The Flying Luna Clipper (1987)

From https://www.msx.org/sites/default/
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Director: Ikko Ono

A 1000 Anime Crossover

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Surreal

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

One of the more curious (and obscurest) works I've covered on this blog or on 1000 Anime. A near hour long film made entirely from 8-bit technology of a Japanese videogame console called the MSX, The Flying Luna Clip is an inherently strange creation, the limited animation and vibrant, bit colour in elaborate detail already creating a fascinating tone before you get to the actual content. A trip both in plot and effect - whose passengers include snowmen, and anthropomorphic fruit and plants, flying in a plane boat around the Hawaiian Pacific whilst also experiencing dreams that the viewer also experience. The result is a haze with a tentative narrative, more a series of scenes and incidents, even a musical number with singing volcanoes, but one which for the most part is so innocuous and charming I felt love for it as a creation.

And its definitely strange. The actual existence of the film and how it was made, alongside its obscurity, adds to its weirdness but there's legitimate oddness on display that can only be described as pop surrealism, a kind that is constantly found in Japanese culture but, far from something to trivialise into the crass "weird Japan" term feels so much more sweet on multiple viewings. For the full review, follow the link HERE. 

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Evil of Dracula (1974)

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Director: Michio Yamamoto

Screenplay: Ei Ogawa

Cast: Toshio Kurosawa (as Professor Shiraki); Mariko Mochizuki (as Kumi Saijô); Kunie Tanaka (as Dr. Shimomura); Shin Kishida (as the Principal); Katsuhiko Sasaki (as Professor Yoshi)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #110

How are there Japanese vampires? In the case of Evil of Dracula, as was the case with Nobuo Nakagawa's The Lady Vampire (1959), a screenwriter for a film meant to thrill and tease its youthful audience (as many horror films, like in West, were probably for) had to delve into actual history. In this case the condemnation of foreign Christianity, where it was banned and those who practice it had to live in hiding, explains how a Western folk creature like a vampire can be created on Japanese soil, turning the chaos of those incidents (documented in fictional form in Silence (1971) by Masahiro Shinoda and retold in Silence (2016) by Martin Scorsese) into back story. Ironically, because they are part of European folklore to the point they've been homogenised into popular culture, a lot of British, European and American films never need to explain the folklore of vampirism, not even explain where the vampire comes from even if there's no wish to go into their origins, sometimes to the fault that it can feel like these figures could easily be replaced with another bloodsucking creature and nothing would change, merely figures that are placed into the narrative without a least a paragraph or a sentence in the script to introduce them. In the hands of a country where they are utterly foreign, Evil of Dracula may not do anything traditionally different with them, still the cape wearing dark eyed stranger and the sensual mysterious woman, but is able to flesh them out with having to use cultural background you don't normally get with the Hammer films etc.

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Barring this, in the midst of seventies plaid trousers and floppy hair, the third of the Toho trilogy of vampire films is b-movie chique that even on a dreadful early 2000s DVD has elegance in spite of the story being seen so many times before. A new teacher is brought to an isolated local community and, like the best of most horror stories, cut off by train within a strange new environment where car accidents are abandoned on desolate roads, murky forests exist from dark fantasy, and he's assigned to an all girls school trapped outside of reality. One, as the girls openly flirt with his during one of his psychology lessons with giant Rorschach tests on the projector, that's all gothic shadows and European decor. Were it not for the back-story set in period Japan, this would be set within a mukokuseki environment. At times, with many women surrounding our protagonist and having screen time themselves, it also feels like it's the prologue of Hausu (1977) before everything went insane.

The vampires feel antiquated even next to the period flashbacks, figures out of time and tone from the reality shown. Even if this is a mukokuseki film in most of its presentation, vampires clearly don't gel as well as yakuza in western suits and jazz by themselves. It's the details around them which makes the result work as has been the case with (almost) every Japanese film/anime/series about vampires. A morbid elegance, some of which is openly borrowed from other countries - the negligees of the female students, the Charles Baudelaire quotations from the Renfield stand-in, a French literature teacher with a pale skin, and gothic tropes of coffins and dark cellars. The rest is the tone between the erotic and grotesque that's arguable from Japanese art. Its tame next to other Japanese films that were made in the sixties and at same time as Evil of Dracula, but there's still the brief glimpses of bared breast with blood staining them, of a white rose turning bloody crimson, that has far more perverse sensuality to them than the more brazen and (frankly) embarrassing attempts I've seen from Hammer from the same period. Then there's the suddenness of two scenes which make what's a pretty standard J-horror film stand out in memory. One, a naked female corpse on a table, the face severed off, the body gasping one last time in agony, as a crow is silhouette in shadow nearby and the face becomes a new appearance for another figure. The other the final shot, practical effects both gruesomely oozing and melting but almost beautiful in fast forward decay, capping off Evil of Dracula on a high note. What would be a generic, average film shows moments of real visceral power that help it for the better.

