Medium (1985)

... aka: Ling yu an jian (Supernatural Cases)

... aka: Mediet

... aka: Медиум

... aka: Mysteria replica di un omicidio (Mystery - Replica of a Crime)

... aka: Un misterio llamado Aleksander Orwicz (A Mystery Called Aleksander Orwicz)

Directed by:

Jacek Koprowicz

Setting: 1933, Nazi-occupied Poland. Greta Wagner (Ewa Dałkowska), the powerful psychic sister of veteran parapsychologist / occultist Ernst (Jerzy Nowak), tunes into strange visions that are actually the current activities of another unknown medium. The medium is using his or her powers to control four different people, entrancing them and leading them all somewhere to do different tasks. Andrzej Gaszewski (Jerzy Zelnik) travels from Warsaw to the autonomous city-state Sopot / Gdańsk via train and has no idea how he even got there, but vows not to leave until he finds out. Schoolteacher Luiza Skubiejska (Grażyna Szapołowska) walks right out on her students mid-class, goes to a museum, steals a turn-of-the-century dress and then ends up in a park with no clue how she got there or why she has the dress. She then immediately returns the garment to the museum. Since this hasn't been the first time this has ever happened, she's on the radar of the police and could potentially lose her job. Likewise, out-of-town banker Georg Netz (Jerzy Stuhr) keeps waking up in a strange house, despite the fact he's simultaneously paying for a hotel room in town. He has no idea how he got there, why he's there or why he's been writing gloomy lovelorn poetry while entranced.

Superintendent Selin (Władysław Kowalski) is not only in charge of investigating the above weirdness but also happens to be directly involved. Every night after work, he mysteriously ends up on a beach, where he gets drunk and goes to sleep. When morning comes he doesn't remember the evening before and then turns up at the office every day unbathed, unshaven and reeking of alcohol. His young assistant Krank (Michał Bajor) is something of a sadist who worships Hitler ("it's logical to side with the stronger," he claims) and is conspiring against Selin behind his back. He secretly goes to their higher-ups to report the superintendent's bizarre behavior but they refuse to fire him for it. At least for now.

The strange home that appears to be the centerpiece of the action belongs to a Polish man named Aleksander Orwicz, who suffers from diabetes and is later found in a diabetic coma. While in his hypnotized state, Georg had been showing up there to give him shots of insulin and claims there was another guy present at the time... a guy who looks suspiciously like Selin.

Everything links back to a love triangle (square?) gone wrong that occurred in the same house 36 years earlier. In the late 1890s, extremely rich forty-something banker Stefan Orwicz married beautiful 22-year-old Zofia. He built her a luxurious Italian-style home and the two soon welcomed a son named Aleksander. Things then took a turn for the worst when Stefan went blind due to his diabetes. A live-in doctor named Malicki moved into the home to care for him full time. Soon after, he and Zofia began an affair. That arrangement would soon came to a bloody end when Wiktor Arlt, Stefan's hunchbacked secretary and personal assistant, went crazy and murdered all three of them with an axe. See, he too was in love with Zofia, and would often write her poems about how grueling his unrequited love for her was. After the murders, Wiktor committed suicide, and history may very well repeat itself in the present day unless our heroes can stop it.

This is often cited as one of the best Polish genre offerings from this time, which very well may be true. That's not an endorsement of its quality so much as it is the simple fact that not many horror films were produced in Poland in the 80s and two of those were THE SHE-WOLF (1983) and I LIKE BATS (1986). Some of their other genre films from this time sound promising so this may even end up on the lower half of the scale for me by the time I see the rest. Nevertheless, being slightly better than the two middling films mentioned above doesn't mean Medium is inspiring or noteworthy itself. It's not. Things open well and the intrigue is maintained until about the midway point. That, combined with the competent directing, acting and production values, keep everything watchable even after it starts becoming something of a mess. The true undoing of the film is that it's never able to make its myriad plot threads work together harmoniously.

