Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile (1974)

After Alan Ormsby-Honda heard of his twin brother's success with Gojira, in 1953, he bided his time and came up with the ultimate Kaiju, based on the real killer and, maybe, necrophiliac, Ed Gein. The result was Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile, or like it was called in it's Japanese release: エドGein対メスの恐竜, which means literary "Ed Gein versus the Female Dinosaurs. He casted Roberts Blossoms, fresh from the success of his latest Tokusatu: "FIGHT! STRIKE! Pale Poetry Old Man, You Rule!", 110 episodes of Kaiju-action between a superhero reciting poetry and rubber monsters from France.

Shot in Canada, because the actors are more beautiful there, Ormsby and his team constructed a impressive miniature landscape in the form of a barn and a house, ready to be burned down at the end - a detail that was missed because lack of time and it's just explained in the end. It tells the story of giant monster Ed Gein, who can skin other monsters alive with his Mega-Laser-Action-Beam (from his nose) and an impressive knowledge of wrestling moves. It's cheesy, but never childish. The "female dinosaurs" (to quote the Japanese), Macobbalon, Maureenselbytron and Sallyorgon delivers a good fight before they're killed off one by one in spectacular, explosive fashion.

Much like the Koreans and Yongary, Ormsby-Honda hoped for a similar success - and it worked well. The script is gritty and quite violent for being a Canadian Kaiju, with impressive special effects and a wonderful dread all over the film. It's moody and has a lot of atmosphere, a dark and quite nasty monster movie the way only the Japanese-Canadian could do it. Especially Blossoms impresses with a multi-layered portrait of a monster who just wants to kill other monsters, but in the end kills one to many and is put under psychiatric care.

The film became quite a success and a sequel was planned, Ed Gein vs. Mecha-Ed Gein, but was scrapped because Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel made a similar movie, much like Toho's Destroy All Monsters, with a whole family of flying, rotating, fire-breathing rednecks called the Sawyer Family. The movie is mostly known as The Texas Chainsaw Monsters, but we fans prefer to call it by it's original title: "The Super-Angry Flying Machine Man - The Friend of All Children" (that's a direct translation from Japanese).

Still controversial today, it's also one of the best Japanese-Canadian Kaiju-productions ever made. The miniature work is impressive and the fight between Ed Gein (or Ezra Cobb as he's called here, legal problems during the production) and the enormous Maureenselbytron is the highlight. Blossoms continued to work in television doing the lead in "Super-Mega-Canadian: Strike Force 10000!" and "Canadian Rider 1-2-3: GO GO GO!". Ormsby-Honda later tried to revive his success in the early nineties with Ed Gein vs. Mecha-Dahmer, but it failed at the box office.

It truly deserves a special edition blu-ray release and IF they can dig up that alternate ending, where Ed Gein is fighting a giant "Walrupus" I'm sure it's not only me that will be very happy!

Warning from Space (1956)

Warning from Space was the first Japanese sci-fi/kaiju movie in color and also made after Godzilla made a lot of money around the world. But Daiei Studios realized a bit too late that what they needed was BIG monsters and designed the posters to make the monsters look bigger (and also seemed to release promo material featuring fake screenshots from the film picturing the aliens as giants!). It actually got mostly negative reviews, but slowly became a small success all over the world, but since then it's quite forgotten and badly distributed. 

I bought on DVD ages ago, released by the infamous public domain company Alpha Video and since then it's been collecting dust on the shelf. Until today, when I decided it was time to give it a spin. I wish I didn't wait so long, because this is a neat little sci-fi movie, partly inspired by American sci-fi's from the same time, but without losing its national identity.

There's UFO sightings all over Tokyo and weird starfish-style creatures is seen, and it's not imagination. Up there somewhere a race of aliens really needs to contact us, but they look too weird and we're just scared by their looks. One of the mutants into a woman and through her the earthlings learn that a gigantic planet/sun/something is hurling through space and it's gonna crash into the earth! What to do?! The planet is getting closer and soon disasters strikes! Is it too late to save us all?!

It's never too late. At least not in the magic of movies. Warning from Space is a damn nice little sci-fi flick which perfectly in with the other more down-to-earth productions like The H-Man and The Mysterians, and with that I mean movies who's not focusing by huge rubber monsters fighting other creatures in miniature cities. The story takes an interesting turn from being a normal alien invasion story to something more positive and constructive, maybe a unique hopefulness that sometimes can be lacking in alien invasion films from the time (where a new danger often lurks around the corner). The nuclear weapons also is used to something good instead of blasting each other to pieces or creating monsters. I know, it's stuff like this that we love, but instead there's a couple of nice disaster scenes towards the end - all using them same excellence in building miniatures as usual.