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Microwave Massacre (1983)

From http://vhscollector.com/sites/default/files
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Director: Wayne Berwick

Screenplay: Thomas Singer

Cast: Jackie Vernon (as Donald); Claire Ginsberg (as May); Loren Schein (as Roosevelt); Al Troupe (as Philip); Karen Marshall (as the Neighbour)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #109

Synopsis: After his tolerance for his wife May (Ginsberg) and her failed attempts at elaborate cuisine snaps, Donald (Vernon) in a drunken rage ends up killing her. When he accidentally eats one of her chopped up body parts, he develops a taste for cannibalism which twists into his redeveloping libido when he discovers he can still woo the opposite sex.

Microwave Massacre is not a popular film. When the American exploitation oddity was recently re-released for a modern cult audience, many of the viewers I've read have given it scathing reviews for the most part. Offensive or as funny as a napalm enema, amateurish or just crass, dated junk. Yet it says something peculiar within the film that, even if it's an inexplicable and tiny cult, it still gets a lavish Blu-Ray restoration from Arrow Video and you have former Coil member and film scholar (of American exploitation cinema especially) Stephen Thrower defending it in spite of its immense flaws. Microwave Massacre is a film, as documented, where after living within the culture of cinema for his whole life, director Wayne Berwick finally took the chance to make his own movie, only on the first day of production to realise that the script for their serious horror film was full of awful puns in the dialogue. In a moment where a production has a gun directly pointed to its head, as other independent exploitation films from this era of American cinema have had to face before them, the creators of Microwave Massacre decided to make as intentionally as dumb and ridiculous a film as they could.

The issues with this are with the humour that's of its time, including the terrible puns constantly in the dialogue and puerile jokes about sex or stereotypes. One or two of them are actually offensive for a modern viewer like me, but it feels within context of the film of it being merely dumb as a movie and of its time. I've only been offended by a couple of films morally for their attitudes - The Birth of a Nation (1915) for obvious reasons, and Brother 2 (2000), an already middling sequel to an interesting cult Russian crime film which, after a sincere monologue about African Americans, becomes morally toxic in how offensive the scene with that dialogue is. A film like Microwave Massacre in contrast is a film so desperate to pull laughs that its stuck having to punch low below the belt. Most of the time its instead a weird tone that works in its favour rather than anything truly morally problematic, as most of the jokes are so poor they give the tone of anti-humour by accident.

The result is closer, if it was made in Britain, to a 70s British sex comedy of the era with a little bit more gore, more sleaze, but the same disjointed view on good taste separated from the modern day. It's an apt comparison with comedian Jackie Vernon in the lead. A figure who'll make the film more shocking for American viewers due to having voiced Frosty the Snowman in beloved Christmas animated specials in the US, he's at times almost in slow motion alongside other performances, making it impossible for the jokes to work regardless of the quality of the writing itself. If the original choice for the lead was affordable, Rodney Dangerfield, then even the tired "nagging wife" jokes would've had more spark in them, and even added some credibility to an older, larger man being about attract nubile, younger women due to his natural charisma. Other times however Vernon is perfect as long as a viewer reads the film with Donald not being a sympathetic character. A lot of time he's a bumbling dolt, but the only really likable moment in the whole film is one scene, when he's stuck to eating dog food sandwiches because of his wife's cooking, where he befriends a stray on the construction site he works for. For the rest of the film however he's a useless chauvinist male from an era whose wife, barring the terrible decision to try to cook elaborate food without enough skill and with a stupidly large microwave, is completely innocent and his midlife crisis becomes cannibalism by way of sex ritual.

