Thirst (2009)

Director: Park Chan-Wook

Screenplay: Park Chan-wook and Jeong Seo-kyeong

Inspired by Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

Cast: Song Kang-ho as Fr. Sang-hyun, Kim Ok-bin as Tae-ju, Kim Hae-sook as Mrs. Ra, Shin Ha-kyun as Kang-woo, Park In-hwan as Fr. Roh, Song Young-chang as Seung-dae, Oh Dal-su as Young-du

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

When I think about what helped me become a huge cineaste, the 2009 Cannes Film Festival was a huge turning point for this among other factors, a strong line up in terms of just the competition when I took interest in reading the coverage. That festival had the infamous Lars von Trier film Antichrist, and Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void, had acclaimed films likes Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, Jacques Audiard's A Prophet and the eventual Palme D'or winner for that year, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. There are also the other fascinating films in the official selection, not even factoring in the other screening categories for awards or not, such as Hong Kong film maker Johnnie To collaborating with French actor/singer Johnny Hallyday on Vengeance, or Thirst, Park Chan-Wook making his way from the acclaimed Oldboy (2004), part of a trilogy on vengeance which premiered at Cannes, into a vampire film.

Chan-Wook, a decade later, has had a strong career, The Handmaiden (2016) another huge film alongside a career with a divisive American production (Stoker (2013)) that are mandatory, but also something I would have never had predicted on the bingo card when I first saw films like Thirst, a BBC mini-series called The Little Drummer Girl (2018) based on a John le Carré novel. Thirst comes from a time before this where I vividly remember Western audiences asking themselves what he would do next now the then-completed Vengeance trilogy had ended. Chan-Wook was helped considerably by the wave of interest in Asian cinema, including South Korean, that came in the early 2000s, and whilst the middle film of this eventual trilogy, Oldboy was the film which caught attention and could have won the Palme D'Or in 2004, the unofficial Vengeance trilogy as a whole was what was on peoples' minds especially when he finished it, starting with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and ending with Lady Vengeance (2005). Before Thirst was I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006), a divisive but necessary move into a comedy with melancholic edges about a young woman in a mental hospital because she thinks she is a cyborg. Thirst took a further direction in being a horror film whose erotic and violent love plot centers on a Catholic priest Fr. Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) being turned into a vampire. It was a step confidently forwards, whilst absolutely staying as idiosyncratic as I remembered it even in terms of its sudden switches to comedy.

Kang-ho's priest Sang-hyun goes to a research lab tackling a near-if-not-fully fatal disease, and is the one man who survives as a willing test subject. He finds himself meeting a childhood friend as a result of his miraculous recovery, one whose adopted member and wife of this male friend, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin), is treated like trash by the mother. This is all in mind his survival comes due to a blood transfer of his involving vampiric blood and that he has fallen in love with Tae-ju; when he changes fully into his new form, alongside the taste for blood, so does the subtext of a man who lived his faith only to be drawn to earthly pleasures. It feels less like an anti-religious film, before one asks, but explicitly riffing on the French novel Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola, his fight against his own Catholicism part of the psychodrama that this film has, one which just happens to involve vampirism, where it becomes the catalyst for both power but an unquenchable thirst.

The title is perfect for its themes where we sympathetic with our two leads who fall in love but see them slip into a downward spiral confusing between sensual pleasure and needing to murder the son, all amongst the reasons for a growing body count. It is a tangled web where Tae-ju was treated terribly by the mother, overprotective of her hypochondriac adult son, tormented to the point that, when power comes to her in her romance with Sang-hyun, simply running at night to avoid contemplating the son's murder is not enough. Even if she does love Sang-hyun, the tragedy is still there are the film escalates, and here I also have to credit co-writer Jeong Seo-kyeong who became a frequent collaborator from his final Vengeance film onwards, Lady Vengeance (2005). She is arguably a huge factor for the turn of his films from then on, as she worked with him on films like The Handmaiden to Decision To Leave (2022),. She could been seen as a huge catalyst for where his career would go in-between projects with other writers, alongside how she became acclaimed in South Korea for her work as a screenwriter not only his films.

The complexity has grown in this film when having returned to it. Faith exists but if you struggle with your emotions, you will suffer the infernal war, and that is not helped when you've been turned into a vampire that ramps up this war. Song Kang-ho plays his character as a priest that even to the end, when he has killed in horrible ways, is struggling with his real morals as a good person, neither helped that people close to him turn around him at his lowest. Even the priest who raised him spiritually, who willingly slices a wrist to feed him and listens with concern for his vampiric issues, just wants to be turned into one due to a life blinded in the eyes. Tae-ju too, whilst loving him dearly, has been twisted by her situation to effectively use him to get power in her household. It is a great performance from Kang-ho, but that it isn't a surprise, whilst Kim Ok-bin goes between sympathetic, disturbing and, when she becomes a vampire with the makeup and costume upgrade to match, devilish in a compelling way.

Reading the synopsis to Zola's Thérèse Raquin, a surprising amount of the narrative was transferred, a film like Zola's story about studying temperaments of its cast, even when it is reinterpreted in humorous ways here like the dead refusing to leave their murderers' lives even when it comes to the coital bed. Sensuality here is a vibrant, explosive act even in the joys of kissing bruises from self flagellation for sinful thoughts to toe and armpit sucking, the eroticism on display here something that would return significantly with The Handmaiden. The tonal flip-flops make sense in mind to this presentation of these complicated characters in terms of morals and their emotions, a melodrama between comedy and extreme violence for a film that was a huge hit back in its native South Korea. The emotional mind field here is what is central to the story, whilst the horror premise becomes itself the stylization, yet to the production's credit, how this is depicted still stands out. The plasticity of the special effects, in terms of depicting Sang-hyun being able to leap tall buildings and even crawl on walls, is great because it doesn't try to ground the unnatural power he now has. It has a major part to the emotions, like punching a lamppost in half in anger, or the least expected and abrupt neck break in the final act, and the tone of scenes alongside the bloodshed itself befits this hyper-stylized tone to the drama.

Winning the Jury Prize at that Cannes Film Festival where the film premiered, Park Chan-Wook didn't really have to worry in regards to his career after this, and from the strong acclaim he got from his earlier films in 2000s, he has continued on with a healthy career. Thirst itself would have stood out of interest for me just for the fact it was a director not known for horror tackling the subject, catnip for me for what he would bring differently to this area of cinema. Revisiting it this year again, a lot of that different and the surprise in the best of ways is what makes Thrist still a strong film, of tawdry, explosive passion and violence by way of its horror theming.

