Onna kyûketsuki (1959)

... aka: Lady Vampire, The
... aka: Vampire Man
... aka: Woman Vampire, The

Directed by:
Nobuo Nakagawa

Late for his girlfriend's birthday party, Tokyo Times reporter Tamio Oki (Keinosuke Wada) and his taxi driver are speeding through the streets when a woman walks out in front of their car. Thinking they've hit her, the two get out only to discover that there's no body. Once they arrive at their destination, Tamio gets another glimpse of the same woman hanging out in the garden, but she disappears again. He goes in, finds his girlfriend Itsuko (Junko Ikeuchi) a little upset at him (well, until he hands over a present) and everyone gets started dancing, singing and eating cake. That is, until a surprise visitor stops in unexpectedly. That visitor is Miwako (Yôko Mihara), who disappeared twenty years ago when Itsuko was just a baby. Needless to say, Itsuko's father / Miwako's husband, Shigekatso (Torahiko Nakamura) is shocked to see her again, and even more shocked that she looks identical to the young bride he'd married over two decades earlier. Seeing as how she hasn't aged a day, Shigekatso calls in a doctor friend to look her over. He's unable to come up with any explanation for it, but Miwako is weak, confused and suffers from partial amnesia. She needs her sleep.

While mum's resting, Tamio takes Itsuko to an art gallery and, low and behold, the two find that the award-winning painting is a nude portrait of Miwako. No one knows the first thing about the artist who painted it, but he goes by the name Shiro Sofue (Shigeru Amachi), and he's the dude always wearing shades in the daytime and accompanied by a dwarf sidekick he calls "Tiny." Shiro's real name is Nobutaka Takenaka and he's not quite human. OK, he's a centuries old vampire somehow connected to Miwako's bloodline, which is explained in a lengthy and confusing flashback. In a bizarre touch which injects werewolf mythos into the proceedings, the vampire is set off by the glow of the moon, which makes him uglier, fanged and clawed, and drives him into a murderous rampage. He kills a hotel maid and, when exposed in a nightclub, kills six different women. And you know how in most vampire movies the vampire casts no reflection? This film has scenes where the vampire is invisible and can ONLY be seen as a reflection in mirrors.

Naturally, Nobutaka / Shiro was the one to kidnap and entrance Miwako years earlier and now he wants his runaway bride back, even though she doesn't love him. After getting a slew of reporters and police officers on his tail for the murders, he finally manages to capture Miwako and retreats to his castle home. His castle is in the mountains hidden underground through a cave system and he shares company there with not only the dwarf but other ill-defined "monsters" such as a white-haired old witch and a bald strongman. The ladies in Nobutaka's life who've betrayed him over the years have been turned into statues that decorate the place.

Aside from its historical importance as one of the first Japanese vampire films and one of the earliest vampire films set in contemporary times, this boasts a very charismatic performance from Amachi. The film also has numerous impressive shots (with especially excellent use made of mirrors throughout the film), nice use of widescreen photography (with some breathtaking outdoor shots), very moody lighting and some striking minimalist set designs. Unfortunately, these pluses are all but thrown out the window by an awful final 20 minutes. Once Tamio, Itsuko and a slew of police invade the underground castle, the movie pretty much becomes an unintentionally hilarious disaster. For starters, the sets look incredibly cheap, with floors and walls wobbling throughout the action. Secondly, the fight choreography is terrible, with the vampire suddenly going all Errol Flynn with a fencing sword. The strongman's descent into a pool of bubbling water is done with all the finesse of Tor Johnson and watching the dwarf chase the screaming leading lady around all over the place is just plain comical.

Confused mythology doesn't help matters. I could care less about the fusion of vampire and werewolf tendencies for the villain, but little is explained. The link between his bloodline and the heroine's isn't adequately explained either (he does mention he likes the taste of their blood, but that doesn't count). Neither is how he became a vampire in the first place or who / what the dwarf, old woman and strongman are. Why does the moon turn him into a murderous beast throughout the film, but at the very end turn him into a white-haired corpse? There are lots of frustrating inconsistencies here. Too bad.