From http://www.badmovies.org/movies/microwavem/microwavem6.jpg

Technical Detail:

Helping the film is having been made available on Blu-Ray with a pristine image, revealing in the current day that, whilst the director's previous career as a documentary and public information short director has a significant influence on the film, technical competent but not attempting any risks on such a low budget in terms of elaborate camera moments or editing, the production design gives the film a colourful, garish kitsch that adds to the perversity of its tone. Having art and production designer Robert A. Burns, famous for his incredible and terrifying work on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), helps so much in Microwave Massacre's favour. Donald's home feels like it's from a sixties sexploitation movie rather than the late seventies when the film was shot, and the general sense of colour the whole film has gives it a cartoonish tone appropriate for such broad stereotypes and broad, dumb humour, giving the failure of most of humour a more interesting tone of being alien, a suburban environment where everyone acts with a disconnect of sitcom characters in a deeply inappropriate and adult narrative.

Then there's the titular microwave, a comically giant monstrosity where Donald can put multiple fake arms and prosthetics in it at once (courtesy of Burns' effects, some of which he had no shame in recycling from previous gigs). I originally found this, even for a horror comedy, utter absurd until I heard a late seventies radio ad advertising a Sears microwave, suggesting the public could cook a whole lavish dinner (pork chops, mashed potatoes, vegetables) within one to save time for busy families. In the modern day, unless a microwave is all a household can afford or fit in a very small apartment, the notion of a microwave replacing an oven as the main tool of a kitchen is absurd, only seen now to defrost ingredients to cook in an oven late or to heat up microwave food and leftovers, but at one time there was a serious suggestion (at least from companies) suggesting they were important new innovations. (This at least lasted into the late eighties, as my parents still own a second print version a Hitachi Microwave Cookbook from 1988). Even Vernon's own stab at a meaning to the film, documented in retrospective materials, that it's a warning about modern technology corrupting people fits in how, for all Microwave Massacre's failings, it's a gleefully perverse tale of a suburban white slob whose sex cannibalism murders, including giving his co-workers the spare meat to eat, is helped by the ease of using such a stupidly elaborate microwave. Even the subplot of the machine effecting his pacemaker is an exaggeration of an actual fear with the machines even if it seems ridiculous now.

From http://www.thenerdmentality.com/wp-content/uploads/
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Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Psychotronic/Weird

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

Unintentionally Microwave Massacre redeems itself for me. Even with the fact, baring slashers, 'I'm fascinated with this period of independent American horror cinema, Massacre feels like with one nudge, and significantly better jokes, it would've been in a kitsch, perverse view of middle or upper working class life, pissing on suburbia as Donald does into the fireplace at one point out of frustration. While its far from the weirdest films of this era, it's still a peculiar experience where even the absolute pits stand out, stumbling through a deliberate lame world such as Donald picking out a woman with an unknown foreign accent dressed in the worst chicken costume you could ever see just for terrible poultry puns.

And some of the jokes do work. Everything with the bartender at a strip joint, who hates people crying about their terrible existences and talks about his haemorrhoids to get rid of patrons is funny, as is Donald's female neighbour who is sexually liberated and has many sex parties. Some of the later is the writing trying too hard, such as her digging holes into her lawn to plant seeds with a vibrator, but the introductory moment is perfect to try to find a tone to appreciate Microwave Massacre, where a male patron of an orgy at the home, a cameo by one of the film's producers in women's underwear, closes the curtains but still looks through at Donald with a disgusted look as if he's the real deviant, proved by everything he commits no long afterwards.

From http://images4.static-bluray.com/reviews/13908_5.jpg

Personal Opinion:

Microwave Massacre has to be approached with caution. Many have rightly dismissed it as junk for its awful jokes, some that rightly you couldn't get away with today, but like a lot of these films you can still gain a lot from it even if its unintentional. For me, like many American exploitation films, there's entertainment even in their failures and manage to still show a picture of when they were made. It's a film many would understandably feel embarrassed about seeing, but with its combination of "take my wife" era jokes, crass eighties sex comedy (but with a middle aged stand-up in the lead rather than a hunky, brainless male lead), and moments of gore in the Herschel Gordon Lewis mould are already a curious combination alongside strange, unexplained moments such as a nude woman being smeared with mayonnaise than covered with a giant piece of bread. It's a queer taste in terms of a movie, but one that's appealing as much as it is scrapping the barrel for that reason.