Tilbury (1987)

Director: Viðar Víkingsson

Screenplay: Þórarinn Eldjárn and Viðar Víkingsson

Cast: Kristján Franklin Magnúss as Auðun; Helga Bernhard as Gudrún; Karl Ágúst Úlfsson as Tilbury; Erla Skúladóttir as Sigrún; Róbert Arnfinnsson as Rev. Thorfinnur; Aðalsteinn Bergdal as Barði Kemp; Bryndís Pétursdóttir as Lilja; Magnús Bjarnfreðsson as Gen. Tilberry

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Explained in the opening voiceover, an Icelandic production with a British voiceover for this opening to befit the importance of the British characters in this story, the “tilberi” is a witchcraft creation, born from a human rib taken from a grave and kept by a female creator’s breast. Fed on communion wine, it stole milk from other peoples’ cows unless caught and uses it to create “tilberi butter”. This TV movie takes this mythology, and creates a complicated horror period story, in less than an hour, dealing with a changing Iceland during the early 1940s when World War II is in full swing. On the 10th May 1940, the British and Canadian militaries invaded Iceland in 'Operation Fork' due to the concern German forces would take over the country. By 1941, as the film ends its own narrative on, the defense of the country was given to the United States in agreement by Iceland itself. The country was officially neutral during the world, but cooperated with British, Canadian and American military¹, but through this supernatural story we see how this would drastically alter Iceland when forced to open up to the new influences.

Auðun (Kristján Franklin Magnúss) is a young man training to become a swimmer and is asked by a priest to talk to his daughter Gundrun (Helga Bernhard), who was caught taking an excessive amount of wine during communion, and fears she has fallen from her religious upbringing. Because they grew up together, in the same church, the priest naturally thinks Auðun is a more appropriate person to win her own from what are her perceived sins of drunkenness, when it is obviously set up that her story is connected to the tilberi. Set in the capital of Reykjavík, with members of the public working with the British soldiers, the tone is grounded and keeping with the period, but also emphasizes the circumstances is their strangeness. In evoking the period with this grounded nature, we see the banality of the scenario without the glamour of the war, with the male soldiers cavorting with the local women. There is a possible flaw with the film that, at less than an hour, it fudges the complexity, such as having Gundrun come off as a stereotypical femme fatale in the midst of this, or demonizing the Allied forces whilst having one of the characters Auðun encounters being a literal Nazis they have captured. Particularly with that one scene character that yet has a major scene, that tries to throw in anti-Jewish beliefs in his explanation of what a tilberi, you can easily see flaws in nuisance here lost in the storytelling. There is however the sense that Tilbury the film is about the chaos of all this period, which influences the storytelling.

Isolated until this war, this is an Iceland being abruptly thrown into the cultural exchange without a knowledge, from how director/co-writer Viðar Víkingsson depicts it, of how bad the Nazis were, instead that a war is apparently happening but feeling like a place of banality. There is no combat, just sights like seeing a British soldier having sex with a woman at one point, possible a sex worker but at least with an older male driver as their cab waiting with them in the driver’s seat during the act, which completely undercuts the sense of historical importance of all this as the days pass. With soldiers occupying the place, everyone is however just floating along. Trucks drive around and mortar firing practice is done completely isolated from the real war, as despite all the sandbagged protective walls built. The soldiers are mostly comparing condoms (and laughing at the local guy who thinks its chewing gum), cavorting with the local women or at the parties at night, whilst the local women like Gundrun link up with said soldiers. Even if there is a sense of corruption from the Allied forced, it is not as if Iceland, as represented by Auðun, is a noble figure, instead a little naïve itself when the world around them has grown and become more complicated.

Within this sense of stagnation is the mysterious British colonel Tilbury who gives the TV movie its title, a young actor clearly in old man white makeup and a fake nose who is clearly unnatural. Among the British soldiers coming off more as nuisances, or arresting random locals who may be Nazi sympathizers, Tilbury is just hiding among them without anyone questioning his involvement as a general, who is connected to Gundrun. This does lead to Tilbury being a revealed as a goblin-like entity puking green goo, but Gundrun’s relationship to his is interesting as it is clearly weighing in on Iceland’s relationship with the British and how complicated it clearly became, such as the fact that this is shown as a very religious country. Thrown into a relationship to foreigners of the island who will undercut this in their relationships, when not on military drills, the world cannot go back to the perceived morals of the past as now the 20^th century has fully arrived, and it seems neither that the old Christian ideals are celebrated because they were merely what the likes of Auðun were raised with. Spirituality did not really form him for the better as his involvement is less for saving Gundrun, but as a fawning crush from her past that cannot get past her. Central to this is Tilberi butter chocolate disguised as Cadburys chocolate; as symbolic of Britain’s status to the Icelandic as with the Americans, when they appear in the last moments appear with their Hershey’s chocolate bars, there is definitely a negative or at least concerned view of what had possibly been lost due to this occupation over time.

At the same time, however, even Gundrun’s plan for this chocolate, which is not recommended to eat due to it causing seizures, whilst a negative on the types of influences on Iceland from the bigger countries is undercut (even if the script being vague) by her being on her own unknown mission. Tilbury the goblin-creature intends to influence Iceland with these chocolate bars, and it is important to remind one selves that, whilst World War II had clear-cut villains that had to be defeated in Nazis, it was still a morally complicated war where the Allies were not clear-cut themselves at times. It was not a good idea, in the moments where the film undercuts itself, to have Tilbury depicted with the fake nose, which unfortunately throws up anti-Semitic stereotypes. There can be arguments to be made that the film needed a lot more time to really explain some of its content to avoid these unfortunate aspects, like presuming that since he is helping Auðun, the openly fascist person who the soldiers arrested would be viewed as virtuous when he is forced into a hole in the soldiers’ camp like he deserves. I will give the film and its creators’ the benefit of the doubt as, in this war depicted onscreen, the severity of its fight is lost to this world, Iceland shown oblivious and just going off these soldiers, on the outskirts, who don’t present themselves as a positive but something even frightening. They treat the locals like crap despite being there to protect them, and the locals just get on with life. Tilbury comes off less like a problematic dog whistle stereotype but a strange creature of misfit whose chocolate, even if contaminated, is never shown in its full effect, likely more a comment that, even if they were fighting this major war, the British and American soldiers to the locals were less than graciousness in spite of the Icelandic people contributing to them helping the war. Even if the heroes, this presents that, as in the morally complex reality, that didn’t mean ever British soldier and general was exactly a bastion of virtue, cavorting and partying at night, even with a joke later on that one or two are doing inappropriate things to local farm animals.