The coolest thing with Warning from Space is the design of the aliens, created by artist Tarō Okamoto. If you do a google image search of his name you'll see some of his statues and paintings and it's not surprising he got the job. It's the same kind of surrealistic, high-flying psychedelica we see in this movie. A couple of the statues could be monsters from Ultraman or Gamera! Another interesting thing is that it's claimed, in John Baxter's 1997 biography over Stanley Kubrick, that Warning from Space was one of several kaiju's that inspired Kubrick to explore the world of science fiction.

I'm very sure Warning from Space will get a better reputation the day it gets a remastered new English-friendly release. It's worth watching even on the Alpha DVD, the quality is passable and just crappy and not mega-crappy, but it's not a worthy disc for such a fine little movie. 

The Inugami Family (1976)

I'm the first one to admit that I'm watching a lot of soulless crap. Most of what I'm watching never - NEVER - gets reviewed here, because it's too uninteresting. I think this is one of the reasons why I'm from time to time looses interest in writing reviews. These movies, the bad ones, works as (to quote Anton LaVey) "Psychic Vampires". They steal all my energy and points out how meaningless it is, this what I'm doing. The last couple of days, after a few weeks of writing nothing, I've been watching Japanese genre cinema and hey... this is very good for the soul! From Ultraseven (SO cool) to The H-Man and Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds. Original, fresh, fun, absurd and with a depth that a lot of other countries don't have in their art. So I decided to once again take down Kon Ichikawa's The Inugami Family from the shelf and give it a spin, and boy... this is freaking good stuff!

When it comes to the work of Kon Ichikawa I'm not an expert at all, but I would love some recommendations what to start with - preferably if it's out on a nice DVD or even nicer BD. What I understand this is not a typical Ichikawa film, but obviously he liked it enough to make a whole bunch of movies starring Kôji Ishizaka as the shy, maybe-maybe not incompetent, mumbling private detective Kindaichi (based on a hugely popular series of books written by Seishi Yokomizo). I would give my left arm to see the other Kindaichi films they made together. Anyway. The Inugami Family is the proud tradition of Agatha Christie and similar storytellers, and this time it's even more cliché: old man Inugami has died and seven months later his family, his three daughters with their three sons and the rest, gathers to open his will. The will is very complicated and it will work out the best for one of the family's branches if Inugami's new favorite girl, the young and innocent Tamayo Nonomiya - not belonging to the family bloodline - marries one of the sons. One of the sons is also hideously deformed after the war, but she has to choose what's best for her anyway...

Well, we all know what this leads to: murder, murder and more murder - everything in a delicate mess of intrigue and gossip and the question is if even the famous Kindaichi can solve this mystery before it gets even bloodier!

The Inugami Family is part murder mystery but maybe most of all an interesting and very dark deconstruction of a typical rich (and greedy) Japanese family. I promise you, there's multiple solutions to the murders and after each one it gets even more and more complicated. The calm camera studies the reactions of everyone in the shot, like I never seen it before. A couple of time the visual style reminded me of John Carpenter's The Thing: the paranoia growing bigger, the unexpected kills, the subtle music. Ichikawa also has some fun with the murders - all of them off-screen, until the final revelation at the end when we gets a chance to see every kill again, but this time with blood and goo. It's not terribly graphic, but enough to spice up a brilliant story even more. The style of the movie also reminded me of Mario Bava's Bay of Blood, with it's setting close to a dark lake - perfect to dump bodies in - and greedy family members sneaking around every corner.

The story is very complex and convoluted, and it takes 100 % concentration to watch this film. Because if you look away you might miss a clue or a twist, and to fully enjoy this story you need to know everything.

The Inugami Family, with its black humour, ghastly murder mystery and scathing satire - and don't forget the discrete use of homoeroticism - is one of my favourite Japanese movies ever and a true masterpiece. For those interested, Ichikawa remade it himself in 2006. I need to see that version!

Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds (1977)

After Toho closed down the Godzilla-shop in 1975, after Ishiro Honda's masterpiece (and a movie that also failed to gain enough audience) The Terror of Mecha-Godzilla and Gamera took a nine year long break after Gamera vs. Zigra in 1971, the Kaiju died away in cinemas (but continued to wreck havoc in television with armies of Ultramen, Kamen Riders and everything in-between in tight pants and spectacular helmets) and seemed to be a lost cause... until 1977 when Tsuburaya Productions and Rankin/Bass Productions co-produced the entertaining The Last Dinosaur (starring a very visibly drunk Richard Boone) and Toei tried their hands on one of the oddest pieces of Kaiju cinema so far, Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds.

