Andrew reviews Criterion's Eclipse Series 37 of late '60s Japanese horror.
In
the Japanese studio driven film scene led by studios like Toei, Toho, Daiei,
Nikkatsu, Kadokawa and Shintoho, Shochiku is among the oldest and most
respectable of the bunch. Founded in
1895 initially as a kabuki theater company before evolving into a film studio
in 1920 as a competitor to Nikkatsu, Shochiku sought to follow in the footsteps
of the Western studio system by aiming for stories focused less on Jidaigekis
(period dramas often in the Tokugawa period) with greater emphasis on
modernistic small town urban dramas.
After a few setbacks including the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake,
Shochiku soon attracted the talent of yet to be great directors like Yasujiro
Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Hiroshi Shimizu.
Then WWII rolled around and many of the studios including Shochiku began
churning out propaganda films, resulting in the arrest of Shochiku president
Shiro Kido and Shochiku founder Takejiro Otani.
After the end of the American occupation in 1953, Kido resumed work at
Shochiku and went on to garner the talents of Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi
and Keisuke Kinoshita.
For
the most part, Shochiku was known for their more eclectic and melodramatic
director driven fare, often called the director’s studio by many auteurs lucky
enough to have worked for them. In later years still they soon courted the
talents of Takashi Miike, Yoji Yamada and Takeshi Kitano. Further still, Shochiku has distributed many
well-known anime films including Ghost in
the Shell, Full Metal Alchemist the
Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa and Jungle
Emperor Leo. What the company isn’t
necessarily known for, however, are horror movies and in particular rubber suit
kaiju movies ala Gojira and Mothra.
Following in the footsteps of Toho and Shintoho’s low budget monster
movies and horror flicks was the last thing on Shochiku’s roster. But from 1967 to 1968, Shochiku briefly
decided to give the critically maligned but commercially successful subgenres
of their competitors a try, resulting in four films making up The Criterion
Collection’s Eclipse Series boxed set, When
Horror Came to Shochiku. Previously
only available via third generation bootlegs sold illegally before getting the
Criterion treatment, these low budget ventures all certifiably wacky and
exemplar of a film company as a fish out of water exploring the possibilities
of exploitation horror cinema.
Indicative of the tail end of 1960s pop culture filtered through science
fiction horror, all display an ineffable charm, visual invention against
limited resources and all address numerous postwar fears with its mixture of
international casting and their own take on Hammer Horror filtered through what
would soon become the notion of J-Horror.
With this, The Movie Sleuth takes a good look at each of these four
delightfully warped horror movies, marking a time when a film studio leapt into
the most unlikely of genres with feverish and often reckless abandon.
The X from Outer Space (1967)
Despite
the low budget effects, this is one of the few kaiju flicks with something more
to it than the usual Gojira fare. Take
for instance a sequence where two of the astronauts try to lure the Guilala
away from the FAFC astroboat center with the Guilala close behind their
vehicle. Images of a hastily rendered
blue screen optical effect of the Guilala’s hand reaching down for the vehicle
immediately reminded me of the eventual T-Rex chase in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. In between the low budget hilarity are real
characters who, despite being broadly drawn archetypes, you become invested
in. There’s a love triangle, military
intrigue, intentional as well as unintentional humor and moments of peril where
you genuinely fear for the characters. The
strangest overqualified addition to the cast has to be Eiji Okada from Alain
Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour. Seriously, how do you go from a prestigious
arthouse favorite to over and unabashed schlock? In any event, there’s also, believe it or
not, moments of scenic beauty scattered throughout the film, augmenting the
surrounding goofball scenes of the Guilala running about destroying models of
cities and batting at airplanes hung by monofilament wires. That said, I won’t pretend The X from Outer Space isn’t the weakest
film in this series. If you’re familiar
with Gojira or have seen Destroy All
Monsters, there’s a good bet you’ve seen this sort of thing already. I always enjoy a good kaiju flick,
particularly one with its tongue firmly planted in cheek, but to say it pales
in comparison to what would come next from Shochiku’s brief horror oriented
period is being too modest.
