Bakeneko Toruko furo (1975)

... aka: 怪猫トルコ風呂

... aka: かいびょうとるこぶろ

... aka: Haunted Turkish Bathhouse, A

... aka: Kaibyô toruko buro 

... aka: Mysterious Cat in a Turkish Bath

... aka: Phantom Cat Turkish Bath

Directed by:

Kazuhiko Yamaguchi

It's 1958 and a new "anti-prostitution act" has got into effect in Japan. That means sex workers in the Red Light District of Tokyo are soon going to have to either change professions or risk being thrown into prison. Instead of closing up shop and just tossing his girls out into the street, sleazy brothel owner Genzô Kakinuma (Taiji Tonoyama) decides to revamp his establishment into a hammam, or Turkish bathhouse. The new rule is that the owner will now merely "rent" the girls a spa room and whatever they decide to do with their clients is entirely up to them. In other words, business as usual, except Genzô will now legally be off the hook if any of the ladies are busted. All of his workers agree to the new arrangement except for Yukino (Naomi Tani). She's fallen in love with Yûzô Shikauchi (Hideo Murota), who's not only promised to marry her and give her a more respectable life but also let her sheltered teenager sister Mayumi (Misa Ohara), who has dreams of becoming a dressmaker, move in with them from the country.

Unfortunately for Yukino, she's picked the biggest scuzzbucket in all of Tokyo to hook up with. Shikauchi claims to be indebted to gangsters and has no way of paying them back 500,000 yen he's stolen, thus coercing Yukino to go to the bathhouse and beg for a job to help pay off his debt. Unbeknownst to her, he's actually in cahoots, and is having an affair with, the bathhouse owner's sadistic wife Utae (Tomoko Mayama). He's already taken money for a three year contract for Yukino that she has no clue she's even under.

Not scummy enough yet? Well then... While Yukino is busy slaving at the bathhouse, Shikauchi decides to rape her kid sister. When Yukino returns home and discovers what's happened, Shikauchi beats her up. And when Yukino discovers she's pregnant, Shikauchi, Utae and some of the girls tie her up to a pole outside and beat and prod her with a bamboo pole to make her miscarry the baby. That attack not only kills the baby but also Yukino herself. Shikauchi and Utae then plaster the body up behind a wall Poe-style and go about their business.

Several months pass and the bathhouse turns out to be a huge success; so much so that Genzô hopes to franchise and open up another such place in New York City. However, he has no clue that his wife and Shikauchi are plotting against him. They stab him to death, hide the body then arrange a marriage with Genzô's crippled, piano playing daughter Natsuyo (Terumi Azuma), which ends with Natsuyo slitting her wrists after Shikauchi rapes her. All the while, Yukino's beloved black cat Kuro and her now-hardened sister, who's gotten a job at the bath and uses her trademark full body massage technique "Naked Dancing" to quickly become the most popular girl there, lurk in the background and plot their revenge.

After Kuro is decapitated and some of the girls try to drown her sister in a well, Yukino finally decides she's had enough and bursts out of the wall in the basement as a fabulous white-faced cat demon in a white flowing gown, silver fright wig and gold contact lenses. The cat woman hisses, flies, flips, hangs upside down, slashes people with her long white fingernails, rips out guts and a throat, pokes out eyeballs and bites an ear off. Even after being decapitated, Yuriko's flying head continues to attack. There are several cat attacks, a severed hand left as an offering outside a door, lots of colorful lighting and (the main reason the film was made in the first place) loads of T&A provided from numerous attractive Japanese actresses.

The first hour of this one is mostly heavy drama with sex / nude / rape scenes uneasily punctuated with comedic bits involving goofy male bathhouse guests making ridiculous faces while women rub up and down on them. We definitely could have used much more haunted bathhouse action instead since it doesn't even occur until the last 25 minutes and that part is a hell of a lot of fun. But as silly as this is, judging it against other softcore erotica, it's vastly superior to most films of this type from a technical standpoint and that counts for something. It looks great and is well-made, very nicely shot and lit and has some unexpectedly clever directorial touches.

I've not seen enough of these things yet to be familiar with the cast. Apparently leading lady Tani is considered one of the top actresses of such films and is often dubbed the "Queen of Pink" and "Queen of S&M." She was a big star in Japan and many of her films, like the 1974 duo of Flower and Snake and Wife to Be Sacrificed, were huge box office hits in Japan. Few of these were released to theaters here in America though, so her greatest exposure to U. S. audiences during her heyday was when Playboy magazine tapped her for a 1968 pictorial titled "The Girls of the Orient."

The director, best known for his Delinquent Girl Boss and Sister Street Fighter movies, also made the genre film Wolf Guy (1975) starring Sonny Chiba, which I've heard is far crazier than this one so I'm certainly forward to it!

