Almohadón de plumas (1988)

... aka: Feather Cushion

... aka: Feather Pillow

Directed by:

Ricardo Islas

This was made by the same fella who'd just done the ultra low-budget shot-on-video vampire film CROWLEY (1987). Since I already wrote a bit about him on that review, I'll give you the Cliffs Notes version here: Islas was a horror-movie-loving teenager living in Uruguay, a low population country (around 3 million when this was made) that didn't have much of a film industry to speak of. Still, he didn't let that stop him from making his own camcorder-shot features, which appear to have only been shown on TV in his home country. Islas churned out quite a few of these in the late 80s into the mid 90s (including a Crowley sequel) before relocating to the U.S., where he continues to make ultra low budget horror films to this day. This one is an adaptation of a short story (a very short one) of the same name by Horacio Quiroga, who's sometimes referred to as "The Edgar Allan Poe of Latin America" and was born in Uruguay but spent most of his professional career working in Argentina. El almohadón de plumas was first published back in 1917 in a collection of eighteen short stories from the author titled Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte ("Tales of Love, Madness and Death"). Though he's mostly unknown here in America, apparently his work is frequently praised in Spanish-speaking countries.

The cheap-looking title screen and opening wobbly shots around a curio shop looking at dolls, masks and the titular pillow set to synth music is oddly charming, but we're also immediately slapped right in the face that this is an amateur home movie. The camerawork is shaky, the videography is sometimes blurry, everything is blindingly bright in the day yet too dark at night and there's almost no attention whatsoever paid to making sure we can actually hear what the actors are saying in the first scene. As our protagonist is discussing some kind of construction deal with his colleague Antonio (Richard Perlas) the audio is muffled and voices are drowned out by passing cars. Cars can even sometimes be heard in some of the scenes taking place indoors and a faint hissing sound is present over most of the dialogue from relying on the camcorder's built-in mic.

The story centers around Jordan (played by the director) and Alicia (Norma Morgan), former college sweethearts who have just gotten married, yet sleep in separate bedrooms. He's so preoccupied with work that he usually brings it home with him and it seems like it's all he can ever talk about. She doesn't seem to have a career or much to do aside from sleeping a lot. Alicia has recently purchased a fancy red feather pillow with a curious, hand-painted design on it (a six-pointed star with an eyeball in the middle) that she seems to be pleased with.

Alicia starts getting headaches and passing out. A doctor is called in and recommends she change her diet. However, her issues continue and she starts getting even worse. Woken up by a noise, she thinks she sees a black-clad figure lurking around their home and follows it into the cellar, where a ping pong ball eyed woman with rotten teeth charges at her. After hearing his wife screaming, Jordan rushes down to the cellar to find her unconscious. Back to the doctors they go. This time they run some more tests and question whether she's on drugs, vomiting blood and / or suffering from "nasal or vaginal discharge" (?!) They finally come to the conclusion she's having hallucinations brought on from anemia and recommend she get more rest. No problem there. All this chick ever seems to do is lie around in bed! Nevertheless, Jordan has his sister Nancy (Beatriz Rossi) come stay with them to help around the house so Alicia has even less to do.

Further encounters with the mysterious lady follow, which leads to more screaming and more passing out, plus dramatic physical changes like dark under eye circles, paleness, rapid loss of weight, rapid loss of blood and small sores on her face that resemble bug bites. After the doctors assure Jordan there's nothing to worry about, Alicia suddenly passes away in her sleep, just five days after first becoming sick. The doctors complete their analysis postmortem and reveal that she had been drained of her blood by something of a parasitic nature.

Considering what medium was used to make this, the unavoidable pratfalls of using said medium and the fact very little money was spent here, this showcases enough care, talent and ambition to keep it enjoyable if you can tolerate zero budget videotaped horror. Though there are awkward, bland and / or technically inept moments sprinkled throughout, a surprising number of scenes are professionally staged, paced and edited, to the point where you sometimes actually forget about this being a home movie. It's almost as if scenes were (gasp!) planned out by the director in advance to the point he may have actually (double gasp!) storyboarded them. Faults and all, I genuinely appreciated the effort that went into this, especially when compared directly to most other SOV horrors from this same time period.