Clownhouse (1989)

From https://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpress.com/
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Director: Victor Salva

Screenplay: Victor Salva

Cast: Nathan Forrest Winters ( as Casey); Brian McHugh (as Geoffrey); Sam Rockwell (as Randy); Michael Jerome West (as Lunatic Cheezo); Byron Weible          (as Lunatic Bippo); David C. Reinecker (as Lunatic Dippo)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #108

Trying to separate the creator from their work can become an ethical issue when their reputations are tarnished by the events outside cinema. Political beliefs, problematic behaviour or in the worst cases, actual crimes. As a fan of Roman Polanski's films, I have to constantly ask this question. With Victor Salva and Clownhouse, there's are even severe questions to be asked as the crime he was convicted for was mid-production of the film, sexual molestation of the child star Nathan Forrest Winters, which causes both incredible discomfort in watching the film but a lingering history afterwards, where the film's nigh on impossible to acquire on physical release and Salva under constant scrutiny whenever he makes another film, even re-releases of his older movies from the likes of Scream Factory leading people to boycott anything involving him. Salva's career afterwards is as conflicting morally for me to consider, juggling between complete obscurity but also moments of mainstream attention that led to  more controversy, from helming a Disney produced film (Powder (1995)) to sustaining himself in the popular consciousness with the Jeepers Creepers series.

Clownhouse, even if there wasn't the troubling stigma built within the project, wouldn't be with an worth for me anyway. If the film was the same regardless of Salva's crime, it's still a turgid late eighties shocker, one which emphasises my growing disdain for stalk and scare scenes, those post the slasher boom which presume that a sudden jump scare is enough to sustain a film, not that they're only affective when set up well or that even some fun beyond them is required for a film to actually be entertaining or an actual horror film. A large part of the film is sadly following three unlikable male protagonists (Winters¸ Brian McHugh and Sam Rockwell), three brothers who spend most of the narrative teasing and insulting each other, without any sense of bond between them, as mental asylum patients dressed as clowns occasionally appear in the shadows constantly hinting at suspense that only takes place in the finale.

It's only when this is all set up at the circus that the film seems vaguely interesting. Inherently like Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse (1981), the carnival as a film setting is inherently fascinating as seeing the central character's fear of clowns being visibly tested, showing both how fascinating clowns are as a centuries old concept but also why they would be scary with their grease painted faces, their exaggeration of mannerism and the harlequin like costumes. Three quarters of Clownhouse before and after this however are the three leads arguing whilst various fake scares and near shocks by the killer clowns, all of which become tedious quickly. The trite moral of protagonist Casey having to overcome his fears is made disturbing knowing actor WIlliams was the victim of Salva's off-camera acts, making it an uncomfortable position for him to have to speak dialogue written by Salva about escaping his fears. On the other side of the spectrum, it's amazing that whilst Sam Rockwell is a great actor as an adult, it also amazing how atrocious he is here, so wooden that it's a case that when people started to notice him from Galaxy Quest (1999) onwards he improved in his acting skills immensely over ten years.

The music is dreadful, the worst case of generic synthesizer music you can hear. Also knowing what was taking place mid-production with Salva, the obsession with the three young leads being constantly shirtless, half dressed or nearly naked is a pertinent example of the camera gaze and how it objectifies individuals of any gender in such an extreme and problematic way. My viewing of Clownhouse was a morbid experience, somewhat thankful in knowing there's no reason ever to watch it again. Tragically however it also exists as an actual crime having been committed whilst it was being made, which makes the experience worse to consider. 

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Gozu (2003)

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Director: Takashi Miike

Screenplay: Sakichi Satô

Cast: Yûta Sone (as Minami); Shô Aikawa (as Ozaki); Kimika Yoshino (as Ozaki); Shôhei Hino (as Nose); Keiko Tomita (as the Innkeeper); Harumi Sone (as the Innkeeper's Brother); Renji Ishibashi (as Minami's Boss)

Synopsis: When his mentor and senior yakuza Ozaki (Shô Aikawa) is deemed to have lost his competency and sanity, requiring "disposal", the younger gangster Minami (Yûta Sone) is the one forced to take him away by his seniors only for Ozaki to both die accidentally and for the body to vanish in broad daylight from his car. Stuck in a small town trying to find his mentor, Minami's investigation leads to a mounting series of bizarre people and events, stuck in an inn where the owners are strange and more than happy to provide twice a person's worth of food, stuck in a small town where he's seen as a foreign body and going around in circles in spite of the assistance of the partially white faced Nose (Shôhei Hino) to find Ozaki. Then there's a beautiful woman (Kimika Yoshino) claiming to be Ozaki and can manage to actually prove who she is.

