a small cramp hideaway full of life sized mannequins. The concept of de Sade's virtues of vice are forced to be re-evaluated when a real death takes place, the real world encroaches on your desires, and someone you control goes against your wishes by falling in love. The film splits itself in the real and the abstract. The machinations of real life, seeing actors getting into costumes and rehearsing, are contrasted against the actual theatre stage. The film cuts from one time period to another, the play reflecting what is happening off the stage, and when the otherworld is brought up by the end, the theatre becomes an internal construct of the characters' minds as well.

In terms of sexuality and debauchery, it is as subdued. Baring a scene of said maids being forced to eat sea cucumbers, which turns out to be the most grotesque scene even next to all the perversions depicted, it is as subtle as its tone. It is not Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) either. It is still a very erotic film, but it conveys it through image and mood rather than actual sex even when that is shown. For a film which even has an explicit scene of necrophilia, it is depicted with a matter-of-fact eeriness which is less shock value, but portrayed through a baroque tone as a heighted dramatic denouement for some characters.  Unlike other depictions of Sade as well, it is about the ideas being conveyed through words and thought rather than the whips and chains of, say, Jess Franco's adaptations. Like This Transient Life, it matches this with a visual texture to make everything, the actors' naked bodies to the environments around them, sensual. Even when he adapted more fantastical genre work, like Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988) with its time hopping tale, including the Taisho era, of the war between Tokyo and a magician wishing to reduce it to rubble, the director was just as fascinated with the visual textures and mood of his work. Its depictions of the occult and the monstrous felt from the same director of This Transient Life, making his career directing the likes of Ultraman even more compelling to contrast to these films.

The result is very unconventional. The concepts of de Sade are placed against reality itself, of political strife and emotional strife, the Marquis and his friends as isolated in their perversions as the four leaders in Salo... while the world changes completely for them outside the buildings they are housed in. The virtues and vices cannot be easily separated as his wife proclaims at one point she is neither Justine nor the good Juliette, of the other Marquis de Sade tale that was written as a mirror, instead her own person with her own thoughts, ideas, and her own forms of virtue and perversion. The plan of the Marquis to bring the joys of vice to people through the play does not bear in mind that the people he is around already act out their own delights, and like most people, he becomes hostile to it. Despite the heavy subtext this and This Transient Life have, they are all about where people place themselves when they are separated from perceived texts and concepts, and have to think about their own existence. Mandala (1971), which could be a deeply troubling film nowadays to some to watch as it followed a religious cult who practiced rape to bring in subservient members, was a pretext for themes this film had with hindsight for me. Like the Japanese cinema and culture I have been able to view so far, it is very much an existentialism that goes as far as the soul, and does not shy away from the perverted and vulgar in answering the questions, or mixing it into "vulgar" genres like pinku films. Nikkatsu, who produced the film, abandoned the roman porno movies that kept them afloat by the time this was made. Those films are still there for me to view, but it is befitting I became aware of the one which breaks the ideas of sexuality and perverse delights down and scrutinises them.

One day, I hope this particular film gets rediscovered and brought in full restoration due to these reasons talked of in the review, a film which does scenes that are deliberately erotic even if playing with taboos, in green dream haze flashbacks having politicians' wives crawl naked with their sleek figures and black bob haircuts on chains like a pet, but contrasting it with the deconstructions of these philosophies. It contrasts them with the absurd naivety of the Marquis' last meal, starting with a mere olive stuffed into an animal carcass than insert that into more animal carcasses so that the olive itself, with the rest disposed of, takes all the succulent flavours of the earth to the sky in one single bite. Decadence is shown but with a moral knife point, where the philosophy meant to free people of organised religion, government and guilt in the West is shown here as being as complacent and as capable of being a tool for the elite to hold power against the public, eventually to be swallowed by another elite iron fist which was not complacent in real life. 