This is also one of those instances where I don't recommend reading the source material before seeing the movie. You can breeze through that in just a couple of minutes afterward like I did, but watching the movie version play out with no knowledge of what's going to happen offers up some surprises you won't be getting if you familiarize with it beforehand. The film does a pretty nice job respectfully staying faithful to the story while also elaborating upon it, especially adding an ambiguous element about the source of the pillow that sends it into faintly supernatural territory.

There are a number of other filmed versions of the same story. It was adapted by Mexican filmmaker Alicia Violante in 1990 (which appears to have been a student film), was the subject of Cuban and Chilean shorts in, respectively, 2000 and 2007, was an episode of the Argentinian TV series Fantasmagorias in 2018 and an episode of the Paraguayan TV series Relatos Clásicos de Misterio y Terror in 2020. There's also Japanese TV movie version from 2022 and it's been featured on several Spanish-language podcasts. To my knowledge, this particular version has never been given an official home video release, nor has it ever been released with English subtitles.

★★1/2

Pimag (1980)

... aka: 피막

... aka: 避幕

... aka: Bi mu

... aka: Death Cottage, The

... aka: House of Death

... aka: Hut, The

... aka: Pee-Mak

... aka: Pimak

... aka: Woman's Grudge and Exorcism, A

Directed by:

Doo-yong Lee

Wealthy village leader's son Seong-min (Beom-gi Kim) is dying. Believing he may be possessed by evil spirits, Master Jin-sa Kang (Seong-ho Choi), his wife (Shook Jeon) and his mother Noma-nim aka Great Madam (Jeong-sun Hwang) enlist the aid of shamans from all over the countryside in hopes that one of them can finally cure him. Many elaborate exorcism rituals are performed, including a man dancing on sharp blades, but none seem to release Seong-min from his spell. Priestess Ok-hwa (Ji-in Yu) manages to impress them the most by casually removing a venomous snake from the son's deathbed and then using her powers to make it slither away. She threatens to leave unless her demands are met, which include money and them banishing all other shamans from the village and allowing her to take charge. The desperate family agree to her terms.

Unlike most of the con artists working the spiritualist circuit, Ok-hwa appears to be the real deal. Spending days and nights meditating and praying, she's eventually able to uncover some clues as to what's actually causing the illness. She beats Seong-min with a tree branch, which seems to release an animal-voiced demon, then lets the branch lead her to a secluded spot in the woods. Dropping down to her knees, she digs through the dirt and reveals a buried, smoking bottle. Somehow the top of the bottle has been broken off, which may have unleashed a spirit in the process.

The bottle housed the remains of someone named Sam-dol and the Kang family are hush-hush about both who he is and how he met his untimely demise twenty years earlier. However, Ok-hwa will need this information if she's to be able to exorcise the ghost from the home. And none too soon. Hunchbacked butler Kim (Tae-il Han) starts spitting up blood and keels over simply for holding the bottle, so even though the spirit has perhaps left the son's body for the time being it's certainly not through tormenting the family. But why is it doing this?

Lengthy flashbacks show us the sad fate of Sam-dol (Namkoong Won - A DEVILISH MURDER), a lonely, unshaven half-wit who was stuck with perhaps the worst and least rewarding job ever: running a remote 'death hut' on the outskirts of the village where the terminally ill are brought to die. Think hospice, only dirty, without a trained medical staff, appropriate equipment and adequate pain management. The excuse for this place even existing is superstitious nonsense about spirits not being able to find their way back to the village but the real reason is more likely that the wealthy didn't want to deal with the emotionally-draining, stressful task of seeing their loved ones through their final few days. Much easier to shuffle all responsibility off onto outcast Sam-dol, who's apparently deemed fit to deal with the dying but otherwise treated as a leper driven to living alone on the fringes of their society.

The Kang family are obsessed with prestige, tradition and reputation. Since men in the family have had a bad habit of passing away at a very young age, the widows left behind were forced into a life of chastity until death as not to tarnish the family's good name. In the meantime, some of the surviving widows have resorted to whipping, burning, cutting, vaginal mutilation and other self-harm techniques as a means to keep their desires at bay.