★★1/2

Salinma (1965)

... aka: 살인마

... aka: 殺人魔

... aka: Bloodthirsty Killer, A

... aka: Devilish Homicide, A

... aka: Devilish Murder, A

... aka: Sha ren mo

Directed by:

Yong-min Lee

Wealthy, middle aged businessman Shi-mok Lee (Ye-chun Lee) goes to a museum expecting to see an exhibition only to find the building almost completely empty. The caretaker informs him the exhibition had already been held some time ago. Shi-mok does however find a melting portrait of his previous wife Ae-ja (Geum-bong Do), who'd died ten years earlier, and that is accompanied by ghostly female laughter. After leaving the museum, Shi-mok is unwillingly taken by a driver out to a secluded mansion where he encounters the crazed Joon-chui, who demands he take an identical portrait of Ae-ja. The same ghostly female laughter is heard and the crazed guy instructs Shi-mok to hide under the bed with the portrait. From there, he sees his ghostly former wife stab the man to death and float out of the window. Shi-mok manages to escape from both a guard dog and the driver when he comes after him with a knife and eventually encounters Ae-ja is a hidden underground room. She promptly falls over dead. Or so he thinks. Shi-mok transports the body into the city.

The corpse is taken to Dr. Park (Namkoong Won, from WOMAN OF FIRE), the same physician who'd already pronounced Ae-ja dead a decade earlier, and he's understandably amazed that her body has been so well preserved. However, upon further examination he soon realizes that she's anything but human. Her blood is clear and thin, she has no heartbeat, an x-ray shows that she has no vital organs, her eyes open and close on their own and she casts no reflection in a mirror. It isn't long before she's up off the slab and demanding the doctor restore her to life while making claims that she suffers from a condition so bad that even hell has rejected her! Ae-ja then uses her supernatural abilities to kill off those she feel wronged her, starting with electrocuting the doctor to death.

Shi-mok returns home to his second wife, Hye-sook (Bin-hwa Lee), mother (Ae-ran Jeong) and three kids and the ghost of Ae-ja starts haunting them and killing them all off. She opens doors, windows and cabinets, tries to strangle the mother in her sleep and makes blood come out of the faucet and rain down from the ceiling. Revelations about Ae-ja's death soon come to the fore as several family members are revealed to have murdered her. While the mother is returning home from a temple, she's accosted by the ghost, who smashes her head with a jagged rock and sends her body over a waterfall. The teenage daughter disappears after being yanked out of a window, dragged on top of the roof and then taken into the woods.

The dead mother's body is possessed and returns as a cat "goblin" to cause more problems. She recoils from a rosary, destroys Buddha statues in the garden, hisses, claws and cleans herself like a cat (and also casts the reflection of a cat in a mirror), hangs from the ceiling and licks the young kids on the face while they sleep (!) as a prelude to feasting on their blood. A face is beaten with a log until the eyeball pops out, a cat eats a corpse walled up in an empty temple, a mysterious maid shows up to warn the family and flashbacks reveal both the origin of the painting and just why Ae-ja's ghost hasn't been able to rest in peace. That involves jealousy, eavesdropping, adultery, blackmail and murder using an Indian drug that causes the taker to become deaf and mute for twenty days plus a special "venom" that causes disfigurement.

While this features the excessively done (at least in Asia) premise of a faithful model wife / martyr led to an early grave by scheming characters and now back for revenge, and has a narrative structure that won't please all viewers, it mostly makes up for that with great noir-ish lighting, good performances (especially the female leads), decent make-up, some interesting (though not always great) special effects, and best of all, a lightning-fast first hour that goes from one horror set piece to another with little let up. Initially a little confusing due to a chaotic pace, this finally hits a great off-the-wall groove where you're never quite sure what's going to happen next. However, the momentum ultimately slows down and things become more predictable with a lengthy soap opera flashback that, while not bad, probably should have been inserted elsewhere into the film. The final scene is also more than a lil bit cheesy.

The director was fairly prolific in the genre but is yet another Asian filmmaker whose legacy has been undermined by the mere fact they happened to do all of their work in the pre-home video era. Few of his titles received any kind of international theatrical distribution, only two (to my knowledge) have received an official home video release and nearly all of the rest appear to have vanished off the face of the Earth. Among Lee's other credits are A Flower of Evil (1961), The Gates of Hell (1962), Bride from the Grave (1963), Beauty with No Neck (1966), The Devil and the Beauty (1969), Revenge of the Snake Woman (1970), The Man with Two Faces (1975) and Black Ghost (1976), but good luck finding them. I'm not sure if any have even played on TV in Korea or have been released on video there. Even worse, a number appear to be missing and are possibly lost forever.

A Devilish Murder is one of the lone exceptions to the rule in that it received an anamorphic widescreen DVD release from Sinister Cinema with English subtitles. It's one of the only older Korean genre films that's relatively easy to find, which may have something to do with it also receiving a rather wide release in Hong Kong.

★★★