What becomes true liberation is how, in the romance in the centre of the plot even to be lost, eroticism is found even within the actresses' makeup, sensual even without the sex or nudity. The eroticism that is pure and sensual is in how much coloured gel and decor there is as well as the intimacy show, fully liberated as much as in how characters talk to each other intimately bonding as much as the sex. Dolls populate the environment and they move, opening their eyes or turning their heads. A pubescent girl doll spills from her stomach vibrant, sexually red strawberries. The artificiality of the Western European clothes in this Japanese film give as much a sense of the unnatural especially as, until we see the chaos in the real world once or twice, it is entirely closed within its own existence. It is a film which ends with unexpected half-clown makeup and dress, and feels appropriate to the tone of the work, a sense of art and pulp that sent a shiver down my spine.

Satan Place: A Soap Opera from Hell (1988)

Directors: Scott Aschbrenner and Alfred Ramirez

Screenplay: Scott Aschbrenner, Melanie Johnson, Jeff Stogner and Alfred Ramirez

Cast: Warren Andrews as Edward Dayton / Human Hormoan (segment "Disposable Love"); Nora Miller as Doris Dayton (segment "Disposable Love"), Mark Rackstraw as Gordon Lighthand (segment "Disposable Love") / Dick Slasher / Thug #2 (segment "Too Much TV"), Sonja Etzel as Mother (segment "Too Much TV"), Hollis Wood as Johnnie (segment "Say Goodnight, Sophie"), Marsha Malone as Suzie (segment "Say Goodnight, Sophie"), Lisa Hatter as Sophie (segment "Say Goodnight, Sophie") / Daughter (segment "Too Much TV"), Jme Mestel as Jonathan (segment "Sally Satan")

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Missouri Mop Massacre. He can't stop them, and he doesn't do windows.

A woman with Bonnie Tylor hair, blasting shot-on-video budget rock riffs from her car stereo, asks for directions from a male chauvinist, she the interlinking figure herself between all the segments from this anthology horror film.

The first half focuses on the theme of chauvinist men stuck trying to dispose of corpses, the first story following said guy in the introduction, Eddie, in a grumpy mood and not interested in his wife Doris' lamp chops. She fantasies about shooting him in the head in a cowboy pastiche, and he only cares for watching TV and forcing his wife to get him beers, accidentally killing her with one punch over a warm can of brew. Whilst that may dangerous sound like trivialising domestic abuse, in context the film has him both as a terrible person, and within a film where (even if moments have not aged well) the tone is played with a sick comedic humour, with the moment playing as an abrupt moment of fake blood splatter and he stuck in a predicament which will doom him. Like a few SOV anthologies I have seen, they have minimal stories, here Eddie having to dispose of Doris' body, a farce as he considers placing her piece by piece in the trash, but going the weird direction of cooking her in the stove first beforehand. It is obvious where this goes, as he is able to live comfortably, watching porn in the lounge, only to be haunted by her ghost. Not even taking a bath is safe, for the bathwater turns into blood, nor going to the fridge as she tries to force feed him her own intestines' when he is there. It is also a reminder for me too how the trash disposal unit in kitchen sinks, a concept we never really had in my home country of Britain, was a trope for horror films and made me wonder as a result how they were considered safe.

It is pretty obvious, and we are not even dealing with the more elaborate tales you might get from Amicus in the golden age of horror anthologies of the sixties and seventies. The Bonnie Tylor woman has to deal with another sexist pig, kneeing him, who becomes another folly of these kind of men we follow, driving drunk listening to country music, calling his ex a bitch, and running over an old man whilst desperately calling a Mary-Lou at the steering wheel who is about to leave his life. He gets the old man to hospital, but claims the guy jumped out at his car as the old man dies in the hospital. It is obvious too where this is going, thought it has to be established Satan's Place, alongside really liking abrupt twist endings even if they do not make sense as for this story, is more interesting as an SOV production with the tropes they have. Openly a lot of my enjoyment of this one, as many others, is more the template, the atmosphere, of a homemade horror film even when the plots are abrupt and/or slight.

