Makaryûdo Demon-Hunter (1989)

... aka: 魔狩人

... aka: Demon Hunter

... aka: Demon Hunter Makaryûdo

... aka: Demon Hunter Makaryuudo

... aka: Makaryûdo

Directed by:

Yukio Okamoto

350 years ago, Yama Rikudo was banished to some kind of underworld limbo for all eternity by a master demon for using a "mirror of the past" to look into the past lives of others. Now boss demon is ready to forgive and forget, granted Yama goes along with his master plan to restore some sense of balance to the failing human world. On Earth, excess, a power imbalance, war, pollution and an overall "foulness of the spirit" has increased the amount of negative energy and thus opened the doors for all kinds of creatures to run amok. The demon wants Yama to return to Earth and gives her the sole task hunting down and killing these creatures and thus restoring some much-needed harmony to the universe. Seeing how the reincarnated form of her former lover - a student named Sho Kurogane - is around, she agrees. To help her in her quest, she's given a nifty red scythe weapon and a familiar that rests on her shoulder and can sometimes transform into a giant dragon.

With her unruly hair amusingly styled into devil horns, Yama poses as a teenage student and starts attending a school plagued with strange disappearances. The principal is away for an extended period and his beautiful (supposed) granddaughter is filling in for him. The granddaughter is actually a monster in disguise who's been regularly luring (namely male and horny) students to their doom. At her bidding are an army of winged female monsters (human heads and nude torsos on bird bodies with fangs and talons) as well as some weird creature that's some kind of tentacled snail with a snake-like neck, human head and eyes for ears. The victims are lured into a building with a trap door on the floor that leads to some underground catacombs where some of these monsters lurk.

While a lot of potentially enjoyable horror anime elements are present and accounted for, this is horribly written and paced, very confusing and so severely underdeveloped in so many different ways that it's difficult to really enjoy. Everything feels rushed and half-baked, starting with the fact that I could never figure out why the underworld demons were even bothering sending Yama to kill demons in the first place when later in the very same conversation they're talking about needing to destroy humanity (?) Maybe this is similar to the Christian belief that Israel needs to be protected so that it can then be destroyed per Revelation so they get their "Second Coming," but I couldn't really tell where this was going.

A lot of side characters are introduced, including Sho's innocent, wide-eyed kid sister and his spastic comic relief best friend, a bratty, hair-pulling little boy, a couple of diner waitresses and others, and none of them really have any relevance to the plot nor anything of interest to do and just eat up what little time there is. I'm sure there were plans to stretch this into some kind of series and elaborate on the characters and plot points later on, but since that never happened and we have nothing around to retroactively remedy the myriad problems seen here, this doesn't work at all as a standalone.

Amplifying the confusion in this structural and narrative mess are weird time leaps, flashbacks, narration from multiple characters, ast life stuff, prophesying, exposition, glimpses at an apocalyptic future Earth, weird symbols occasionally being flashed on the screen and plot elements involving hypnosis, possession, mind control via some shells filled with green goo, restored youth and a giant skeleton demon with multiple heads. Seeing how I'm all about the girls-kick-ass subgenre and usually even enjoy the really cheap and terrible ones on some level, for a film like this to make me zone out, and do so in just 30 minutes' time, takes some real fuckery.

Completely forgotten these days, and understandably so, this one-and-done OVA from Bandai didn't lead to much else. It appears to have been based on a comic of the same name released by Kasakura Publishing in 1987 (which appears to itself had a sequel) and was given a Japanese VHS release from C. Moon Video in 1989 as well as a laserdisc release from Bandai / Emotion the same year, though I could find no other releases for this title elsewhere.

★1/2

Ye zhi ji (1980)

... aka: 鬼圖

... aka: 夜之祭

... aka: Devil Design

... aka: Ghost Map

... aka: Gui tu

... aka: Ritual of the Night

Directed by:

Pan Yung Min

1276 China in the setting for the lengthy (nearly 40 minutes long!) prologue. Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, is in the middle of expanding his Yuan dynasty deep into China and ruthlessly massacring any detractor along the way. Though the Mongols have been generally successful, pockets of resisters from the Sung dynasty have sprung up all over. General Ku-Shah (Ying Bai) is tasked with finding these people and killing them before they can pose a threat to Yuan. Upon completion, he's been promised a special reward: Royal marriage to a princess. A battle between Mongol and Chinese armies finds the former easily winning after slaughtering the Chinese troops and decapitating their leader (Chun Ku). The Mongol forces then ride on until they locate an abandoned village and settle there for the night.