Not technically a typical Kaiju movie with men in suits battling in miniature cities, instead it's another version of Jaws...or Grizzly, or Tentacles etc etc. A small tourist spot near a lake experiences odd disappearances and deaths and soon some scientists suspect there's a dinosaur swimming around there, hungry for human flesh. It starts of beautiful and quite scary with a woman falling down in a cave - after walking in a fairy tale forest, breaks a big egg in the fall and a huge slimy, yellow eye looks out at her. She screams and runs away and soon everyone wants to go to this little town to look for dinosaurs and monsters!

Already here the movie feels very off-kilter and has a very modern (for the time) look and characters who are more grown-up and cynical than everyone else who ever appeared in a Godzilla-movie - not to forget Gamera. There's not stupid kids or slapstick here, not talking monsters or colourful space aliens shooting rays of death against skyscrapers. The humour here is very adult and dark and that's also the feeling of the whole movie. This is not for kids and maybe it's goal to be aimed at a grown-up audience also made it less popular and confusing for the contemporary audience. Everyone expects most Japanese rubber monsters to be for kids, yeah? Not here. LODAMB is also quite gory with some torn off limbs, unexpected deaths and adults having problem with each other. No nudity though, which feels even odder when you look at the rest of the movie - because it belongs there.

The effects is all over the place, but as a fan of the Toho flicks I can't say they're less convincing here. They fit the genre and even if this is less "fun", the script is also dark enough to make the story work even with rubber and plastic filling the screen. Another fine detail I like is the inclusion of - I guess - the infamous suicide forest Aokigahara. I can't remember they're mentioning it in the movie, but it's located in the same era and fits both the look and the story. In LODAMB they walk through the forest and finds some human remains and the guide just laughs at it and explains that it's a common place for suicide. It's a macabre little twist and it's left like that without explanations. Check out the wiki page about Aokigahara, seems like a "nice" place.

When I first saw this film I wasn't that found of it, probably because I expected something more traditional - but I've seen it a couple of times since then and I like it more and more and now it's a Kaiju favorite. The dark themes, the blood and twists, the more mature characters, everything makes this a very fine example of Japanese genre cinema.

The H-Man (1958)

Ishiro Honda was, according me, one of the finest director to ever have lived and work in Japan. He began like everyone else, but after Gojira he became the leading special effects/monster/sci-fi guy - and he did it with the same flair, style and quality as his non-genre movies. In 1958 he directed one of the most interesting films in his career, The H-Man, who completely lacks a big rubber monsters who stomps Tokyo, but still contains one of the coolest creatures in his career: slime.

I'm not gonna go into the story that much, except it's a beautiful and original mix of gangsters, night clubs, cops and slime - yeah, more or less a monster-noir packed with jazz and tough guys wearing hats. Of course everything is triggered by nuclear bombs and it lead to two scenes - directly after each other - that's very similar to what Luigi Cozzi did in his wonderful Contamination. The same dark and gritty atmospheric search of the abandoned vessel, resulting in the spectacular death for some of the people aboard - and then back to the lab where they try out the liquid on an animal, with terrifying result. In this one it's a frog, in the Italian film it's a rat. Cozzi is a big fan of Japanese genre cinema and I'm pretty sure he included it into Contamination as one of many tributes.

Like with Honda's later family production Godzilla's Revenge, The H-Man also shows us what a fantastic storyteller he is with a film that puts the special effects and terror in second place. The H-Man is first of all a gangster/crime movie, but with an awesome slimy twist. Godzilla's Revenge is, as you might remember, a very cute and well-made kids movie with a few pointless inserts of the Kaiju monsters fighting on an island. 

Usually when fancy schmancy nobody's with a PHD in fine arts laugh at Godzilla I always reminds them of how Honda and Kurusawa was dear friends, they often worked together and how much they respected each others work - even if they worked on the total opposite of the movie scale in Japan.

But I'm sure you won't get disappointed at the slime-sequences in The H-Man. This is class, and of course superior to the same years (in my opinion very weak) The Blob. The special effects here is fantastic and produced with a lot of imaginative ideas. This piece of slime moves around and behaves like no slime up till then - sure, some effects is a bit cheesy, the dancer who gets covered by slime comes to mind, but it's very realistic compared to the American counterparts. The melting people looks awesome also, often covered in shadows and the result is like from a horror movie.