Score:
Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell
(1968)
Now
here is where the eccentric, colorful and just plain bizarre sensibilities behind
Shochiku Horror really started to come into their own playing field. With my personal favorite in the Eclipse
boxed set and a longtime favorite of Quentin Tarantino, Hajime Sato’s Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell is a
batshit, psychedelic, transgressive free for all that has to be seen to be
believed. Telling the story of an
airplane which crash lands after being sideswiped by an alien spacecraft, the
ensemble piece quickly transforms into a gonzo freak show when it becomes
apparent the aliens intend to possess and destroy the human race. Did I mention vampirism factors into this
thing as well? To say caution is thrown
to the wind is an understatement. From
the outset and title itself, this looks like another Invasion of the Body Snatchers flick but in all of the body
snatcher adaptations that have come and gone over the years, none of them
approached the Mount Everest of hallucinogenic weirdness reached by Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell. Dubbed by hardcore fans the ‘Vagina-Face
Apocalypse’, the film is most notable for the method in which the aliens take
over human bodies, forming a slit on the victims’ foreheads where a neon
fluorescent blob crawls its way inside. It’s
fair to say David Cronenberg must’ve seen Goke
when he devised the vaginal orifice on James Woods’ stomach for Videodrome, another science fiction
mindblower easier to see than describe to others. Not to mention the acting with a capital A is
joyously over the top, ranging from histrionic to laughably melodramatic,
rounding out this surreal horror package as one that will elicit a myriad of
reactions from the viewer.
Visually the film is absolutely stunning with ornate cinematography, vibrant colors, eccentric lighting and increasingly strange set pieces including a still phantasmagoric interior of the alien spacecraft which looks like a wet dream of Mario Bava and Nicolas Winding Refn come to vivid, bloody life. The film also sports a funky score of strings and the theremin reminiscent of Nobou Nakagawa’s Jigoku. Newcomers to Goke will immediately spot the Kill Bill Vol. 1 homage with a model airplane flying through a blood red sky, a striking beginning to a film which can and does go in places you wouldn’t expect. There’s also a bevy of striking optical effects of orange alien spacecraft invading Earth and a mesmerizing image of characters in a trance slowly walking towards the spacecraft. Spliced in between are images of disintegrating corpses that are startlingly gory, Kamikaze-esque crows and finally scenes of voiceover of the Gokemidoro alien race speaking their sordid intentions to the characters. There’s a loose anti-war political context running through the film, including a subplot involving an American woman traveling to Vietnam to claim the body of her dead husband, but mostly Goke is remembered for being a color oversaturated freak out. Unlike the previous film, The X from Outer Space, part of the charm of Goke is that it doesn’t play for laughs, leaving viewers unsure of how to process the surreal cocktail being served. Much like The Thing from Another World, it is a horror film about a confined cavalcade of characters boxed in together while an extraterrestrial force lurks from the outside. While the premise is familiar, the execution is otherworldly and a sensual delight for the eyes and another example of how many years ahead of the gory and oddball horror genre the Japanese really were.
Score:
The Living Skeleton (1968)
Backpedaling
from the zaniness of Goke, Shochiku
aimed instead for a more straightforward gothic kaidan this time around, ultimately
producing the only black and white film in the group: Hiroshi Matsuno’s The Living Skeleton. Opening on a violent massacre on a pirate
hijacked freighter, the film jumps ahead three years as a young woman finds
herself haunted by evil spirits stemming from the horrific event. In this ultra-widescreen atmosphere drenched
unfinished business ghost story horror thriller, we see the tracks laid for
John Carpenter’s The Fog with
elements of haunted house chillers Val Lewton and Tod Browning would be proud
as well as the then late 60s level of graphic violence amid yakuza and horror
films of the time. We also see the
ground roots for methodically paced and nuanced low budget J-horror of the
mid-2000s with many scenes you can trace directly to the likes of Kiyoshi
Kurosawa or Takashi Shimizu. Where the
first two horror offerings from Shochiku seemed subversive in their own funky
manner, The Living Skeleton marks the
first time the studio’s attempt at horror managed to be genuinely creepy. One part of you wants to reach out and touch
the monofilament wires dangling the fake looking rubber bats about while the
other can’t help but get unnerved by the sounds of disembodied and ghostly
cries and moans against dead silence. Sound
being a key element to the horror experience, the score is one of the biggest
surprises with Noboru Nishiyama’s mixture of jazz, funk, avant garde and
ambience. A recurring motif of an
echoing twanging guitar over time gains the capacity to make your hair stand on
end. This might in fact the only horror
film to make a harmonica sound eerie. It’s
such a creepy and melancholic listen even hearing it outside of the film is
unsettling.