There, Ku-Shah and his deputy, Ha-Tou (Han Hsieh), have an interesting conversation about how their spiritual beliefs seem at odds with their constant killing. To Ku-Shah, war is an "inevitable necessity to achieve one's ends" and the creator has made all men to fill predestined roles. God's chess game has but one king and his loyal men. Everyone else is meant to be "dispensable" and thus were created solely to die, which makes it perfectly fine to go around slaughtering them. They're not dead people. They're "destroyed objects."

The arrogant warriors in the midst of celebrating their victory are about to face their comeuppance as the destroyed village they end up in happens to be haunted by the evil spirits of those they'd previously slain. A lumpy-faced, cackling female ghost shows up and men are slashed, impaled with bamboo poles and forced to commit harakiri. Another has his own hand possessed a la Evil Dead 2 (only seven years earlier), which then attacks him and forces him to sever it, yet continues to live on. The Mongol warriors killed return as clawed, hopping vampires in wonderfully atmospheric scenes filled with lots of wind, backlighting and fog. Eventually, all of the Mongolian troopers are either killed or flee, but the narrator informs us that some of them will live on as evil spirits themselves.

We jump ahead 300 years to the Ming dynasty. The country has been led into turmoil due to a corrupt king, a drifting away from Buddhism toward amorality and the rampant use of black magic. The site of the Mongol warrior murders is now the village of Yen-Poi-Yi, which has been haunted by the ghost of Mongol warrior Ku-Shah for the past three centuries. As a result, the village has dwindled down in population considerably and there are only a handful of people still living there. With the arrival of an exorcist comes renewed hope and people start moving back there by the droves. Elder Uncle Lee (Hsiang-Ting Ko) suspects these new arrivals are phonies, especially after they ban mute orphan Lien-Hua (Doris Lung Chun-Erh), whose parents have been killed by the demon, from their festivities due to her presumably being bad luck. Uncle Lee is correct.

While the white-haired exorcist puts on quite a show for the villagers with a lavish parade, chicken blood, fire, smoke, acrobatics and giant spell papers, he's easily blown up / killed by the ghost of Ku-Shah. Everyone flees the village once again, leaving even fewer people than before. Just when things don't seem like they could get any worse, Yen-Poi-Yi is stricken with the plague, killing many of the stragglers. However, traveling monk Ou Ming (Chun Shih) arrives just in time to help. Ou Ming has made it his life's mission to re-introduce Buddhism to the people of China and thus save their souls. He orders all corpses and contaminated materials burned, even if that does upset some of the locals, then concocts an effective vaccine that saves everyone else. After he helps them repair their damaged homes. the sound of playing children laughing is heard around the village; a sign of hope that a new era is about to begin.

Ou Ming has decided that his direct path to Buddha and his final task will be to take on the Ku-Shah demon, thus freeing the tortured, murderous spirit from limbo and setting Yen-Poi-Yi on a path to recovery. In preparation, he shaves his head and then meditates while Lien-Hua gives him a full body tattoo, which will act like a suit of armor during battle. However, he's fully aware going in that this battle is most likely to cost him his life regardless. Sigh. The things we must do for Buddha.

Imperfect, poorly paced and heavy-handed at times, this is still a pretty neat little film which fuses history, religion, war, horror and drama. One thing it is decidedly not is a martial arts or action film as it's categorized on many websites, so don't go in expecting such. Despite the low budget, it's fairly well-made, has its heart in the right place, is often extremely atmospheric (particularly the first half hour) and also boasts some surprisingly creepy distorted sound design and synth music, which may have been stolen from other sources. There are issues with the editing throughout. Some scenes appear to have been clipped short, which may be due to only a heavily-damaged print being available to view. We'll perhaps never know for sure. The chances a 40+ year old Taiwanese genre movie is going to be fully restored at this stage of the game is slim.

Long-forgotten and seldom viewed these days (as of this writing, it doesn't even have the 5 votes necessary to clock a score on IMDb and has just two ratings [including the one I just sent in] on Letterboxd), this was released theatrically in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand and distributed on VHS in a number of countries. There was a U.S. mail order release from World Video & Supply Inc. in 1990, but it didn't come with English subtitles and was falsely promoted as Hong Kong action when it's Taiwanese horror-drama. I also found a Korean video and this was probably also released on VHS in Hong Kong and / or Taiwan. I'm not exactly sure where the English subtitled print came from.

★★1/2