The H-Man is a masterpiece of fifties sci-fi and manages to be adult and intelligent all the way through. 

Curse of the Dog God (1977)

Japanese cinema has for me mostly been Kaiju-movies and Sonny Chiba. I've never been so much into samurai-movies and the recent Sushi Typhoon-production is just pure crap. I'm not a novice by any mean, I've seen a lot of Japanese movies but it has never been my area. But what I've realized is that the 70's cinema of Japan is something special, like most of the world during that time. The Inugami Family is one of the best and then we have Village of the Eight Gravestones, the Hanzo-films etc. Stuff filled with originality, violence and controversy. Three ingredients that's very important for me. My pal Jon in Norway sent me package a little while ago, and Curse of the Dog God was included. I've heard about it since earlier, but this was the first time I was able to actually see it. And oh boy, this is one original ghost movie...

I team of experts searching for Uranium finds a big heap of at a sacred mountain. On their way up there they accidentally destroys a small spirit house and then even more accidentally hits a dog! One in the team is getting married also, to a village girl, but the owner of the dog - a little boy - throws stones at him during the wedding. As a revenge. Back in the big city strange things starts to happen and soon people around him is dying. His wife is afraid the he's gonna die to, from the curse of the dog god, and goes slowly mad! He takes her back to the village for an exorcism, but it all ends with her dying! THEN shit hits the fan and the Dog God is furious, setting out to kill and destroy!

Wattya say about that set-up? Impressive? Yeah, and it works! I had no idea what this movie was going, and I couldn't in my wildest imagination see a subplot of rapist-wannabe motorcycle hooligans, a flying dog head, a giant drill running amok and so much other weird stuff. Not to mention the traditional female ghost with black hair, but here she's really nasty and violent!

Curse of the Dog God is a beautiful movie, packed with Japanese nature and landscapes, all in ultra-widescreen. The blood is RED, the violence is corny but borders to nasty and it's totally unpredictable. Lots of superlatives here, but this is a great movie - one of the best Japanese movies I've seen in long while. When Sushi Typhoon is churning out bullshit they should look back in time to their own countries past and see how to make original and bizarre genre movies for real and not just like simple, cheap, childish jokes.

But fuck Sushi Typhoon. Why does Curse of the Dog God work, with it's absurd premise and killer dogs, nudity, explosions and ghosts? Just because it's serious. I can guarantee that most movies works good when they're serious and the filmmakers actually trying to make something good out of it instead of joking around like another jackass. The Asian countries has always been experts in making serious, absurd and crazy, genre movies and most of them still do - even Japan sometimes. I like, as a part of the audience, to be taken seriously. And when the filmmakers respect me I'll respect their movie. Sure, there's of course pure horror comedies - but that's a whole different thing.

Lots of rambling in this review, but it's because I'm not sure what to write about Curse of the God Dog. It's that original and should be experienced instead of being a silly review at Ninja Dixon. Now my lust for watching Japanese cinema has awoken once again. Lets see what else I find in the collection...

Train Week: The Bullet Train (1975)

I reality I hate trains. I just see them as a one long coffin of boredom, and it takes forever to get somewhere. Not to mention the smell, the screaming bastard-kids and the over-priced restaurant. Have you noticed that the first hour often is quiet nice and cozy, but then the smell and dirt creeps up on you and when you finally arrive you're a germ-bomb of sweat, dirty and the stench of seats that reeks of twenty years of farting!  The only nice train I've been on is one between Shanghai and Beijing. Extremely clean and nice people. We shared compartment with a gentleman from the anti-piracy bureau there. He had a collection of 3000 bootlegs himself at home. But all my complains is nothing compared to what the passengers and crew have to experience on... The Bullet Train!

Sonny China, in a glorified cameo, is the captain of the super-fast bullet train. What he don't know is that a group of three men have planted a bomb underneath the train and it will explode if they gets under a certain speed! Now it's up to the control central and the police to figure out where the bomb is, where the terrorists are and save the day. But it's not that easy, of course, and soon there's just one person who knows how to disarm the bomb and he's not gonna turn himself in!

That's the basic storyline of The Bullet Train, but it has a lot more that makes it in may ways superior to American counterparts. First and most important, the characters has more layers than just being heroes and bad guys. After a while you actually feel for the main bomber (the excellent Ken Takakura), you can understand his pain and why he's doing it. This very important because then you have something else to care about and the scenes when the police is searching for him gets even more interesting and filled with tension because you're on his side during those scenes. I kinda liked him actually, and it's very far from the over-the-top scene-chewing "acting" by Dennis Hopper in the similar movie Speed (I need to see that one again actually).