Auðun himself is also a complicated lead. His love for Gudrún, including intonations that he had relations with her when they were young teenagers, the barn where this transpired to haunt him as he literally sinks into the hay in the last moments, is less a virtuous hero than a putz being dragged along. He comes along not really as a person who deserves pity, but a version of Iceland which will be obsolete and left out, mad, at the end whilst the influence of the other Western states come to Iceland. He is naïve to what is going on and that, whilst horrified by Gudrún’s openly promiscuous ways even before he learns the truth of Tilbury, he comes off less a bastion of virtue himself, but a naïve figure who can’t really talk as he has unfulfilled urges for her that were suppressed. His views of her open sexuality in the cold light of the modern day, decades after the film was made, come off as a prude or just clueless with hindsight. The most overtly elaborate scene, a sudden dance sequence with Gudrún and Tilbury, is clearly his jealous imagination, literally filtered in a green light, with them separated from the world and presuming he is an emotional vampire on her when she is clearly the one in control.

He is an appropriate figure in a world where the less likable people can still help him, but can’t be trusted. There is a joke that even the minor Nazi sympathizer is revealed to have been kicked out of the Olympics, as a swimmer in the Nazi held one, due to accidentally splashing Hitler’s personal viewing box, so there is even in the cynical humour the sense he too is just among a bunch of drifters, losers, also-rans and very confused Icelandic people just living through a major war. Iceland did lose casualties as a result, including 200 Icelandic seamen who died from war related deaths¹, so the country was integral to the war, but as we see in various works of various tones and realities on World War II. Its lasting shockwave on the world includes all the banal moments where things awkwardly transpired, like being stuck with numerous British and Canadian soldiers initially on your soil without warning, and the complicated relationship this would have caused.

Viðar Víkingsson’s film does had a greater sense of complication to this all. You can make the argument, for Tilbury’s biggest flaw, that it could dangerously flub some of its themes, in terms of the fact that less than an hour may be enough to examine some very significant historical themes. However how much it managed to depict, with the matter-of-fact naturalism undercutting any glamour to the proceedings, is still to be acclaimed. [Huge Spoiler] In the end, due to the lore of the tilberi, Auðun gets Gudrún killed by her own creation, so he is not a noble white knight rescuing the local maiden from the invading British, just a man lost in this goal to find her, lost in his madness at the end with the only lingering thoughts left rekindled when he realizing Tilbury is now just posing as an American soldier with Hershey’s chocolate with his own special ingredient added. Nothing he had done was helping at all, and he is a confused Icelandic man just seeing the world turn. [Spoilers End] For its possible flaws in not getting a clear message carefully out, this strange and fascinating folk horror work still comes off as very cynical about this major part of Icelandic culture on both sides. I’m not Icelandic, ironically British like those invading soldiers, so the irony is not lost if I stupidly presume to know what it would have been like for that generation when Operation Fork happened, but in spite of the fact that the UK military were on Icelandic soil to fight the Nazis, there is a greater sense of weight in how this depicts it almost as a farce, a stop gap where bars of chocolate are likely to have a more lasting influence than the biggest conflict on the 20^th century.

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1) The Occupation of Iceland During World War II, written by Sunna Olafson Furstenau and published for Icelandic Roots on May 25th 2023.

Theatre of Darkness: Yamishibai Season 1 (2013)

a.k.a. Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories

Director: Tomoya Takashima

Screenplay: Hiromu Kumamoto

Voice Cast: Kanji Tsuda as the Story teller

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

 

The review linked to below comes with knowledge that, starting in 2013 and with more series being produced up to 2024 itself, Yamishibai may still continue into 2025 onwards. Taking the tradition of kamishibai, a form of paper play storytelling and theatre, and amalgamating it in a "micro-series" with urban legends, ghost tales and moments of general spooky misanthropy, it won me over. tIn mind that future series will even tie into cult cinema, with Noboru Iguchi (The Machine Girl (2008)) and Takashi Shimizu (the Ju-On/the Grudge franchise) getting involved from the second series onwards, and I cannot wait to get to the future series.

 

For the full review, follow the blog link HERE.

Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine (2000)

aka. Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine in Daehakroh

Director: Gee-woong Nam

Screenplay: Gee-woong Nam

Cast: So-yun Lee (as the Teenage Hooker), Dae-tong Kim (as The Teacher)

An Abstract Candidate

 

When I first approached Teenager Hooker..., there was no wonder I hated this, as I had a zero taste for micro budget films which went against the norms of genre cinema just in terms of budgetary limitations, let alone their unconventionality. Now I love these films, and Teenager Hooker... is an idiosyncratic production for those who share that similar taste. It has a premise you would expect from Japanese films made with an eye for the West as from Sushi Typhoon in the mid-2000s - a schoolgirl prostitute (So-yun Lee) is caught having sex with a client against the wall of a older woman's apartment, the son the schoolgirl's teacher (Dae-tong Kim) who gets his three brothers to dispose of her gruesomely as punishment...only for a secret organisation to bring her back as a biomechanical assassin. The twist is that this is a South Korean production just in the cusp of their great cultural wave in terms of Korean cinema getting huge recognition in the West. Director/screenwriter/cinematographer Gee-woong Nam's filmography sadly stops into the mid-2010s, but it delights me that he managed to get a long run from his debut here, include a TV movie, which I will bring up later.

Suffice to say, I was not prepared for what is on the surface a premise I found in a lot of films from this DVD era I got to by the late 2000s and hovered old DVDs from the early half of the decade even a few decades after; this was a time not just of the "Tartan Asian Extreme" era, in reference to the side label the late British film distributor Tartan managed to ride a hugely successful wave on at this time, but the time of the likes of groups like Arts Magic who brought lower budget films, including early V-Cinema era Takashi Miike to our sources, who is a good comparison in terms of the abrupt curveballs this has. Even then, his films were ones I liked back at a time when I hated this one, which turned out to be an eccentric mood piece. The immediate thing to bring up beyond how distinct its soundtrack cuts are, between Primal Scream's Swastika Eyes (a Chemical Brothers remix) to Mozart, is that this is a standard definition digital camera film which looks even more unreal nowadays as the images have become more blurry. Taking a while even to start as a sixty minute film, languidly letting our female lead wander dingy dark streets, you have the harsh lighting of the format that film was shot on, where blue parts of the streets mix with the orange yellow of artificial street lighting that immediately started to win me over rather than put me off as my younger self may have react to.

Visually as a result, this absolutely would have disappointed someone expecting a film Noboru Iguchi's The Machine Girl (2008) from Japan; while it belongs tentatively in the same camp as this area of eccentric genre films on lower budgets coming from the East Asian countries at the time imported into the West, this is a far and away more confounding one to sit through. Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine is an eye-catching title but the results, only sixty minutes long, are a lot more unexpected than anyone could expect, especially as that led to why I once hated this film to the point I held it up as one of the worst films I ever saw, all because the title catch my attention in a DVD review magazine, and I went out of my way to see it. Instead of the obviously weird, I ended up witnessing something much more using its idiosyncratic plot and moments of lurid content in very obtuse ways.