Nakagawa also made the impressive THE GHOST OF KASANE SWAMP (1957) and THE GHOST OF YOTSUYA (1959), as well as JIGOKU (1960), which many claim is the first gore film. Watch any of those and skip this one.

★★

Borei kaibyo yashiki (1958)

aka:
Black Cat Mansion

aka:
Mansion of the Ghost Cat, The

Directed by:
Nobuo Nakagawa

Tokyo-based doctor Tetsuichiro Kuzumi (Toshio Kuzumi) decides to move to a small town with his ailing wife Yoriko (Yuriko Ejima), who's suffering from tuberculosis. Eager to get away from the hustle and bustle of city life, and thinking the fresh air and solitude will do his wife some good, Tetsuichiro decides to move into a large mansion owned by Yoriko's family, which has been uninhabited for years and is rumored to be haunted. He opens up his clinic there and begins seeing local patients, but his wife keeps seeing visions of a black cat and an old, white-haired woman lurking around. Their dog is killed and the old woman attempts to strangle Yoriko several times. The doctor and his brother-in-law Kenichi (Hiroaki Kurahashi) go to a priest for help and learn that the home is cursed. The priest then relates a story going back many years to the former occupants of the home.

The period scenes involve samurai Lord Shogen (Keinosuke Wada), who's basically a prick who abuses his power and tries to kill anyone who angers him. A young man named Kokingo (Ryûzaburô Nakamura) is hired to teach the Lord a game called Go but is killed after calling out Shogen for cheating. The Lord later rapes Kokingo's blind mother, Lady Miyagi (Fumiko Miyata), who returns home, curses the entire family and then kills herself. Using the guise of Shogen's elderly mother (Fuji Satsuke), the spirits of those wrongfully killed enact their revenge against the Lord, his son (Arata Shibata) and servent girl Yae (Noriko Kitazawa). The only one spared the wrath is faithful servant Saheji (Rei Ishikawa), who apparently moved on to start his own family. Guess who Yoriko and her brother are descendants of?

Though not nearly as dramatically strong as the director's other supernatural tales, this manages to seperate itself by sandwiching the period-set revenge story in between one set in contemporary Japan. One thing that's not the least bit diminished is Nakagawa's visual eye. There is a lot of great, innovative camerawork on display here, which is very sophisticated for the time. The film opens with one continuous unbroken POV shot of someone with a flashlight walking through dark hospital corridors, finding a corpse on a stretcher, going up some stairs and then closing in our protagonist. There's also an amazing shot that follows a stream of tricking water to darkness, rises up through some brush to show a crow on a tree branch and then dips back down to slowly follow characters through a gate, pushing branches out of the way as it goes. Another visually striking scene involves a montage illustrating Shogen's descent into madness as he's seen furiously swinging his sword around while bold colors flash behind him. Strangely, the contemporary scenes are all shot in black-and-white with a slight blue tint, while the period scenes are done in a muted Eastmancolor.

The presentation of the possessed grandmother is pretty memorable, too. She takes on a cat like appearance (with fangs and pointy ears that spring up from beneath her crazy white hair) and cat like behavior (clawing people, lapping up blood and eating raw fish). How she's able to reel her victims in, so the speak, is exaggerated mimicry influenced by kabuki theater choreography.

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It was adapted from a Sotoo Tachibana novel by Jiro Fujishima and Yoshihiro Ishikawa, who'd later go to write GHOST CAT OF OTAMA POND (which Ishikawa also directed).