Slow and talky most of the time, this attempts to dress up its average mystery plot with various needless complications. The script makes room for psychic powers, doppelgangers, leech treatments, telekinesis, spontaneous combustion, human lives linked to sea turtles (?), immortality, physical regression to childhood, horoscopes that combine astrology and math (birth dates and times) to predict the exact time and day of death and a solar eclipse that's somehow needed to bring the bad guy's plot together. Why? You got me! There are a LOT of ideas crammed in here; too many, and this doesn't do an adequate job explaining most of them. The overcast cinematography, funeral pacing, lack of personable characters and humor and Nazi era setting also gave me bad flashbacks to Luca Guadagnino's tedious SUSPIRIA remake from a few years back.

Stripped down to its bones, what this really is is a rehash of the mediocre Aussie film PATRICK (1978), which was a big hit in much of Europe a few years earlier. Both involve a coma patient who's fully conscious inside their unresponsive body and using their telekinetic abilities to strike out against others. There a number of other similarities between it and this one, only this opts to gum up the works with numerous ill-explained supernatural detours.

Outside of its home country, this was given a theatrical and VHS release (on the Penta Video label) in Italy under the title Mysteria replica di un omicidio ("Mystery: Replica of a Crime"), but that appears to be it as far as 80s international distribution was concerned . A West German co-production, it may have also played in some other European cinemas, or on TV, as well. It's now pretty easy to find with English subtitles and is on Youtube, Daily Motion and other websites free to view, and was even available on Netflix for a spell, though I don't know if it's still there or not. Studio Filmowe Tor / Studio Blu offer region free Blu-ray and DVD versions with English subs.

★★

Jeonghyeongmi-in (1975)

... aka: 정형미인

... aka: 定形美人 (Ding xing mei ren)

... aka: 鬼猫上身

... aka: Geom-eungoyang-i gamyeon (Black Cat Mask)

... aka: Guai tan zheng xing mei nu (Ghost Story: Plastic Surgery Beauty)

... aka: Gui mao shang shen (Ghost Cat Daughter)

... aka: Remodelled Beauty, A

Directed by:

Il-ho Jang

Taking the bones of the French mad scientist / face transplant classic EYES WITHOUT A FACE, adding a supernatural twist and giving it a distinctly Asian ghost cat flair sounds like the makings of a pretty fun film... and this actually is pretty fun!

As domestic cats curiously swarm a hospital, obstetrician Tae-min Shin (Nak-hoon Lee) is horrified to discover that his delirious wife, Gyeong-ja (Yang-mi Park), has just given birth to a hideously deformed baby girl, which is supposed to be cat-like in appearance but actually looks more like someone let a toddler doodle on an infant's face with a Sharpie. It all has something to do with a family curse that we eventually see the origins of via flashback. (Note: If your wife's black cat scratches your bratty daughter, don't repeatedly slam your spouse's face onto hot coals until she's dead, strangle kitty to death with your bare hands and then bury them together.).

The more pressing immediate issue is that the wife dies shortly after giving birth and Tae-min is now saddled with a monstrous baby he has no interest in claiming. The doctor, along with a few other members of the hospital staff, including nurse Mi-hye (Jin-ah Seong) and his surgeon father, Jun-ho (Am Park), decide to remedy the situation by sneaking into the nursery and swapping out the defective baby for a normal one.

Nearly two decades pass and Tae-min has become an even more esteemed figure in the medical community. After returning from an international conference in the U.S., he announces to the press that he's been working on "artificial skin awareness in the field of orthopedics" and has revolutionized the art of skin grafts. He and live-in nurse / assistant Mi-hye have become romantically involved and raised the oblivious Yeong-ran (Ok-jin Kim), now a happy, well-adjusted and beautiful teenager, as their own. However, someone else has tuned in to the news broadcast, and she's about to make an unscheduled and unwelcome appearance at Yeong-ran's 19th birthday dance party.

A masked young woman cloaked in all black shows up in the cellar late at night. She - Myo-sook (Ji-in Yu) - announces herself as the doctor's dejected biological daughter and proves it when she removes her mask and gloves to reveal her blotted face, bushy eyebrows, fangs and claws. Myo-sook then demands her father operate on her face. She'd like to look just like Yeong-ran and, since dad has now perfected his skin grafts, he has the ability to turn her wishes into a reality.