The result feels like an attempt to cross mutate an avant-garde film with lurid genre cinema, especially in how director Gee-woong Nam emphasises and lengthens minor parts over major plotting. Having such a small space of time at hand should force one to be economic but this film takes a different attitude completely to this notion, deciding to have six minutes or so taken up by just the opening credits as mentioned, the titular schoolgirl stood still in the middle of a Korean urban street as music plays. Immediately drastic tonal shifts are found where, after the serious presentation of the opening credits, the film starts with the female protagonist asking a potential client if he wants to pay for "voluntary date-rape", leading to him "chasing" her with a Cronenbergian phallic gift, and then (dry) humping against a wall where she's bored and texting on her phone mid-coitus. The film goes even further with going to an older female widow losing her mind hearing them having sex against her building wall, clearly meant to be humorous but quite disturbing in how she rants immediately into a phone in the middle of the night with a deranged tone to her voice. The production design here also emphasises Gee-woong Nam was deliberately taking advantage of the eerie nature of his standard definition camera as much as it was a practical choice, as he shots the widow's scene in a darkened room with painstakingly lit candles, multiple candles to the point of having been a nightmare to collect together, as the main source of lighting for the scene. This introduces the viewer to the main antagonist, the putty faced and giant chin welding school teacher, which to this day I cannot decide is a prosthetic or his actual magnificently rubber face, catching the schoolgirl working at his home and waking his grandmother up. This leads to her demise but not before you get a prolonged few minutes of the two, when she asks for forgiveness by offering free sexual services, of them recreating a mating ritual animals do by swaying on the spot to non-diegetic music.

The film goes along from here with a mix of styles with avant-garde leanings even if by accident, a lo-fi visual I can justify comparing to video art installation work, specifically from an older review I did a long time ago to Bill Viola's Hatsu-Yume (1982) in terms of lighting and style if shot in digital. Back then, this was a credible comparison as Viola, an established American video artist, with that project was shooting on eighties video cameras around places Japan and thus (even from my own faded memories) emphasised the artificial urban lighting in certain locations chosen, something you find here as Gee-woong Nam is working around a lot of real locations and the liminal spaces in-between, especially as night where artificial lighting would be needed, between public bathrooms to obscure diners. This is set around a very low budget movie tone that includes the slow pace, emphasis on dialogue and minor actions, and interspersed splat sticks prosthetic effects driven content. The result is unpredictable and leaves a viewer thrown between tones wildly. You can go from a heartfelt and serious monologue, post-coitus and done directly to the camera, from the schoolgirl about her life and how she wants her newly conceived baby to grow up into a opera singer, set to a piece from Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns, to a bizarre gore scene in a bathroom where a foetus still attached by the umbilical cord is floating in the air after she gets blasted through the stomach by the teacher with a gun.

What was once an off-putting aspect of the film for me, the DV photography, actually contributes a great deal to the film for me in how its muddy image appeals as an aesthetic in its own right. The imperfect can have a beauty to it even if it is in the eye of the beholder, and the lo-fi aesthetic sticks out for me on this viewing because of its murkiness and distorted colour lighting, a style as much as the richness of celluloid film or the clearness of high definition in later low budget genre films. Some very striking images start to come to be because of this, such as that incident in the bathroom which is shot in luminous green lighting, almost Vaseline smeared, with the deliberate harshness of the saturated lighting insanely stylish. The more overtly lurid moments, such as intercutting between the teacher and three brothers having their way with the lead, sawing her into pieces, or actress So-yun Lee bravely dealing with nude scenes and/or strapped to machinery built from metal beans and tubing, are contrasted by ones I would expect from video art I have watched, such as intercutting to an actual opera singer never addressed by the cast singing in the scene nearby. These later details now I see are more overtly unconventional choices on purpose.

Particularly with the shots in the open streets or an empty night road, it evokes video art from a variety of decades as mentioned by way of a video camera which distorts the lighting and the colour, in how the failing image adds to the sense of environment that crisp photography might not do well with all the time. Even the moments of scenery consuming colour lighting adds to the distorted sense of reality the film has where everything is out-of-whack to suit the messy visual look. It almost takes one back, for a moment of unintentional comedy, when I spotted a prominent KFC restaurant out of nowhere in a moody scene over turntable music in real South Korean streets. The music is surprisingly strong as already mentioned, and anyone who hates the film would still appreciate the choices immensely. The director has a good taste in classical music and remixes by the likes of Massive Attack, where even in scenes that might frustrate people, such as an opera singer inexplicably stood on a pier as mentioned, masked by the bright white light in front of the camera above them, you still have good music being played that has a grandeur to it. These tonal switches are further fudged by the brief inclusion of an assassin subplot with sci-fi trappings where the schoolgirl, now a biomechanical cyborg, has to kill a person in a restaurant. The further genre changing does pull the film fully into the lurid genre cinema of the time though closer to Takashi Miike's, in both how he abruptly undercut these premises with moments of quietness, or that when he did ramp up the absurdity, he was glad to. The crotch gun that ends this film, subverted as a phallic object inside a man's mouth from a woman in this case, is something he could have done in one of his films.

The experience of Teenager Hooker Became A Killing Machine is an acquired taste, a lot of its strange tone one which would catch a lot off. It's the blurring of the artistic and the lurid that causes a lot of this, but I have come to love this as time has gone on, where you find yourself both with the pacing of a more atmospheric film, but contrasted by your antagonists being a high pitched voice man with rubber putty all over his head and three strange brothers by his side, one calling himself a girl and their method of dismemberment being a comically large saw a magician would use for a magic show, the artistic aspirations clashing continually with these creative decisions that now win me over. We can only thank an early DVD release by Third Window Pictures in Britain for licensing this - an unsung hero especially for Japanese cinema like Shinya Tsukamoto to Sogo "Gakuryū" Ishii on Blu-Ray - in fully translated English subtitles, as we never got any of the other films from Gee-woong Nam.  As a director, he would continue with these very idiosyncratic titles - Chow Yun-Fat Boy Meets Brownie Girl (2002) furthers this eye catching title with a premise about a jar the former finds that allows him to turn snails into human beings, whilst Never Belongs to Me (2006) sounds like a premise to a Shinya Tsukamoto or Miike film we sadly never got, of a man who on request of his girlfriend in an act of revenge has his penis replaced with a gun that fires on orgasm to use on those who did them wrong. Whether they were any good or not is entirely not for the place of this review, but if any of them demonstrated the style and idiosyncrasies of Teenager Hooker Became A Killing Machine, that would make them more enticing.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Themroc (1973)

 

Director: Claude Faraldo

Screenplay: Claude Faraldo

Cast: Michel Piccoli as Themroc, Béatrice Romand as the Sister of Themroc, Marilù Tolo as the Secretary, Francesca Romana Coluzzi as the Female Neighbour, Jeanne Herviale as the Mother, Patrick Dewaere as the Police Officer, Coluche as Male Neighbour, Miou-Miou as the Young Neighbour