Gozu is an episodic odyssey with a nod to Alice in Wonderland, not in presentation but the idea of a person finding themselves wandering in a strange place with bafflement at everything they witness.  Admittedly the film does start strangely already. Miike's almost interpreting what a David Lynch film is like with Minami watching a television is a cafe with his gang which is entirely distorted and about someone wanting to lactate but isn't being allowed to, a stiltedness to the initial performances and scored, as throughout the film when it isn't completely silent, but ominous strings by perfectly implemented by Kôji Endô. Ozaki, played by Shô Aikawa, immediately sets the bar by randomly killing a small dog outside in front of two terrified women, having claimed its a yakuza attack animal and proving he's lost his marbles, setting up the black humour immediately off the bat. However this is sane for Miike, his usual balance between seriousness, that has a surprising amount of cinema verité in the grungy environments and minimal use of music, and bizarre punctures into transgression and slapstick. Gozu actually has a visible shift for protagonist Minami where he'll enter his Wonderland, reaching a road in his car that's completely swallowed up ahead by a river, a sudden glitch in the image and distortion in the soundtrack, his mentor inadvertedly dead before Minami finally developed the courage to kill someone he had platonic and friendly love for. Than Ozaki's body vanishes when trying to phone his seniors in a cafe and has to puke up an egg custard he's didn't order in the bathroom.

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Technical Detail:

Yet Gozu, from this initial premise, emphasises one of Miike's best virtues especially from all the films up to this one of the slow, deliberate tone. Miike even in some of his most notorious films usually paces his work with a greatly leisured tone; ironically its now as a much older veteran, making more mainstream films and adapting manga more so than before in his early career, that he's making faster pace films rather than the presumption older directors become more sedate. This slower pace helped him in even the stranger genre works of his to always emphasis characterisation, here of immense importance as its entirely down to the fresh faced Yûta Sone to anchor the film, playing a virginal adult yakuza lost in a realm of sexual obsessions and various distractions he's forced to go through which exasperation like a labyrinth of nonsense. The cast helps greatly, full of regulars from Miike's career in large and minor roles who, throughout all the films Miike made, are all talented actors able to bring an air of seriousness even to the most ridiculous material. For example Renji Ishibashi, as the yakuza boss who can only get an erection from an intricately inserted ladle, manages to give this absurd character some gravitas so the character can be taken serious but, helping this black comedy to succeed, is visibly having fun with the material, as with everyone else in the cast recognisable or new to Miike's world here.

The slower, deliberate tone is needed as its one of Miike's films which is not inherently propelled by plot but a lot of character building, Minami's search through the small town making up most of the film's length and deliberately filled with pointless tangents, searching for clues which go in circles and arbitrary goals to complete, even having to complete a riddle to get help from Nose (Shôhei Hino) in the first place, the assistant of a local yakuza who's ability to be stroppy if angered is tantamount and just as liable to delay Minami's quest. The lengthy running time in hindsight of this isn't indulgent but a necessary, Gozu very much in the area of cinema and storytelling I love the most of either dream logic or a journey which is not based on a quest, but a small goal where like a sightseer the viewer and the protagonist(s) witness things entirely new to them and have to respond to them. That this journey becomes increasingly weird for Minami, who reacts with more and more shock and alarm at everything he see, adds to the film and the slow burn pace allows for each scene to be even more shocking for the viewer and hilarious. It helps in being in Minami's place trying to rationalise the events around him, not only the transgressive aspects like excessive lactation or a cow headed man in only underpants appearing in his dreams, but the unexpected egg custard forced onto him when he only orders coffee or how his outsider position to even his own yakuza group makes him useless in convincing many he encounters into talking to his straight about what he needs.

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-em2Rm07_mqc/U00n7ac0DeI/
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Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Surreal/Weird

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

Undeniably, this is one of Miike's strangest films, a film where character moments take up most of the time rather than a plot until the third act where Kimika Yoshino comes in, rejecting a rational beginning, middle and end for bookmarks side-by-side of increasingly oddball events. It's known for its notorious sequences which stand out in the director's career (the full adult birthing, Renji Ishibashi's collection of ladles, the skin suits of yakuza tattoos preserved in a freezer from all the disposed of yakuza) but the weirdness is more palpable for how the film is grounded in tone in spite of its odd moments.