Like many Japanese movies the filmmakers (this movie is produced by Toei) often used miniatures to boost the vision of the movie and Bullet Train is no except. It took me a while to realize that many of the train shots is miniatures! Sure, after a while you notice them quite clearly but they still looks great. Even if this is a disaster movie that actually lacks traditional disasters there's three sequences with exploding trains and those scenes looks awesome. There's some non-train action spliced in-between the drama also but it's the grittier, seventies style. Handheld camera, some blood and explosions.

The Bullet Train has a seriousness that you could find in slightly silly movies during the seventies and this makes it so much better. I have no time in watching movies that jokes away a good story, and The Bullet Train actually is really good with a lot of tension and thrills. There's a sequence when they need to transfer something from one speeding train to another that works so well! But it mainly lives because of the characters and the humanity in them. The DVD released by VCI is the shorter, dubbed, international version. It still works very fine and after a while you get used to the corny English voices. The original version seems to be released in the UK on DVD so I might have to get that one sooner or later.

Watch it, for the tension and for the wonderful actors!

Virus (1980)

I first watched Virus (aka Fukkatsu No Hi) ages ago on some obscure x-rental I bought for a ridiculous amount of money. To be honest I wasn't that impressed at the time, probably because I was very much into more special effects-drive disaster movies like Earthquake or Meteor and Virus is more or less the opposite of those films. The version I saw was also the short 108 minute cut, edited so stupid westerners around the world would appreciate it more - but when I finally now sat down and watched the original version, in widescreen and with all the lost scenes I understand that I've been missing out a minor masterpiece during all these years. Don't expect an action-adventure or traditional disaster, this is a very Japanese drama with an impressive international cast of character actors.

To recap the story in this movie is just boring, but if you want to know it's about the world being infected by a virus, the Italian flu, who's more or less unstoppable. One country after another is dying and we're following the few survivors, scientists taking shelter on Antarctica. In the White House the president (Glenn Ford) is spending his last days together with his closest friends and foes, a UK submarine and it's captain (Chuck Connors) is travels the seas to find survivors and around the world everyone we love is dying... or killing themselves.

Virus is a nice feel-bad movie, most of the time. Kinji Fukasaku did a couple of big mainstream movies, all of them much less personal and edgy than his smaller movies. But somehow he actually manages to inject a big fat dose of cynicism and darkness in Virus, which makes the already bleak story even darker. It almost borders to parody when a Japanese radio crew (one of them is Sonny Chiba in his only scene) is listening to a eight year old child who commits suicide alone on a boat somewhere or when the nurse takes a small boat and a little surviving boy, feeds him with a deadly pill and drives into the sunset to die. The whole movie is packed with tragedy, no one is spared.

The sense of hopelessness and being abandoned by all kinds of higher forces reminds me of The Submersion of Japan, one of my favourite feel-bad movies ever, but in some way Virus is even bleaker, effectively killing all religions and beliefs in supernatural powers by just showing how reality is. The image of Jesus on the cross, laying on a church floor with the skeleton remains of his former followers is a striking message of atheism. The whole movie breaths "We're all alone and no one is going to save us!" and that's of course the reality. That's how it is. Forget the rapture, prepare to rotten.

The cast is very fine and even notorious rotten actors like Bo Svenson makes it work better than usual. The finest of the bunch is the Japanese cast, not surprising it's a Japanese production, but even Glenn Ford - who during this time often worked with one of his eyes steadly on the paycheck - is really damn good. Others, like George Kennedy (What?! George Kennedy?! In a disaster movie?! I didn't see that one coming!!!!), Edward James Olmos and Henry Silva (Rod Steiger seem to channel his performance in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks) does a good job.

Virus is filled with strong imagery, but I think the final scenes, when Masao Kusakari almost seem like walking back in time, through ancient civilisations, through dead religions, through the past until he reaches his goal, is the most powerful sequence in the whole movie. It's a sign both of a humanitarian view on life, death to religion and maybe even a way to find what we've forgotten and start all over again.