★★★

Kaidan Kasane-ga-fuchi (1957)

...aka: Depths, The

...aka: Ghost of Kasane, The

...aka: Ghost of Kasane Swamp, The

...aka: Ghosts of Kasane Swamp

Directed by:

Nobuo Nakagawa

In the snowy village of Hanya, Shimosa in 1773, blind masseur Soetsu Minagawa, raising his young daughter Rui with help from female servant Tetsu (Kikuko Hanaoka), goes to collect a debt and ends up getting slashed to death by irate, prideful samurai Fukami, who owes him money. The body is put in a chest and sunk in the waters of Kasane Swamp, but Soetsu's ghost soon returns to destroy the entire family, tricking the samurai into killing his own wife before leading him into the swamp where he drowns. The samurai's servant takes the surviving baby boy Shinkichi and leaves him at the doorstep of a wealthy food goods store owner at a neighboring village. Twenty years later, a now grown Shinkichi (Takashi Wada) is a kind, good natured and hard-working young man who is adored by all the town's ladies and has become the servant to those who ended up adopting him. His adoptive "mother" treats him little better than a slave, but her daughter Hisa (Noriko Kitazawa) has fallen in love with him. Unfortunately, Hisa is set to marry a wealthy young man from a well-to-do family and her mother is getting fed up with her daughter's obvious interest in Shinkichi and opposition to the arranged marriage.

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Meanwhile Rui (Kazuko Wakasugi), who was raised into adulthood by Tetsu after her father's murder, is a popular music teacher living in the same village. One evening after a little too much sake, Rui is almost raped by a samurai named Omura (Tetsuro Tamba), but ends up being saved when Shinkichi stops by. Rui and Shinkichi end up spending the night together and when Shinkichi's boss/adoptive mother finds out, she kicks him out of the house. Rui and Shinkichi move into together and start living as husband and wife, but possibly supernatural forces seem intent on destroying the union, starting with a freak accident involving an axe blade that disfigures half of Rui's face. Tetsu puts two-and-two together and informs Rui that she's fallen in love with the son of the man who murdered her father and insist she breaks things off. But by that point, Rui is starting to lose her mind; partially because of her monstrous appearance and partially because the discovers Shinkichi has been sneaking off to visit with Hisa behind her back. Fate in this case takes shape as Omura - the man who almost raped her - who has been leaving behind incriminating notes and belittles her appearance. All principal characters end up meeting their grim fates in the swamp where a generation earlier both families were destroyed. Looks like history's about to repeat itself.

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Clocking in at just 66-minutes, this eerie black-and-white film has elements of melodrama, social commentary and horror and deserves a wider audience and a reevaluation from critics and audiences. This film is solid in just about every single technical area; the performances and characterizations are uniformly excellent, the period detail is convincing and many of the scenes (especially those in the swamp) are highly atmospheric. The camera-work and score are both very good, and there are some very clever and arresting directorial touches, such as when Rui's new face (the makeup design is excellent and surprisingly grotesque) is slowly revealed in a bucket of rippling water. But this film is more than just a visual piece; it's also very smart.

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Best of all - and this is where many horror films past and present have failed - is the well-written script; full of irony and insight on the casual cruelties of a judgmental and intolerant society. This movie obviously looks at local gossip and class hierarchy with disdain. Rui's career is destroyed when the villagers find out about her affair with Shinkichi and they no longer let their children come to her for music lessons. And if not for the interference from her mother, who's more interested in her social standing then her daughter's happiness, Hisa and Shinkichi could have been very happy together. In fact, if not for others, Rui and Shinkichi wouldn't have been romantically mismatched in the first place.

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How the two samurai characters are portrayed is also a very interesting aspect. During this same period here in America, there were many films that romanticized the gung-ho wartime hero types while glossing over the actual horrors of war, just as there were many westerns that wanted us to be in the corner of the good, God-fearing white man as they were shown being randomly attacked by unreasonable Indian savages. Likewise in Japan, there were many films that seemed to romanticize the samurai. This film almost seems like an antithesis to that kind of thinking. Of course, there's Shinkichi's father, who reacts to a debt by slaying his debtor. Twenty years later, there's Omura, his hand rested on his sword throughout as if he's about to resort to violence any time something doesn't go his way. If not for Omura's deceit and greed, things also would have turned out differently for all the main characters.

★★★1/2

Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan (1959)

...aka: Ghost of Yotsuya, The
...aka: Ghost Story of Yotsuya
...aka: Yotsuya Ghost Story in Tokaido

Directed by:
Nobuo Nakagawa

Review coming soon.

★★★1/2