One of the biggest aspects to this strangeness, in a career that's full of sexual issues and kink, is the subplot of Minami's sexual yearnings, visibly in the plot to have feelings for his mentor Ozaki. This is not the first relationship between gangsters that's either yearning or explicit homosexuality shown in Miike's cinema, neither is it the first time this narrative plot has taken place in a Miike film, Full Metal Yakuza (1997) leading to the gangster who looks up to his stronger, wiser senior becoming stronger himself from having his senior's body parts (including genitals) attached to his rebuilt body. Here, it's a visible confusion in Minami's relationship with Ozaki, and it's not through literal envelopment that this relationship is consecrated but with a desire that's built up through flashbacks that suggest more is going on for Minami, literalised when a beautiful woman appears who knows intimate secrets about Minami that only his senior knew, claiming to be Ozaki herself and breaking the wall Minami has had for his mentor. That this film is rife with various forms of sexual kink brings to mind Gozu being entirely from the perspective of Minami's confused sexuality manifesting itself in various forms.

But Gozu's success is truly found in how the normalcy is as much strange as the more extreme content, maybe even stranger on subsequent viewings when the initial shock of the more infamous scenes had faden. You're initially struck by the odd sight of an older man in a gold tracksuit talking to a similar one in a silver jumpsuit, only to find that their conversation about the weather is one you'd hear in real life in an actual cafe and actually strange in itself to realise. Sakichi Sato, the screenwriter, also adapted Miike's notorious Ichi the Killer (2001), and alongside that film's deliberate complexity in its various transgressive sexualities, it also had a huge emphasis even against other Miike films on puncturing the extremity with bafflingly normal scenes and quiet gestures, normal behaviour that feel alien in context of what happens around them even in the same scenes. How the characters act or even one-off figures who don't necessarily come off as wacky figures but people you might actually bump into in a small Japanese town, like the American wife of a store owner who needs detailed placards on the walls of their shop to help her speak fluent Japanese or the yakuza disposal site employees who are completely casual about their career in crushing human bodies into pulp and retaining their skins.

What helped me to fall in love with Gozu is that it's a film where an everyman is placed within a world that's both very mundane and utterly bizarre, and both sides are as strange as each other, where even the doubling size of his meals at a hotel gains a reaction from him and us as a viewer of surprise. Little details pull as much humour as the more twisted moments, giving Gozu a greater effect.

Personal Opinion:

Gozu is one of Takashi Miike's underrated and best films. Not because it's weird for the sake of weird, but because it makes both normalcy as weird as the bizarre, transgressive material and the sides meet together to create something as perplexing to follow as its ghoulishly funny, ending on a happy ending that's surprisingly sweet despite the yucks that taken place beforehand.

From http://sqd.ru/files/g/ozu6.jpg

Tokyo Psycho (2004)

From https://cdn-2.cinemaparadiso.co.uk/
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Director: Ataru Oikawa

Screenplay: Ataru Oikawa and Noriko Tanimura

Cast: Sachiko Kokubu (as Yumiko Oosawa); Seiji Chihara (as Keisuke Kataoka); Yuka Hayashi (as Mika Nakahara); Mizuho Nakamura (as Moe Masumoto); Masashi Taniguchi (as Osamu Komiya)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #107

If it comes off as an inherent bias, I apologise, but I find the modern extremely low budget films from Japan to be more interesting than a lot of the ones from English speaking countries. I'm concentrating specifically, to borrow the name of a great podcast I listen to, on "no budget nightmares" from after the year 2000 which are shot on digital cameras and are genre films with whatever resources the filmmakers could get hold of. That's not to say as well there's no god-awful garbage coming from Japan either - hello Zombie Self-Defense Force (2006). It very much strays into how genre filmmaking in Japan always has an invention to it for me barring the worst cases and that, no matter how strange and pedantic it might sound on page, this virtue even goes to how distinct the films look in terms of what cameras were even used to film them in appearance.

A large part of its the tone. Sadly irony started to infect the Japanese genre films after the Millennium, bad style for the sake of a deliberate joke, tainting the sincerity of a lot of modern entries in contrast to the older ones (from Sushi Typhoon productions to the likes of Big Tits Zombie (2010)). Thankfully in most cases there's sincerity in most Japanese films still, a pervading sense even when there's material so bizarre it would be impossible to take seriously, or the films have broad slapstick and deliberately weird jokes in them, that its almost cultural custom to always take the material seriously and accept whatever happens on screen nonchalantly with a shrug of the shoulders. This inate quirk even manages to negate traits that could undermine extremely low budget productions from the US like bad CGI or wooden acting, even able to make these virtues or artistic flourishes on the most impoverished of budgets. Tokyo Psycho is far from one of the better examples of this, but expecting my revisit of this film to be a complete demolishing of my like of it on the first viewing, it's more meaning to enjoy it on its own wavelength than worry about its obvious shortcomings.