After repeatedly stabbing herself in between the legs with a dagger, one such widow, Ms. Lee (Yun-kyeong Kim), was taken to the death hut. Great Madam convinced Sam-dol to make love to her as a last minute means to appease her and keep her from returning as a tormented spirit. Then a funny thing happened: After tending to the widow's wounds with herbs, Sam-dol was able to save her life. At first outraged at being taken advantage of while in a vulnerable state, Ms. Lee discovers the truth and finds herself drawn to the outcast. She starts visiting him, doing his laundry and bringing him food and new clothes. Before long, the two begin a consensual sexual relationship. All in secret, of course. It has to be in secret. Remember that all-important Kang family reputation?

But Ms. Lee eventually found herself pregnant, the Kang clan men discovered what had been going on and the only way to conceal it was to murder them both. Ms. Lee's body got tossed over a cliff into the ocean in a staged suicide while Sam-dol's spirit was drawn out by a shaman, captured and housed in a bottle, which was then buried outside of the village. Returning to modern day, a revenge motive is revealed and some (though sadly not all) of the deserving characters get their comeuppance in a variety of different ways (snakes, hanging, wheat cutter...) during the climactic exorcism finale.

One certainly can't argue about the technical merits on display here. This is a professionally directed, acted, written and shot film, which gets most of its mileage from its subtext as opposed to the actual plot itself, which is a bit too predictable. 

Still, it's fascinating (in a bleak, depressing kind of way, at least!) watching something made over 40 years ago that calls out certain obvious, harmful societal issues only to realize those same exact issues are still very much with us today, and perhaps always will be. It's doubly disheartening that this film was made over 40 years ago but is set way before that (some time in the 15th - 19th century Chosun Dynasty), and, if anything, the issues addressed have only gotten worse. Though this may have been directly mirroring certain contemporary problems in South Korea (I'm not so sure since I don't know what was going on there at the time), what this has to say is universal and still timely. Essentially we're presented a village that's a microcosm of a larger society. Even on such a small scale, the corrosive effects of living in a plutocracy where wealth, power, reputation and family name mean everything, and ultimately determine one's fate, are clear as day.

Some of the men in the wealthy Kang family don't even believe in spirits yet pretend like they do in polite company; secretly using superstition as a tool to manipulate and exploit the peasantry in essentially the same way modern day politicians use religion to manipulate and exploit the poor and middle class. This patriarchal society grants men, even married ones, the ability to have sex with whomever they please (even if by force), while women of equal social standing are made to live like nuns when widowed or even get killed for falling in love with someone beneath their social standing.

As far as Ok-hwa is concerned, she's in the unfortunate position of being a woman, poor and in a line of work that's considered lowly and disreputable within this society, which means the wealthy men around her think nothing of utilizing her services one day and raping her the next, knowing they'll always be protected and no one's ever really going to care what becomes of her. Limited in options, Ok-hwa's only way to really fight back is to use sex as a tool to manipulate these men whenever possible, but this also dooms her to a lonely existence. Her grim potential future is cleverly reflected right back at her by the elderly, territorial local female shaman (Jeong-ok Ra) who eventually takes her under her wing. She's been used when needed for many, many years, but has still been forced to live in isolation on the outskirts of the village and is frequently mocked as an "old hag."

This won two awards - Sam-yuk Yoon for Best Screenplay and Kyeong-ja Lee for Best Editing - at the Korean Association of Film Critics Awards, a Best Actor award (for Won) from the Grand Bell Awards (Korea's Oscar equivalent) and a Best Director Award at the Baeksang Arts Awards. Most notably, it was the first film in twenty years to win a major international film award after it took home a special prize at the Venice Film Festival. Because of that, this is considered a key title when it comes to getting the ball rolling on global recognition of Korean cinema. Just look where we are today! Not only are Korean horror films regularly acclaimed and popular around the world, but who would have ever guessed a worthy South Korean film (Joon-ho Bong's Parasite) would make history over 40 years later by winning Best Picture, Director and Screenplay Academy Awards? And, just one year later, veteran Korean actress Yuh-jung Youn (WOMAN OF FIRE) would make history yet again for winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Minari (2000).

There was only one VHS release that I'm aware of, in Korea (under the English title Pee-Mak) on the Goldstar Video label. However, this was given a boost when it was chosen by the Korean Film Archive as one of the 100 most important Korean films of all time. KFA then oversaw a remaster and Blu-ray release of the film, which comes with English subtitles and includes a commentary track from the director. This is also free to view (with English subs) on KFA's Youtube channel, though the quality isn't nearly as good as the physical release judging by the photos I've seen.

★★★