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.

★★★

Ping an ye (1985)

... aka: 平安夜

... aka: 直冒冷汗

... aka: Christmas Eve

... aka: La nuit de l'assassin (Night of the Assassin)

... aka: Night Caller

... aka: Night Color

... aka: Perversión en la noche (Perversion in the Night)

... aka: Silent Night

... aka: Zhi mao leng han

Directed by:

Philip Chan

Much is made of holiday-set horror within the horror community despite the fact there are few actual great genre films set around any holiday. You'd think most of the standout titles would be centered around Halloween since horror is already built right into the holiday itself, but that's not the case at all. There are actually more good genre films set on Christmas! I guess there's just something about contrasting good will, generosity, family and "holiday cheer" with the macabre that appeals to fans, plus there's that undercurrent of it being somewhat subversive having horrific things go down on what's a religious holiday. Perhaps the atmosphere of Christmas itself is the primary appeal just for nostalgic or aesthetic purposes. When we think about Christmas we envision it being cold and often snowy. It gets dark early and many people are staying inside for obvious reasons. All of that makes for a proper horror atmosphere regardless of the holiday. It's also rather easy, visually-speaking, to capture the proper Christmas atmosphere. All we need are trees, lights and decorations and a few Christmas songs on the soundtrack, right? Still, I've seen plenty of films that have managed to fail even accomplishing that simple task and the same can be said for "Halloween" films failing to adequately capture the Halloween spirit.

There have been many times over the years that I've considering doing a "Best Christmas Horror" list but one thing always stops me: I do Top 20's around here and I've yet to find 20 great Christmas horror movies made between 1950 and 1990 for such a list. On the bright side, unlike Halloween, I could at least do a Top 10 for X-Mas if I wanted or it could become the backbone of a generic "Best Holiday Horror Films" list that includes all holidays. Unfortunately, Night Caller (which I had semi-high hopes for) isn't good enough to factor into either potential list.

Originally titled 平安夜 (or Christmas Eve) and aka Silent Night (carolers sing a Cantonese version of the Xmas staple during the opening scene), Night Caller is a lot like the previous German krimi and Italian giallo in that it features a few elaborate suspense / murder sequences and centers around a police investigation of a serial killer. Where this film eclipses a lot of what came before it is in its depiction of its two central detective characters and their camaraderie, plus having a host of side characters being fairly well-used. It also has a sense of humor that sometimes works and, instead of bogging things down too much with empty procedural, spends adequate time making the characters feel like human beings. And it's good it at least has that much to offer because it's otherwise too unoriginal and too light on the horror and suspense to extend beyond being merely a passable viewing experience.

On Christmas Eve, someone dressed in black (right down to the trench coat, bowler hat and gloves) enters the home of model Jessica (Terry Hu) and proceeds to viciously stab her 27 times in a blue lit giallo-esque sequence that ends with her being pushed through a window. Though some carolers and the one-eyed maintenance man see the culprit fleeing the apartment building, the only witness who may actually know the identity of the killer is the victim's angelic young daughter, Edith (Pui Wai Lee). However, she's traumatized, left in a state of shock and unable to talk. Seeing how Edith's estranged birth father (Dick Wei in a cameo) has no interest in taking full custody and suggests putting her in an orphanage, Inspector James Wong (Melvin Wong, also one of the producers) takes her back to his home so he and his wife Kiki (Deborah Sims) can care for her. The two hope she'll feel safe enough to eventually open up and reveal the identity of the killer.

Unlike the more by-the-books and responsible James, his partner Steve Chan (director / writer Chan) is an older bachelor who's known for his unorthodox techniques that have included shoving heads into toilets to coerce confessions, driving his car through stores during police chases, pointing his gun at dicks and making frequent use of his baton on unruly punks. Despite their differences, the two are very good friends, celebrate holidays together and have each other's backs when it comes to diffusing criticism from their hard-assed superior (Hoi-Tin Ng). The two are joined in their investigation by spunky tomboy policewoman Porky (Pat Ha), who is not at all porky and probably best described as "endearingly annoying."

Evidence lead the trio of investigators to numerous places, starting with the modeling agency that employed Jessica. It's run by Tak Ho (Stuart Ong), who has a criminal record that includes sexual assaulting underage girls. After trying to blackmail the real killer, Tak Ho becomes victim #2 after he's stabbed and thrown off some scaffolding during a televised fashion show. The killer is revealed midway through and, based on what little we've seen to that point, their identity isn't much of a surprise considering we only first see the character during the reveal. James eventually is kidnapped, chained up and tortured in the killer's lair while Steve and Porky attempt to piece the clues together and rescue him before it's too late.

There's a scene where punks attack an elderly couple and terrorize them with a soda fountain, flyswatter, toaster and ketchup, a loon (Kei Mai) singing Toni Basil's "Mickey" and doing a Travis Bickle impersonation while in blackface (?!), flashbacks that reveal the killer's true motive (which is pretty lame to be honest), a scene taking place at a HK knock-off of Chuck E. Cheese and a truly preposterous (though surprising) final scene. Genre regular Pauline Wong (Siu-Fung Wong) has a colorful role as a spurned bisexual model that earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination from the Hong Kong Film Awards, who also awarded this their Best Art Direction award. There are small cameo roles from Teddy Yip (MISS MAGIC) and Tina Lau (LOVE MASSACRE) as well.

While this received decent international distribution in the 80s in countries like Italy, Germany, the UK and the US (on the Rainbow VHS label), I'm not aware of any remastered DVD releases for this title. Ocean Shores was the primary distributor and at one time offered it on VHS, VCD and laserdisc.

★★