Effectively it's a lurid pot-boiler as made in pure minimalism due to its low budget quality. A young woman Yumiko Oosawa (Sachiko Kokubu) is receiving sinister letters and packages from a stalker, likely a student from her high school years she rejected, managing with small means to have charm, a word that's weird to say considering how nasty the plot gets, even as far as the aforementioned letters being woven with metal wire and blood like stains, but fitting for a film with its pluck that could've gone horribly wrong in production. It's only when its deliberately playing itself up as a lurid low budget nightmare - a body lunges forward to stare at the audience, a bad CGI switching of a character's face - where the worst associations I'd presume this sort of film would have are shown, something which doesn't try to be inventive regardless of its low budget and coming of as low rent and not taking itself seriously. Thankfully it's in a different place of a low budget film that isn't perfect but at least gets a lot more right than films three times its budget with well worn material.

From http://film.thedigitalfix.com/protectedimage.php
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Because of its minimalism it actually has a perversely distinct style to it. Where the characters are vaguely interesting even if some, like the single mother who lives next to the protagonist who may be abusing her young daughter, aren't fully delved into. A language barrier does admittedly exist in terms of whether any of these particularly performances are any good, but you do get a creepy psychodrama nonetheless that's got some grit to it. This is also as much to do with how the film looks and where it was shot. There's also an appeal in these films in terms of where they're actually located, the extremely low budget Japanese films I've see, even those shot almost entirely in someone's living room, utter fascinating for me and not just out of a curiosity of a country whose culture I absorb a great deal of.

There's inherently something that stands out in the type of environments in these Japanese films, even the back lots with more weeds than grass, and a large part of it isn't just the aesthetic for Japanese public environments, the signs to the placement of exteriors and interiors, but even in how they're shot, more colourful and brighter to an advantage even in the dullest of industrial environments. It might seem trite or borderline on the obsessively weird to denote a paragraph to this, but one of the biggest hindrances for a low budget genre film I've countered is that there's really a sense of immersion into these movies by where they're set, something any film can achieve on any budget if there's an thought put into it. With a long history of very lo-fi productions, especially in the pinku softcore industry, which took advantage of its disadvantages and minimal locations, it's not surprising even the non-erotic films like Tokyo Psycho are just as entertaining for this too.

Particularly with lower expectations revisiting this film, there's a sense of greater respect when Tokyo Psycho manages to accomplish skills films with significantly longer budgets fail with. There's an actual sense of grossness that tactile, and actually helped by being shot on digital on a low budget, letters and tokens sent to the protagonist with metal wire sewn through them or actual worms being found within them, the most distinct of these a shrine for a corpse which uses Christmas lights and a sinister music box chime. The side characters, even if their appearances on screen are slight, don't feel like ciphers with little of interest between them and are at least memorable for their tiny parts, from her likable boss who's between playfully mocking her and a possible flirtation, to a female detective whose more likely to be scared of an ominous isolated corridor than the heroine is. It gets together a group of actors just for one segment, set at a school reunion in the early part of the narrative, which looks like it would've been a challenge to organise even if the cast's within what looks like a darkened warehouse with an almost art installation minimalism in the decor and lighting.  At least the cast is willing to participate fully - the killer when revealed is played by an actor who decided to chew the scenery and stands out as the best part of the film because of it, whilst Sachiko Kokubu has to endure actual worms being inserted into her mouth and submerging herself fully, head under the water, in the sea at the beach regardless of how cold the location looks onscreen. At least the film is less than eighty minutes, avoiding a pitfall in many of these low budget films in being far too long. And at least the film is entertaining. 