Roaring Fire (1982)

Last day at Weekend of Horrors in Germany. Tired, broke and just wishing I could be back home in my own bed and with a less aggressive native language around me. On the second floor, just inside the "No one under 18 years"-section, I looked down and saw... a cheap Josefine Mutzenbacher-box and thought of Jocke directly. But that's not the point with this story, the point is that not far away, maybe a meter away, I saw a small "hartbox" with the title Diamentenauge, starring Hiroyuki Sanada and Sonny Chiba. I froze. "I need this!". Sonny is one of the coolest actors ever and Hiroyuki is quite a hottie. That's how I came to own ROARING FIRE!

This might be a bit confusing: as a baby Joji (Sanada) was kidnapped, without reason, by a man and moved with him to Texas. There he grew up to be a phenomenal cowboy and a friend of the nice native Americans. On his deathbed, the man he thought was his father, tells him that he has a twin brother in Japan! BUT what none of them knows is that his twin brother, Toru, became a Hong Kong gangster and just days before got shot to death, in a very bloody way!!! Joji goes back to Japan and goes directly to his family's house where he finds a small army of half-naked women swimming in the pool. Some of them topless! But here's the deal: his uncle is really evil, he's a Nazi and has an American boxer in his basement to torture people! He also has an army of evil Chinese henchmen (something I never seen: Japanese actors with make-up to look Chinese!) and I think all of them are out to kill Joji (and his blind sister, which I forgot to mention) and also find the legendary diamond that's hidden somewhere...argh, something like this. Anyway, this is one FANTASTIC flick! Really!

Oh yeah, Sonny Chiba shows up in an extended cameo as Mr Magic, an undercover cop who works as a magician at a cabaret in the evenings. Wattya say about that?

Roaring Fire is pure insanity. I had no idea what to expect from the movie when I bought it, but it exceeded every expectation I had. From the colours and wacky music, to the bloody squibs, the presence of veteran wrester Abdullah the Butcher (playing a character named Spartacus!) and the non-stop action. Ok, there's a few scenes with comedy and talk, but then Hiroyuki kicks a lot of ass - and it's even better when Sonny show what he's made off! Someone on the net compared the final reel to a video game, and that's not far from the truth. Wave after wave of bad guys for our heroes to fight!

The light mood of the movie reminded me of the Lucky Stars-movies, but it's much more violent and has more deaths and some nudity. The stunts are really well done, especially one scene when Hiroyuki is fighting baddies on top of a double-decker.

Roaring Fire almost gets surreal in places, with absurd comedy and a bizarre scene when ten samurai killers on bicycles chase Joji and his friends all over Kyoto (I think it is), including a spectacular stunt sequence when everyone is squeezing themselves up between two tall buildings standing very close to each other. Hard to explain, so see this movie please.

The Germany DVD looks absolutely stunning. It has English subtitles and a crystal clear Japanese audio track.

I'm hyping it now, but Roaring Fire is an extremely entertaining movie, and from now one one of my top ten movies from Japan!

Genocide (1968)

I bought this movie under the title War of the Insects, but that’s such a ridiculous title that I’ll stick to the other official US title instead, Genocide, which is a more proper representation of the story and concept of the production. Directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu, the man behind The X from Outer Space and written by Susumu Takaku, who also wrote Goku, Body Snatcher from Hell, this is probably the oddest Japanese production I’ve seen in a while. I guess it must have been a nightmare for foreign distributors to market this movie, because it’s absolutely not what it first seems to be.

An American airplane crashes outside a small Japanese island. The crew manages to escape with parachutes, and takes shelter in a cave. Then something goes wrong. Only one of them comes out alive from that cave, but he’s in deep shock, almost a coma, and when he finally wakes up he’s first very confused… and then very violent! A local man is accused of killing the two other men, but a brave scientist knows that the man is innocent and tries to prove that it’s insects that killed them. Soon a more sinister plan is revealed, a plan that could mean the end of humanity…

So first of all: there are no giant insects or disaster scenes in Genocide. There are no epic attacks by bees on humans and there’s hardly any action. Actually, it’s has very little of what the spectacular posters promises, and if you know this, if you’re prepared to be demonsterfied, you’re in for a treat.

If we ignore that Cinematic Titanic raped this movie, Genocide is an off-beat freaky little drama-thriller with an interesting premise and execution in the same typical classy Japanese way. The acting is good, and the script – which is lacking action – has a lot of twists and turns, but stays low-key and adds one or two nasty details to an already dark and downbeat story. The characters are unsympathetic and cold towards each other, for example, one person that we could call a hero is cheating on his wife and this is never revealed to her, it’s just a fact in the background, nothing else. The US soldiers and officers are borderline psychos, the cause of the killer-insects is highly controversial and still feels like an odd choice – but good, original and very dark. There’s no nice people here, beware.

