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

Kuutamosonaatti (1988)

... aka: Moonlight Sonata, The

Directed by:
Olli Soinio

I want to start this out by talking about classic Finnish horror cinema. OK, so now that that's done let's move on to... Hey, I'm only kidding. Sort of. There's honestly not a whole lot to talk about here. A wiki page dedicated to Finnish horror has an index containing 6 titles, only two of which were made before 1990. IMDb does a little better job, turning up six pre-1990 feature films and two TV movies. Poking around I was able to find a few more for a grand total of around 10 films. We first have to go all the way back to 1927 with the silent Noidan kirot (“Curses of the Witch”) from director Teuvo Puroo, which is widely considered the first Finnish horror film, though a previous 1923 fantasy film, Rautakylän vanha parooni (“The Old Iron Baron of the Village”), is sometimes considered. While either of those may have been the first, they were also the only genre offering(s) out of them until the ghost film Linnaisten vihreä kamari ("The Green Chamber of Linnais") two decades later. Moving on to 1952 we have a pair; the excellent THE WHITE REINDEER (a cross-over success that won the Best Foreign Language Film Golden Globe and a major award at Cannes) and the OK but less successful THE WITCH. I'm forever grateful that pair exists because 1952 is pretty slim on horror titles otherwise. Two years after those came a ghost comedy (Kummitus kievari / “Ghost Tavern”). And then there was long silence...

The 80s finally rolled around and the Finnish commercial TV network Mainostelevisio offered up the ghost tale Yöjuttu: Merkitty (1984) and the four-part miniseries Painajainen / “Nightmare” (1988), which involves an amnesiac uncovering horrifying secrets about his life. The same year as the latter came this theatrical release from Soinio, who'd previously made the 23-minute monster movie parody Transvestijan tarinoita (“Tales of Transvestia”) back in 1975. There were also a few 90s releases and, in recent years, a couple of fairly well-received genre offerings like Sauna (2008) and Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010). And there you have it folks, a brief overview of Finnish horror to this day. As nice as it is to be able to sum up the horror output of an entire country in just two brief paragraphs, I'm glad all other countries aren't Finland. Otherwise I would have closed up shop here about five years ago.

International fashion model Anni Stark (Tiina Björkman) flies back home to Finland and is hounded by the press as soon as she steps off the plane. See, Anni is not a nice or sweet or even halfway decent young woman. In fact, she's hot headed, foul-mouthed, has a bad temper and is about to get canned by her agency. That's why she's in Finland in the wintertime; to avoid bad press over one of her latest explosions and lay low for a few days. In four days' time she's off to Milan to fulfill another contract. Her agent Carli (Ville-Veikko Salminen) has arranged the trip and has even found an out-of-the-way hotel where no one can find her. When they show up, they find the hotel is remodeling, so the owner sends them off an an even further out-of-the-way skiing cabin located down a long and winding road. Carli then leaves her there and promises he will back in a few days time to personally drive her to the airport for her job in Italy.

Left all alone in the cabin except for her dog (who gets about twice as many adoring close-ups as the human actors), Anni is kept up late her first night by strange, loud noises coming from outside. Little does she realize, but someone's been watching her the entire time. As for her missing panties, the same peeper crept inside while she was in the bathtub and snatched those, too. Thankfully, Anni's kid brother Johannes is supposed to come in and stay with her in another day. She walks to the bus stop the following morning hoping he's there and instead has a strange encounter with a stern old woman (Soli Labbart) and her creepy, pervy adult son Arvo (Kari Sorvali), who also happens to be the panty thief. Arvo warns her to be careful because “the roads are slippery... slippery like a wet pussy,” before pushing his ailing old mum away in her ski-chair. Anni then walks down the road looking for a phone and instead stumbles onto the unkempt farmhouse Arvo shares with his mum and another family member we'll get to here in a bit. Arvo's been following the newspapers and knows exactly who Anni is and about all of the controversies in her life. He tries to take her picture and then grabs her tits and she runs off. He makes a return visit to her cabin later on and she's forced to defend herself with a knife.

Johannes (Kim Gunell), an electronics wiz (which factors into a few later scenes), finally shows up and he and Anni face one horror after another dealing with Arvo and his disturbed family, which not only includes the mother (who likes to beat on her kids) but also a hulking, whack job of a brother with a half-burnt face. He - Sulo (Mikko Kivinen) – speaks in a comically slowed-down ultra-deep voice, fancies himself a wolf and is typically kept locked up in a shack but frequently escapes. Sulo steals Anni's dog and takes him to a snowy cliff where the two of them howl at the moon together. He also chops a TV license inspector on the head with a scythe. Not only are the family bad news, but it seems the entire rest of the town is related to them and refuse to help, including the bus driver who passes through once a day.

Unlike the earlier Finnish horror films I'd seen, which are steeped in the countries folklore and old traditions, this is straightforward, very commercial and completely modern. After starting out on a completely serious note and going on that way for nearly the entire first half, this sadly deteriorates into another blatant retread of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The entire warped family dynamic; disturbed authority figure (a woman this time) with one son who's a talkative weirdo and the other a big, groaning brute, is copied, as well as other scenes like our heroine stumbling into a general store where the owner is roasting some bloody meat and is in cahoots with the family to the mini junkyard of cars (from previous victims) at the whack family's farmhouse. Unwisely carried over is the camp attitude of the second TCM, including 80s-style cornball one-liners like the killer shouting “Time to burn some rubber!” before trying to run our heroes down with a tractor.

Lack of originality and the tonal shifts seriously harm what is otherwise a fairly well-made and nicely shot movie with a few fun ideas, nice scenery and some visual style. The most amusing bit is that Anni's dog takes to the wolf-brother, views him as being the leader of the pack and starts following him around everywhere. However, little is done with that concept aside from it making for one good sight gag. There's much less violence, blood and gore here than in most other films of this type and the cast is pretty mediocre aside from the underused Labbart and Sorvali, who makes really great evil faces. Either way, aside from the location, there's not much to differentiate this from dozens of other backwoods / hillbilly horrors flick out there.

This was successful enough in its homeland to be followed by a sequel from the same director and featuring the same crazy family: Kadunlakaisijat / Kuutamosonaatti 2 (1991), which has been given the English language title Army of Zombies. In Germany, these films were released as Muttertag 2 - Die Söhne sind zurück (“Mother 2: The Sons Are Back”) and Muttertag 3 to be sequels to Troma's Mother's Day (1980), which was released as Muttertag 1 and is yet another movie this has a lot in common with.

★★