An Abstract Candidate

 

Themroc has an interesting legacy in Britain, though one interlaced with a time of moral panics. Channel 4 in Britain, when it was first launched in 1982, was literally the fourth terrestrial television station in Britain. Television was dominated in my country by the BBC, who had two stations, and ITV, who was originally a series of regional stations that shared programming and had advertising unlike the BBC. Channel 4 would eventually over the decades become more conventional, but at first they were very controversial, an alternative choice even into the nineties and into the Millennium as, even when they were drawing bigger numbers creating shows which could get complaints. They had a few notorious moments over the decades, be it satirist Chris Morris' incredibly controversial Brass Eye (1997), which tackled biting topics like the fear of paedophilia in the media with a scathing surrealism, to even TFI Friday, a live music comedy show hosted by Chris Evans originally between 1996 and 2000, which had its own controversies to the point Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder was not allowed on the show in live form to get around his passive habit for cursing. Even now, toning down, you still get something like Naked Attraction, started in 2016, which is a dating show where you literally first get to know someone from their naked body first before their face or personality, which got the danders up for some¹ and thankfully shows that old school side to them.

Themroc is important for them as, whilst only a series with ten films², Channel 4 showed Claude Faraldo's experimental satire as the first film for the Red Triangle series between 1986-7, a curated series of international and experimental films which were marked as after midnight broadcasts, warned in their promotion as having adult content. This was a literal red triangle promising adult material, with many of the choices having sexually explicit content even if they were cerebral works, like Michelangelo Antonioni's sexually explicit but ennui drenched Identification of a Woman (1982). Some films were not this, like the devastating Brazilian film Pixote (1981), films which have slowly been rediscovered and some, like the two from Japanese filmmaker Shūji Terayama in the line-up, in dire need of actual releases in the West still. Themroc among them is the entry from the French industry after the French New Wave, least the time after Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed the medium dead and made experimental projects in a variety of forms over the seventies, a time which could give you Jacques Rivette's Out 1 (1971), but also Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973), a project by the Situationist movement which took a martial arts film, and added a new dub which was a left wing political satire intermingled with the fight scenes. 

Themroc immediately stands out as entirely wordless or depicted with the cast speaking complete gibberish, a tale of art house film legend Michel Piccoli as an ordinary working Joe who ends up descending into an urban caveman after one bad day at work after being disciplined for eyeing in on his boss and his sexy secretary. The film depicts this all in his performance, the cast and the world without needing dialogue, and one of its first idiosyncratic touches tells his back story by repeating each day of this dead end job through tiny moments from days pass, the same moments but with the cast in different clothes per day of Piccoli's life. Among the things which influences this character's descent is also with the opposite gender and sex. Thankfully, this does not factor in with a way which could horribly date as this progression goes on; even if he commits to an incestuous relationship with his sister (Béatrice Romand), this feels like a perverse touch even if a discomforting one, one of the first stabs at the taboos this film is playing with than a male fantasy. It is certainly an eccentric production, where a very sick sense of humour goes a long way into appreciating this, and a sense of the weird too, witnessing the likes of the guard obsessed with sharpening pencils only to break the tips so he can sharpen them again, not that dissimilar to the man polishing his posh car over and over living in the same apartment complex as our lead when the events transpire, strange irrational behaviour between with hindsight that make Piccoli's turn, even if transgressive, more sane in comparison. Cemented together by Piccoli himself, in primal scream form in a damn good performance, he is not playing a troglodyte stereotype but this force of confidence in urban form. This is one or two aspects which may have aged, but not in the ways expected, in that he does begin to entice the women around him, including the secretary, with his charms, but it becomes more complicated. Far more likely to have aged, just in the incestuous relationship, is how Béatrice Romand is a much younger woman in various states of undress throughout the film rather than them being siblings, all because the transgression is more clearly the point but the presentation is what is closer to the reductive alternative version what could have gotten in Themroc as a bad film. A lot has surprisingly gained more as time passed for the production. The first person to follow his charge is the best example of this, as it is a  housewife played by Francesca Romana Coluzzi, a statuesque figure who escapes her doldrums and whose less dominant, small nerdy husband joins her more cautiously, with a regular hammer to break their possessions and walls down next to her with a sledgehammer.

Literally building a cave out of his apartment with a few adjustments, the production getting access to an old building complex they could literally destroy the outer walls of in real time, the police do come for Piccoli, only to become figures in a farce where tear gas is an aphrodisiac when you turn feral. Tellingly, post May 1968 and the riots which brought France to a close, it is the police who are the real monsters, a bumbling mass who for the sake of it assault a young boy out of frustration or even commit sexual assault, coming off as clueless and lost entities are mindlessness. That or as food, as authority figures become the antelopes for urban lions to barbecue for tribal bonding over a meal, with the act of cooking authority the most overtly surreal and transgressive moment, and not even hiding the meaning in subtext. There is even a hint of bisexual cavemen, or at least toying with male-male eroticism where, in an attempt to bring back human respectability by bricking the cave up with walls again, men can show sensual respect for their own beauty by stroking each other, especially to tempt them from being a mindless brick layer for authority and to join this cave person tribe.

The ending furthers this subversive streak of how Piccoli and the others are not regressing but stripping away the horrors of modernity, contrasting their few transgressions against greater horrors as the buildings allowed to be destroyed for this film's production are later contrasted by the new apartment complexes shown at the end, white fortresses which look depressing even shot from afar. Sexuality itself is part of this as is control; there is one police officer living in the apartment complexes as this all transpires who keeps his daughter under his thumb, even striking her out of discipline, regardless of her own freedoms and passions in vicinity to these events. That or the older woman, Piccoli's mother, almost having a constant panic attack between her horror at what has happened but also, even if a taboo is involved, the attack of her social morals clashing within something primordial. That there are taboos that, in any other circumstance, would rightly be considered unacceptable is understandable to consider, but Themroc clearly has these hypothetical scenarios not to suggest they are the right way forwards, like cannibalism, but as a deliberately shock.

Whilst that might be the aspect which has aged the most, the sight of values being raged and challenged in this has not, as Piccoli and his tribe manage to live in peace baring the killed and eaten police officers. His tribe's primal screams in the finale, starting to affect others across the city, cause these figures to question themselves, to break from a repetition, break from materialism by means of destroying one's car they were obsessed with, becoming part of this hymn to a singular human form of passion and life without the trappings of mindless social structure and repression. Again, all of this is conveyed without dialogue and explicit political grandstanding, and that becomes one of the best aspects of Themroc, how pure gibberish from the cast and using performance even from the non-feral figures conveys this all perfectly. Even that it manages to move away from potentially contentious aspects, the strong macho lead who woos women with his feral charms, to become much more interesting in the turns it takes with other characters means it never becomes trite and obvious.