For a lower budget film, the production tries its best more than others in this field, including extensive use of various locations, and is scored to moody late eighties synth. As the film goes, a lot of its personality, including its humour, comes from the surprising amount of pastiche moments, additional original music, and TV/film parodies shot and shown in televisions in scenes that would have taken a lot of time to accomplish. For the second story, they even when out of their way, for a production with multiple collaborators in multiple roles, to use off-screen sprinkles for a rain effect, as our morally dubious Southern stereotype lead thinks he has ran over the old man again when he has just gotten over it, despite the old man being already dead.

Our Bonnie Tylor lead returns in a segment called Too Much TV, about the titular channel hosted by Dick Slasher, and changing the pace as it is about the landlady who Bonnie Tylor crosses who becomes the lead, angry her adult daughter spends all her time watching too much TV and not dating men to her ideal of Elvis Presley. This is the segment more explicitly about the pastiches and side jokes even if aspects of Satan's Palace's tone and humour have not aged well. It is not just that even between women the frequent use of the term "bitch" is used, but some of the explicit pastiches themselves, such as the questionable gay prison movie pastiche Bathroom Bullies with its dropping the soap moment, even if its depiction in feet shuffling back and forth and mouth popping noises in slapstick is absurd, to the first episode having Eddie watch a wrestling match between a transgender dwarf (not the language used) versus a wrestling with his hand puppet friends on both fists. The latter wrestler though is a funny joke which does show the better side of this film, the more overt sillier side which this does provide in spades. Too Much TV is the most scattershot of the anthology segments, as the daughter is watching horror movies like Don't Go into the Kitchen, or good jokes like the Hard Boy, the advertisement for disposable dildos for women. It is definitely the kind of anthology segment you only get from shot-on-video films which drift off in logic, even when it tries to pull a course ahead as Dick the TV host starts to talk deliberately to the daughter about offing her mother. With clearly a higher production, such as all the TV segments shown on television with the horror parodies, you manage to go from a Psycho parody in a bathtub or the mother being gunned down by random 1920s gangsters with typewriter machine guns in a fantasy, all of which including the segment's own abrupt ending, feeling like something you normally do not get outside this world of cinema.

Sally Satan ends the anthology, Bonnie Tylor finally getting her own story, with a suitor named Jonathan visiting and perturbed by the cobwebs around the wine bottles, what looks like a bloody head being cooked in the microwave for dinner, and newspaper clippings about a murder found in the coffee table book for guests to page through whilst waiting. Clearly, the title Sally Satan is an indicator of something Satanic involved, as he lays on her bed in briefs, shirt and socks, all black, reading poetry at one point oblivious to this whilst the score of a NES fantasy RPG is repeating sweetly in the background. He will make the ill advised decision to be willingly tied up, and not even ask for a condom before Satan is announced to be coming.

Like the others, another abrupt twist ending out of nowhere happens, and as mentioned, Satan's Place: A Soap Opera from Hell is not really scary, more eccentric than humorous, and was yet my jam for this pure dose of homemade filmmaking with its own tangents. It also only goes over sixty seven minutes long, which is a huge help to prevent anything from being a miserable slog. Those few jokes which did not age well neither feel like they are truly cruel either, just reminders of this being an older film from the eighties, a long time ago. It becomes clearly, with its end credits, notwithstanding Hubert the Cat in a cameo of the mog licking a corpse kept in the bathroom, too an absolute collaborate effort which I have to admire, with a female co-writer Melanie Johnson as a producer, and one of the director/co-writers Scott Aschbrenner composing the music with another person named Jon Kay, which means even the brief Elvis Presley pastiche you get just for a single scene mention of him, and would have taken time to record, was a work of love from a figure who also helped direct and write the film around the scene. That again really emphasises the amount of hard work put into this film, the only one for the directors. It is an obscure Shot-on-Video title, and sadly might be a difficult one still to locate a proper release of, but for fans of the genre like myself,  you watch them even if imperfect for that sense of hard work.