The whole story is set on the island and the characters are few. The bee-attacks are very effective and show us a couple of spectacular macro-shots of them biting with their jaws into something that look like human skin and flesh. One miniature house is blown to pieces, and that’s about it when it comes to killer animal-mayhem.

But Genocide is a damn fine movie. It keeps up the pace the whole show with only dialogue and twists. The characters are multi-layered and interesting, even if we hate them. I love the fact that everything is doomed already from the beginning. The sense of dread in this tropical paradise is evident and the ending, very down-beat, fits perfect to the story… and must have left a weird atmosphere in the drive-in cinema afterwards.

The DVD from Sinister Cinema looks ok. Taken from a movie print, in widescreen and with good colours, this is better than I expected. The sharpness is not the best and the resolution is a bit low, but that’s something you might notice only in the wide shots.

I think most of you would like this weird little flick, because I did and I see no reason for you to read my blog if you dislike the movies I like. So that’s why I wrote a few words about it. You WILL like it!

Kitami (1989)

I’m very unfamiliar with the Japanese Pinku genre and to be honest, until a couple of weeks ago I couldn’t name one single movie. So I’m quite happy to finally got the chance to experience Hisayasu Sato’s Kitami, aka Muscle aka The Madness Night aka… ya, you know the rest, a new title for each damn territory. The first one mentioning this movie to me was Jason over at Cinezilla, and that’s the reason my friend Tommy in Japan was kind enough to send me the official DVD. I’m very grateful for these two gentlemen helping me see the Gay Pinku light.

Takeshi Itô is Ryuzaki, an editor for a Muscle magazine. He gets involved with an experimental dancer, Kitami (Simon Kumai) and at first the relationship is very kind, very gentle, but Kitami slowly drifts into sado-masochism and wants Ryuzaki to cut him, hurt him. It ends in Ryuzaki cutting of Kitami’s arm and ends up in prison for a year. But he’s still in love with Kitami, or maybe just obsessed by him, and starts to search for him in the back alleys of Tokyo. One reason is to give back Kitami’s arm that he has in a big jar in his apartment and find true love again…

Just an hour long, Kitami squeezes so much drama and passion into these 60 minutes that a lot of other directors and screenwriters should be ashamed of wasting hours and hours of valuable of time on cliché-ridden scripts about love and pain. This is concentrated passion. I guess some people would find the story a bit to dark, a bit too negative, but those are also the people that pretend that they’re living in a silly dream world. Happiness isn’t only flowers and hearts, for some people it can be the pain and the suffering – for them the only way to know life. What I’m curious about, did Kitami want to loose his arm? Maybe, but Ryuzaki still have to give something back in the end, and in all its macabre details, it’s one of the most romantic endings I’ve seen.

This is the first Hisayasu Sato film I’ve seen, but I’m impressed by the realism and the length the actors go to create characters that feels real, that maybe even are real. There’s no poseurs here, no lightweight pretending. When Ryuzaki and Kitami have sex it’s the characters getting on with it, not actors pretending to be something else (do I have to mention it’s pretty hot to?). Both Takashi and Simon is very impressive in their parts, and manage to stay away from being pretentious – which must have been extra hard for Simon Kumani who plays a very arty farty dancer, a hard thing to do without boarding the performance to parody. But a good script and a good director overcome everything. In a Swedish movie things like this would just have been preposterous, that’s why I’m bringing it up.

I also need to mention the haunting score by So Hayakawa, I wish it was released somewhere. I never really cared for “happy gay movies”, what I care about is real gay movies. Movies that’s not shallow and stupid, stereotypical crap. We, the gay community, seem to be forcing ourselves to only like happy movies, but I demand the right to also be multi-layered and not so damn happy, just like the rest of the world. Kitami succeeds in this, long before any brokeback mountains or any other mechanical Oscar-winning project.

It takes a genius to make a movie like this, and I can’t wait to dive into the filmography of Hisayasu Sato!

The Hanzo Trilogy (1972-1974)

It took me a while to actually watch the Hanzo films, but when I finally sat down it was something that was hard to stop watching. Shot between 1972 and 1974 and produced by legendary actor Shintarô Katsu’s own production company, it’s easy to get the feeling that this was a 100 % ego-trip for the eccentric actor mostly famous for his characters Zatôichi (which he played in 27 movies) and Lone Wolf. Maybe he took the chance to be a troublemaker, and somehow I think Hanzo is a slightly exaggerated version of himself: brutal, almost too self-confident, a sexual force, a hero and someone that other obviously was afraid of.