Hilariously, it was the government of Margaret Thatcher who are to be thanked for Channel 4; a deeply controversial figure, a scourge to many and also connected to the attempts to ban "Video Nasties" in the video tape rental stores too through members of her government, they nonetheless wanted to force competition against the BBC, creating an entrepreneurial setup allowing smaller television production companies to create programming the channel could buy off them³. This ended up creating a channel that, in this original form, was everything her conservative ideals would have been aghast with, showing a film like Themroc which rebels at everything her government's ideals would have aspired to just in terms of materialism and family values. That in itself adds a delicious layer to the story, even if this screening happened before I was born, in terms of this film with a legend just in terms of British television.

Abstract Spectrum: Transgressive

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

 

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1) Naked Attraction won’t be laid bare by Ofcom as Channel 4 show escapes investigation, written by Kirsty Bosley and published for Metro.co.uk on August 7th 2017.

2) Too hot for TV? Inside Channel 4’s doomed Red Triangle experiment, written by Stephen Armstrong and published for The Telegraph July 14th 2021.

3) I owe Margaret Thatcher a debt of thanks for creating Channel 4. Now her heirs could destroy it, written by David Olusoga and published by The Guardian on July 25th 2021.

Touch of Death (1988)

 

Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Brett Halsey as Lester Parson; Ria De Simone as Alice Shogun; Al Cliver as Randy; Sacha Darwin as Margie MacDonald; Zora Kerova as Virginia Field; Marco Di Stefano as the Tramp

A Night of a Thousand Horror Movies / An Abstract Candidate

[Warning: Spoilers Throughout]

The set-up to Touch of Death would win anyone over as long as they had a strong stomach, or cause him or her to turn the film off if they did not. An older man is shown, when not killing women, cooking pieces of her flesh for TV dinner, then disposing the corpse gorily with a chainsaw. This sounds like the worst nightmare for a moral campaigner, but my first introduction to Touch of Death was weirder, that it is one of the films of Lucio Fulci's own, with those of others, re-contextualised in A Cat in the Brain (1990), his deeply weird meta-commentary on his own work where he was the central character. The chainsaw and subsequent meat grinder dismemberment definitely raises the bar in feeling ill with Fulci gore, even if you know its fake. In itself it already sets off that we are if getting into the absurdity, reminding me in particular of when British band Carcass got to their album Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious (1991), which stills plays to the grotesque morbidness of the type of music they helped contribute to, but by that point even in imagining someone turning a victim into glue to huff, you are seeing them parodying the idea of gruesome horror imagery to offend and traumatise audiences. Touch of Death itself, starting from that initial scene, sets itself quickly as a sick hearted comedy with a deeply unconventional trajectory, in which older bachelor and gambler Lester Parson (Brett Halsey) constantly has to pay off debts for an illegal horse racing group, having found a novel way of acquiring the funds needed by skimming the lonely hearts pages for wealthy women. Where things get weird is that, seemingly, Lester has a copycat killer reported on TV claiming his victims and implicating him with each news report. Considering his radio is talking back to him in his own voice, it is not really a spoiler to know he is not a conventional state of mind, but the film takes it in an odder direction.

In general, there are strange entries at this point in Fulci's filmography by the mid eighties even for a director who invested into the nightmarish and dreamlike with his horror films – Conquest (1983) is a border line, the least conventional fantasy film you could ever watch, and Aenigma (1987) springs to mind too – whilst Touch of Death was one of the many films either directed by Fulci or had his brand naming upon it recycled as clips for his truly bizarre, quasi-autobiographical oddity A Cat in the Brain. Made the same year as the infamous Zombi 3 (1988) production where he only finished a large portion of it due to illness, and the team of Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei finished the final film, Touch of Death itself is a strange movie to my surprise in its own way. A perplexing mix of comedy, nasty splatter and his reoccurring obsession with reality slowly ebbing out of grasp as the film continues on, this does stick out among the films before and after. The premise has a dark reality, in that you have the likes of the Honeymoon Killers, couple Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck who targeted real women for money and killed them, but here as played by Brett Halsey, Lester is a foil who, despite getting away with a few murders, also gets a speeding ticket at one point when disposing of a corpse. Halsey is among many actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood and of fifties television productions who, as he got older, started appearing in Italian productions such as their spaghetti westerns, finding himself in his later career in a string of late eighties Fulci films at this time. Even in mind that Italian productions are post-dubbed, his character just in presence here. Whilst looking creepily like a real serial killer would in his conventional dress sense, he also has an absurd aura of a man constantly under strain, far from control. His cat Reginald, even if using human corpses, has better luck just from least having good meals.

The character being a putz really adds something here, the tonal shifts themselves effecting. Most of the narrative, until it builds to Lester's increasing paranoia and his fate being sealed, is the character interacting with a string of various female victims, and in spite of the stereotypical Fulci gore that became synonymous to his work at this point, it is played as a black humoured farce. John Waters springs to mind, for playing up bad taste deliberately. A strange quasi American environment, meant to be Florida but entirely in a nether realm of Italian cinema's interpretation of it, is where we find ourselves, one where Lester is an unapologetic sociopath but in a world which makes him look ridiculous. The illegal horse gambling organisation, ran by an older Caucasian man and a still older Asian man assisting him, who exist in their own world wary of the police, seem like a budget restriction expected from a micro budget horror film, in that they have no fixed office; in context however it adds a weird edge that, having to keep an ear for police helicopters, their lack of fixed location is ridiculous on purpose. Lester's female victims are exaggerations, and even a glamorous actress like Zora Kerova is given pronounced prosthetic disfigurements like a mere birth defect on the top lip or a vague moustache to undercut their appearance. It is not flattering in the slightest, and can be seen as sexist, but in general the film's tone is a peculiar ode to the tasteless in a weird way. The exaggeration of the women for broad comedic effect, the most extreme an opera singer with masochistic streak, is balanced out by Halsey playing a strange, pathetic man himself. Charming enough to woo these women, and played by Halsey with charisma even with the ghostliness of him having to dub himself, but slowly finding that he is even having to run over homeless men trying to blackmail him. Considering he is a man unable to keep hold of money, because he is actually terrible at gambling, it is clear he is about to slip off the deep end.

The realistic advice from the voice, similar to his, on the radio is a clear sign early on not all is what is expected, very early in the film and already showing its hand. That moment was enough to push Touch of Death into the abstract before it went further, becoming more unconventional with how this plays out with a streak of melancholia from this. It is clear the film is entirely from inside the mind of a man losing what sanity he had, the copycat himself in some form, but the dreamlike lack of clarity famous from Fulci taking this to an extreme. One where it can be as argued Lester is already dead or a literal doppelganger situation is actually involved. Everything is unexplained, the grotesque broadness of the female caricatures or the depopulated world of a low budget Italian genre flick, alongside the stranger details. Horse racing commentary constantly in the soundtrack is one of those many unique touches to this film I have not seen many "weird films" do, but it works, at first presumed to be on the radio constantly for Lester, but becomes apparent in being part of his psychosis at it continues.