Since she's cursed, the cat girl has supernatural powers at her disposal, which she demonstrates by hypnotizing Mi-hye, clawing her face and threatening to rip her throat out if her father doesn't agree to the operation. She can also levitate and do some other cool stuff that regular humans cannot. With her deep, gravely, echoed voice, and the sadistic delight she shows in shocking and scaring others, she actually comes off a lot like Regan in The Exorcist, which not-so-coincidentally was released just a few years before this.

When it comes time for the operation, Myo-sook refuses to be put under or given any kind of anesthesia. She wants to be awake to watch the entire process as it plays out! Once the operation begins, something even stranger happens. As Myo-sook's face is restored, Yeong-ran's face starts to deteriorate, almost as if the two are switching identities. Myo-sook, who has lived the life of an outcast hiding in the country her entire life, decides to take advantage of her newfound beauty by venturing out into the city. She also makes a play for Yeong-ran's fiancé, Chang-hoon (Jin Kim), who isn't receptive to her aggressive seduction attempts. The doctor then performs an operation to restore his adoptive daughter's face, thus turning Myo-sook back into her original form... and making her really pissed off in the process!

While this is a full-blooded, serious movie most of the time with some surprisingly gory and creepy moments, a lot of cat tropes are touched upon in an intentionally amusing way. At a restaurant, the cat woman gags when she tries to eat sweets yet helps herself to live goldfish she digs right out of a fish tank, much to the shock of onlookers! She also leaves dead animal gifts for the doctor, kills and feasts on rats, hisses, howls, hangs from the rafters and raids the fridge looking for raw seafood. The chaotic finale finds her disappearing and reappearing at will, leaping onto trees and the roof, transforming into an actual cat, multiplying herself and flying, sometimes accompanied by some silly slide whistle-sounding music cues. The rest of the experimental electro score from Min-seop Jeong is pretty great though, as are the performances from Nak-hoon Lee and Ji-in Yu.

The screenplay from Young-il Lee is adapted from the work of Japanese manga legend Kazuo Umezu. I've seen some sources claim it was his 1966 manga Nekome no Shōjyo ("The Girl with Cat Eyes"), which also involves two sisters - one normal and the other cursed with cat eyes - but instead this uses his Kuroi Nekomen ("Black Cat Mask"). "Mask" (seen below) has the cat stuff, the family curse, the doctor father, the assistant, the hospital stuff, the baby swap, the two young women (one beautiful, one disfigured), etc. According to the Korean Film Database, Black Cat Mask was also the film's original shooting title, so that should finally clear up any confusion in regards to the actual source material.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, the director was occasionally wooed away from his homeland to make movies in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, including being tapped by Shaw Brothers to direct the martial arts films The Deadly Knives (1972) and The Thunderbolt Fist (1972), as well as the horror film Night of the Devil's Bride (1975). He also made the obscure genre films Legends (1968) and Life After Death aka The Afterworld (1981) in his home country. Released just six years later, Yu-seop Lee's Hannyeo / "Grudge of Women" (1981) also involved skin transplants and was heavily inspired by Eyes Without a Face.

There was a poor quality VHS release in South Korea in 1983 (below, left), which is very clearly cut, though I'm not sure by how much. This version runs just 63 minutes, while the original theatrical running time given by Korean sources is 81. While I can't comment about the uncut version, the hacky editing jumps, scenes ending mid-sentence and incoherent butcher-job of a finale featuring shots seemingly out of order (like someone safely inside one minute but outside fighting the cat-lady a second later) is probably not how this originally played out. Though I'd love to see the film restored to its full glory one day (which would almost certainly boost my rating up at least half a star), I'm not sure that's even a possibility. This severely cut and heavily-damaged version is all that's known to exist. Since it was a box office flop, apparently nobody really cared about preserving this title.

This also received a VHS release in Hong Kong (above, right) with burnt-in English subtitles in the 80s, though that's not the version I watched. One source claims the HK video is a few minutes longer, though again I'm currently unable to verify that claim.

★★1/2