From http://www.asianfeast.org/wp-content/gallery/
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Illusion of Blood (1965)

From http://image14.m1905.cn/uploadfile
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Director: Shirô Toyoda

Screenplay: Toshio Yasumi

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai (as Iyemon Tamiya); Mariko Okada (as Oiwa); Junko Ikeuchi (as Osode); Mayumi Ohzora (as Oume); Keiko Awaji (as Omaki); Eitarô Ozawa (as Oume's Father)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #106

One of the best things about Japanese genre cinema is that no matter how excessive and even sleazy they can be, many explicitly deal with social issues like class and politics as much as such subjects would be in films by the likes of Kenji Mizoguchi. Inherently with the period films set in Japan's past, the films end up even tripping over themes such as these, the historical periods and social mores especially of the Edo period of Japan giving enough material still for ripe storylines. Illusion of Blood is no exception to this - where samurai are masterless and destitute, even considering trading in their swords for money, one such figure Iyemon Tamiya (Tatsuya Nakadai) is willing to remarry into a rich family with prospects of a new master even if it means publically disgracing his wife Oiwa (Mariko Okada) by either a fake adultery accusation or even disfigurement, maybe even worse to get his way. Like Les Diaboliques (1955), it's a drama of backstabbing and betrayal, its worldview awash with as much a cynical tone as the more famous film. Like that film, the perpetrators of certain crimes may even be haunted by the dead.

It's very much a bleak worldview on display, samurai without honour, a friend of Iyemon's in his own scheme to claim Oiwa's sister for himself even if it means bloodshed and lying. There are a lot of Japanese films about the dead coming back to haunt the living transgressors especially in period settings - even in films not necessarily horror themed like The Sword of Doom (1966) - and it's understandable why, especially in a country still with deeply held spiritual beliefs, as it can reflect both a literal supernatural tale and a metaphorical moral drama at the same time. There's never a need to try to downplay the supernatural content in these films or even try to rationalise them as a lot of modern Western films do, and it's a breath of fresh air as a result to view this film where it's part of a brazenly bleak narrative with a deeply detestable main protagonist to follow. Stories themes which would still be pertinent to the modern day but without the context of a time period that is entirely different from the modern day and allows for different perspectives. An emphasis more on deliberate drama is helped when the acting is top notch. In this case you have Tatsuya Nakadai as the lead of Illusion of Blood, an actor who carried Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition trilogy (1959-1961) on his shoulders, alongside roles in the likes of Akira Kurosawa films, and is just as good here, as an utterly loathful figure here who is yet compelling here due to Nakadai's performance¹.

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Even when these films are conventional ghost stories as this one becomes, Japanese tales like Illusion of Blood are significantly more interesting than from other countries due to how seriously the tropes are depicted and played with. At nearly two hours long, it doesn't feel like its dragging its feet but building up a period drama which ebbs and flows with interest side characters, moments of broad humour that work and a slow burn intensity. The quality of the set design for many of these films, even when one if forced to watch an old grotty DVD copy like I had to, also shows an era of Japan so drastically different, aesthetically and literally, to Western medievalism. While there's themes that are universal here to other countries across any time period, I openly admit a lot of my love of Japanese cinema's period stories is that it's also a depiction of an entirely alien world to mine of hierarchies and behaviour that's different, even the dress of characters drastically separate from many modern Japanese genre films. That even the genre films from Japan could have the best technical crews and production designers on them, rather than a couple of coins to rub together only, really makes these obscurer horror films shine even more.

The horror itself is lingering. Even for the one or two fake rats that appear, they come off as amusing and not detract from the ghoulish macabre tone. This does show, even if more sedate than films like Jigoku (1960) that went even further, the more morbid side of Japanese horror that yet depicts the gruesome - a couple of corpses pinned on opposite sides of a door - with an air of sinister beauty that's rarely found in Western cinema barring the European output. When it's also willing to be openly lurid - from the facial disfigurement subplot to a corpse's face melting off with effects still surprisingly efficient - it doesn't detract from the Japanese Gothic tone that won me over on this viewing. It even has an air of melancholy, the ending of Illusion of Blood with Iyemon being plagued by ghosts that may or not be real in a white snowbound landscape, a type of poetic and lyrical moment you don't normally picture with horror films nowadays but capped the end of this hidden gem off perfectly.

From http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j153/
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¹ In fact, looking into the films Tatsuya Nakadai has starred in for this review, he's now become one of my favourite actors now upon reflection of all the incredible films he's been in I've seen. Ran (1985) and countless Kurosawa films he's appeared in, Kwaidan (1964), The Human Condition trilogy, Belladonna of Sadness (1973) (voicing the Devil), The Sword of Doom (1966), When a Woman Ascends the Strairs (1960), enough films there to make him stand out both for the quality of his career path but that he's always incredible in all of them regardless of language barriers. And the best thing is he is so prolific, still alive as of 2017 and working, there's major films in Japanese cinema he's starred in I've still to see.