That it is played for comedy is a surprise too. Fulci had made comedies early in his career, (fans proclaim that one, The Eroticist (1972), is actually a hidden gem from his filmography), but he was known at this point and still as a serious, nasty director of gore. Unintentional camp which appeared in the late eighties films was one thing, but deliberate humour catches you off guard. Obvious jokes stretched out at length such as Lester struggling to get a body in the boot of his car, due to rigor mortis, stand out when one has seen him direct some of the most gothic and notorious films from the eighties Italian cycle of cinema. One is legitimately a great moment, his attempt to add a Mickey Finn to a potential victim's drink only for it to continually switch which glass belongs to who, but even that scene is violently contrasted against the violent gore that happens afterwards, which adds a punch to this. The gore’s over-the-top actually fits in a sick way for this type of film too, more glaringly fake compared to his early work and with such exaggeration, as even when Fulci has someone hit in the head with a stick, an eye has to pop out. It becomes a heightened wreck of conflicting reactions as a viewer. That Fulci is credited as the sole screenwriter adds a fascinating touch to this film, that this is his interests unedited and leading to this concoction. 

Fulci, bless him, even when background material states the film was undercut by its low budget still managed to make a memorable film in Touch of Death. Its obscurity is not surprising as, compared to the stereotype of his career of lurid horror films, even the gore found here does not off-set that most of it is a melodrama black comedy of a sociopath. The film eventually gains more meat, whilst fascinating before, when you suspect the rug is going to be pulled from under Lester's feet at any moment, helped because Fulci's history of the unexpected always happening in his work adds to this, able to wrong foot the viewer even if it breaks the logic of before. Even the music, which is chintzy, works for the strange humour because it sounds like cartoon music. The tone eventually leads to an ending that can be interpreted in different ways, which is applaudable, Zora Kerova's femme fatale (who yet has that distinct lip disfigurement) a warning of Lester meeting his matched, followed by an emotional conversation with his own shadow for a very unique ending scene. It is kind of twist you would want from Italian genre cinema, and absolutely distinct from Lucio Fulci's filmography as its own quirky surprise.

Abstract Spectrum: Weird/Grotesque/Quirky

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988)

Director: Akio Jissoji

Screenplay: Kaizo Hayashi

Based on the novel by Hiroshi Aramata

Cast: Kōji Takahashi as Koda Rohan; Shintarô Katsu as Eichi Shibusawa; Kyûsaku Shimada as Yasunori Kato; Mieko Harada as Keiko Tatsumiya; Jun'ichi Ishida as Yoichiro Tatsumiya (as Junichi Ishida); Haruka Sugata as Yukari Tatsumiya; Ken Teraizumi as Torahiko Terada; Bunshi Katsura Vi as Shigemaru Kuroda; Tamasaburô Bandô as Kyoka Izumi; Shirô Sano as Junichi Narumi; Katsuo Nakamura as Ogai Mori; Jô Shishido as Noritsugu Hayakawa; Hisashi Igawa as Ryokichi Tagami; Shôgo Shimada as Arata Mekata

Canon Fodder / A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis came to me, and Britain, through an old Arts Magic DVD release, one of the earlier DVD distributers who brought a lot of cool stuff in the medium’s older days, some returning in Blu Ray (the Bloodthirsty trilogy of Toho Studio vampire films from the seventies like The Vampire Doll (1970)) to those sadly not (their dalliance in early polygonal 3D anime like the bizarre dystopian body horror Malice@Doll (2001)). Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis has a lot of significance as a film just by itself as a release. It is an adaptation of the first novel of Hiroshi Aramata’s series documenting the history of Japan through occultism. Aramata has been described as a polymath and the best way to some up his work with this story, all centering around a villainous magician named Yasunori Kato who attempts to destroy Tokyo over countless decades of the 20^th century, is that he is also alongside his acclaim in fantasy/science fiction literature a natural history specialist, one who brought Western texts to Japan off the back of the success of his literature, translator of fantasy novels, author and expert in a variety of areas from occultism and to iconography, and an honest-to-God candidate to that term "polymath" in his knowledge. His book franchise, which Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis begins adapting the first 1985 novel of, begins here with Kato brought to 1912 Japan, at a significant turn in the country's history to modernization in Kato's quest to resurrect Taira no Masakado, a Heian period provincial magnate and samurai, who died on March 25th 940 and famous as the leader of the first recorded uprising against the central government in Kyōto. Killed and with his head eventually finding its way to the future site of Edo, later to be Tokyo, it was buried there and is of course the central target in this film for Kato to resurrect in his goal to destroy Tokyo itself, even if Masakado himself wishes to not be resurrected and disturbed from his slumber. The legend of Masakado's head, among the details that sadly might be lost to those without knowledge brought to this tale, makes even Kato's goal to ravage Tokyo more connected to real folklore; the 1923 earthquake which is central to the film when it comes to the burning down of the finance ministry building during said earthquake in Tokyo, was blamed on Masakado¹.Alongside the decision, in 1874, of the new government officially proclaimed him an “enemy of the emperor”¹, neither did bulldozing his grave by mistake when building the finance ministry help, and by 1928, a new grave was build with even a priest called in to hold a pacification ceremony¹. Beyond even then, more incidents blamed on a curse followed, only for change to transpire in 1984 when, after public pressure, his deity status was reinstated and great care taken not to antagonize him any further².

Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, if there is a big issue with the film, tries to cram so much in just over two hours of an ambitious work. As this novel series goes, it continues with Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd president of the United States, as prominent character in one of the stories, a target for occult assassination, as does the controversial novelist Yukio Mishima, so Hiroshi Aramata's has so much content within itself to unpack as ambitious storytelling. For what it is worth, this does an admirable attempt in containing just a prelude to this wider novel series, contained in a worthy way, and the film is important for me too as this was my introduction to its director Akio Jissoji, who presents the fascinating and noble trait of how he could saddle art cinema and genre cinema without contradiction. He worked both with the Art Theatre Guild, a significant film production and distribution company for seminal experimental work, with the titles as deep and experimental like This Transient Life (1970), to pure genre, his legacy also encompassing his work in the tokusatsu genre with television and cinema like his collaboration in the Ultraman franchise. Even the screenwriter Kaizo Hayashi stands out; before this film, he made the truly unique film To Sleep So as to Dream (1986) as his debut, a tribute to Japanese silent cinema by way of a magical realism detective narrative.

Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis is more genre leaning, but you can see a director (with his screenwriter) who fit at ease with the fantastical and the somber with this curious mix of real Japanese history attacked by demons and evil occultists, presenting the Meiji era ending in 1912 and leading to the Taishō era, a period of flourishing Western influence and big events, the construction of the first Tokyo Metro Ginza Line subway beginning in 1925, a year before the end of the Taishō era itself. The Taishō era itself, through pop culture, has become a fascinating era for me in its eventual turmoil, leading to the militarization of Japan, and its aesthetic culture, from Seijun Suzuki’s incredible trilogy of surreal films between 1980 to 1991 set in the decade, authors like Edogawa Ranpo starting their career from the era and anime series like Mononoke (2007) having a narrative arch about a cat-goblin monster terrorizing people on one of the earliest subways in Tokyo opened in the era. Even if you have no knowledge of a lot of the history or the mythology and occultism filtered through Aramata’s work, this film adaptation is rich in presentation and story.

It is visibly a big box office film from the eighties Japanese cinema era, and yet also really idiosyncratic due to its content. It finds itself between horror and supernatural period suspense, even pure body horror, contrasted by a historical drama where its biggest drama when not saving Tokyo from decimation is its growth into the 20^th century. Alongside Taira no Masakado's possible resurrection, there is also the real figure of Eiichi Shibusawa (played by Shintarô Katsu here), the father of "Japanese capitalism" in charge of the head of the Tokyo Improvement Project, bringing together a variety of specialists in different fields trying to transform Tokyo into a major metropolis with global influence. All of this is under threat if Kato, if not through the assistance of a direct descendent of Masakado, Yukari Tatsumiya, uses her daughter instead into the 1920s if need be to get his goal completed.  It does feel with hindsight a prelude to a bigger work, over other novels, but this film does not feel slight, its own fully told tell but a curious juxtaposition between conversations between higher ups about where they will take Tokyo to turn it into an influential city, and deal with the constant risk of earthquakes, contrasted with stop motion monsters and work even involving Swiss artist H. R. Giger among the great practical effects and craft on display.

The film’s escalation is pretty simple – Kato wants to reawaken the buried Masakado in the middle of Tokyo, whether he wants to be resurrected or not - and instead the film becomes a curious juxtaposition of history and occultism, where even if it based on spirits and luck, a prominent detail of the film is the theme of industrialization and indiscriminate expansion of Tokyo destroying stability if not done carefully, notable as this brings in the 1923 earthquake as caused by Kato. This is a film where real author Kōda Rohan is the protagonist, as played by Kōji Takahashi, trying to save Tokyo, and it is fascinating as a film because of these juxtapositions. There is a long scene discussing the way to evoke, even if considered to build underground, going through a tumultuous period in its history, between destruction to economic growth, immediately followed by a stop motion worm creature being forcibly removed out of a female victim from the throat, which pretty much sets up the tone.

This alternative history narrative is an acquired taste, but compelled me as a viewer, not just from all the curious details of real and reel Japanese history onscreen and behind it, including Jô Shishido, of Branded to Kill (1967) fame, playing the real life businessman Noritsugu Hayakawa, here as in real life funding the first subway, Tokyo Metro Ginza Line, that becomes a huge plot point here. How it reimaginings such an important century in world history, let alone Japanese, in all its chaos and modernization, is important even in terms of the Tokyo subway itself, seen as a huge moment for Tokyo if, in this case, its biggest threat being all the little goblin-like stop motion creatures underground. mauling the workers trying to create the tunnels. Alongside how a literal robot is required, it presents a fascinating world where occultism, including figures that specialize in lay lines, is as vital to the plot as the men and women forced to fight Kato, and how they are just among all the figures who influence this world, contrasted with real Japanese sociological history and both viewed with fascination. The occultism itself, in the world of vivid horror cinema aesthetic, is presented as vibrant and even surreal, where the production design is allowed to be as imaginative as the period setting is an attempt to bring accuracy to the time periods. H.R. Giger visibly provided work here, especially on what is effectively his take on the floating orbs of the Phantasm horror franchise, but this is also a film where a multi-limbed behemoth, in stop motion, wandered out of a Ray Harryhausen production, looking magnificent when revealed among other special and practical effects. It a spectacle film as much as with its other content, one which is finding the right foot between its genre beats and a grandeur, where Kato, through Kyusaku Shimada’s performance, is a villain but one given the cadence of a figure with menace and a justification of humanity destroying the world through their growth.

A sequel came, Tokyo: The Last War (1989), which follows in 1945 in the eve of Japan’s lost in the Pacific War with the United States, reflecting a seismic change in the country in real history, but sadly never came to the West. Doomed Megalopolis (1991-2), an animated episodic adaptation from Rintaro, a well regarded anime director who started in the beginning of the industry as we know it in the sixties, came later, readapting The Last Megalopolis in a more overtly horrific and supernatural take, and even Takashi Miike would cross paths with this franchise as, among the many tie-in and spin-offs works in cinema and in literature around Hiroshi Aramata's creations, the last novel Kato was in, Aramata's The Great Yokai War, was adapted by Miike in 2005. It also cannot be denied that the version of Yasunori Katō as shown here, with his militaristic costume including cap and cape, likely influenced the design of M. Bison/Vega, the boss antagonist character from the Street Fighter video game franchise.

Even if you the reader only know the games through Raul Julia’s portrait in the 1994 film, with the costume strikingly similar to Kato’s here, so Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis is a big work to consider. It is a novel franchise which sadly seems not to have come over to the West, in mind to how much content within it is of its own country's and Eastern Asian culture, to the point Hiroshi Aramata can be thanked for how much interest he brought to occultist folklore in his homeland, and would need a lot of explanation to Western readers. It is however novel franchise which tantalizes, as with every time I have seen this film, even if it struggles with the loftiness of cramming a huge text into one film, it still has so much to admire. Even those who helped fund the film have a huge significance in Japanese genre cinema as, for an exclamation mark, its executive producer is Takashige Ichise. He early on funded screenwriter Kaizo Hayashi's debut directorial film To Sleep So as to Dream, and worked with Brian Yuzna with American-Japanese co-productions like Crying Freeman (1995). He also produced Hideo Nakata's Ring (1998), Dark Water (2002), Takashi Shimizu's Ju-Oh: The Grudge (2002) and a lot of Japanese horror films during the early to mid-2000s boom in "J-horror" cinema coming to the West. He comes off, with an incredible and idiosyncratic list of productions even into the 2020s, as a king level figure for genre history.

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1) The curse of Masakado: why a malevolent ghost haunts Tokyo, written by Jonathan Clements for the Guardian, published 10th June 2019.

2) Taira no Masakado, written for Yokai.com, written, illustrated, and maintained by Matthew Meyer.