Clearly
a Japanese thriller with many conventional Western horror influences all over
it, The Living Skeleton is a solid
horror film in spite of its technical limitations. You can see what would or would not become
Hideo Nakata’s Ringu many years later
in this. I won’t disagree some of the
cheapness in the special effects props department undercut the taut and
stylized tension of The Living Skeleton
but so much of the film works really very well you almost forgive them and
aren’t taken out of the film. The
haunted house and vampire tropes are undeniably silly but the now worn cliché
of a creepy Japanese woman in white with long black hair and an axe to grind
remains startlingly effective here. There’s
also some fine acting throughout with a greater lineup of stars and more
emphasis on subtlety. Much like Kiyoshi
Kurosawa’s Pulse, many of its horrors
happen in broad daylight and still manage to remain terrifying. Far more violent and gory than the Shochiku
entries preceding it with moments that haven’t lost their power to shock, The Living Skeleton against the
drawbacks is an edgy, dark and at times uncompromisingly daring thriller with
many twists and turns you’ll neither see coming nor easily shake off.
Score:
Genocide (1968)
Who
would have though the director of The X
from Outer Space would later make an apocalyptic killer insects outbreak
film that managed to be a sobering, downbeat horror experience about man’s
capacity for self-annihilation? Stemming
from post-nuclear holocaust fears, genetic engineering and swarms of poisonous
insects, Kazui Nihonmatsu’s Genocide opens
on Saul and Elaine Bass inspired opening credits and sustains a bleak and
apocalyptic tone of doom as a horror thriller that may or may not be about a
manmade natural disaster. In a way you
could call this the director’s serious version of The X from Outer Space for shared plot devices such as a miniscule
virus that breaks out into a raging epidemic, but Genocide has far more serious matters in mind to bring to the
table. Despite only running 84 minutes
in length, the scale of the ensemble piece about a military aircraft carrying a
hydrogen bomb downed by a swarm of insects is far greater and more complicated
than you’d think. You could also call Genocide both the precursor and artistic
successor to Irwin Allen’s The Swarm which
had more money but fewer brains by comparison.
Touching on the ease with which mankind can instantly destroy itself,
this killer bugs movie manages to catch you up in nearly every character’s
separate dilemmas, jump around without feeling disjointed and create an
atmosphere of tension with a hint of hopelessness. Much like Jorge Grau’s 1974 zombie thriller The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, it’s
an ecological thriller full of scenic beauty thanks to the remote island
locations and rural region, isolating the horrors from populated areas and
insulating the terrors to only the immediate characters.
An
ensemble piece with multiple factions engaged in guerilla warfare including but
not limited to the military, spies and a vengeful woman with a deadly secret, Genocide touches on the Vietnam War,
Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet Union, drug addiction, racial profiling
and even elements of the medical thriller.
While bugs play a large part in Genocide,
the impact the outbreak has on the cast is what drives the picture, sparking a
myriad of violence, double crossing and the old saying ‘an eye for an eye’
amongst many characters. It’s difficult
to know who to trust here and by the time you’ve allied yourself with the one
or two sensible characters, it’s already too late. One of the highlights of the film involves a
doctor who subjects himself to the strange insect poison afflicting the region. As he goes into convulsions whipping up into
a sociopathic rage informing Danny Boyle’s 28
Days Later, the screen overlays a psychedelic montage of insectoid images
on top of the footage, giving viewers an insight into the biochemical battle
within. It’s a remarkable scene that
conveys the rapid venomous flow through the bloodstream and how quickly a
perfectly sane person can succumb to barbaric impulses. Although a scene of an escaped afflicted
military personnel borders on silly scenery chewing and the sounds of an army
of insects chiming the words ‘genocide’ feel forced, overall Genocide is easily the most pessimistic
and darkest of the Shochiku horror offerings and the most unlikely turn for the
director who gave viewers the ridiculous chicken lizard kaiju just a year
before. Proof positive you can make a
killer insects epidemic film with minimal resources and still end up with a
piercing social critique about man’s self-destructive tendencies and a solid
door to close on Shochiku’s brief but inspired foray into the horror genre.
Score:
-Andrew Kotwicki