The first movie, Sword of Justice, has a weaker storyline than part 2 and 3, but very effectively sets upp the persona of Hanzo. A sado-masocist, a rapist, a torturer and someone who just don’t give a fuck about his bosses. He’s in charge and he knows it. He has enough dirt on anyone so they just leave him alone. In the second part he pretends to take hara-kiri just to scare his bosses, and this very brutal manipulation goes on one time after another. In the end of the slightly vague first movie (storywise) he stands on a big map, looking out in his town. It’s a powerful image that both evokes American cop shows and the departure from realism that you can find in mangas, comic books – when we suddenly leave the “real” environment to be in something that only can be show literary.

When the second movie starts we already know Hanzo, we’re aware of his fondness for penis-pounding, that he prefer raping women to tell them the truth (and of course he’s so good at it that they love it). The Snare, as the second movies titles is, starts with a dead woman – probably after a failed abortion, found in a mill. This leads Hanzo into a dark path, a combination between murder mystery and conspiracy. His trademark of killing enemies inside his trap-filled house is here and the sex is getting more intensive and violent. This sets a theme, money and gold, which leads into the third movie, “Who’s got the gold?” which starts in bit comical way when Hanzo wants to have sex with a ghost. He and his two servants found out that she’s not a real ghost, but placed there to scare of people to find some hidden gold – but who has stolen the gold and why is it hidden down in a lake?

I’ve heard the third movie is the weakest, but I’m not sure I can agree on that. The only weakness is that we know Hanzo’s character so well that nothing comes as a surprise. What makes it better is how much more intensive he’s decided to find out who the guilty is, including hiding in a closet for days until he can get clues he needs. One detail that I find interesting his how his servants are talking about him getting tired of women, because he seem to protect a man instead. Then they start to laugh and look at each other and say “But he has us!”, which points to the concept that he actually uses them sexually when he wants it. The affection he shows the inventor, the man he hides in his attic, is also a bit off compared to the two first adventures.

In the end the stories isn’t the most important thing with the Hanzo films. It’s the concept of being totally un-respectful at authorities, at least from Hanzo’s point of view. According to him they are just humans, greedy humans, and should be treated the way they deserve. He shows more respect towards thieves and killers, maybe because he can see himself in them. The Hanzo films are radical, both sexually (the sex scenes almost boarders to the absurd, the comical) and politically. The violence is graphic and bloody. Let me also say that it’s the third movie that has the most impressive and well-choreographed sword-scenes in the whole series, which people tend to forget when they say it’s the weakest part.

The Hanzo films are Japanese classics with a stunning performance by Katus and the rest of the actors. They are perfectly created sado-masocistic fantasies from the mind of Japanest biggest troublemaker. After a life of drugs, sex and getting into fights with Kurusawa, the great Shintarô Katsu died of cancer in 1997.

What a guy, what a guy…

The Last Dinosaur (1977)

I heard some bad things about The Last Dinosaur, but to be fair, it’s a pretty good dinosaur-adventure which got its reputation from the uneven special effects. I would say The Last Dinosaur just is rubbermonster-impaired flick, a movie which is far more ambitious than people even can imagine. It recently got a very nice DVD-R release from Warner Archive, in a nice widescreen print and also in the long original cinema-version. I can already say now, if you enjoy the rubbermonster-mayhem’s directed by Kevin Connor and starring Doug McClure, this is the movie for you.

A visibly drunk Richard Boone is Masten Thrust Jr, the richest man in the world. I’m not sure what his talent was that made him so rich, but he seem to spend most of his time hunting down endangered animals and putting them on display in his living room. But now he has a new goal, to kill… eh, study the last dinosaur in the world! So in his underwater-submarine-drilling-thingie he, Joan Van Ark, the excellent Steven Keats and (he always scream it out loud) BUNTA! (Luther Rackley) travels to Japan and to the lost world! But soon the expedition ends in disaster and Thrust is getting more and more obsessed with killing the dinosaur than just studying it, which – to say the least – causes some tension in the group.

I was prepared for a bad movie, a silly movie, and in the beginning it really felt that this was going to happen. Richard Boone look and acts like a drunk disaster behind sunglasses, stumbles on his lines (at one point he even stops acting and turns to read the script – but they use this is in editing) and is terrible. All of this is in interior shots, but somehow – when the exteriors come – he manages to actually do a good job again and the longer the script goes, the darker his character gets and also Richard Boone’s performance.

The special effects is actually nothing special or unique for us aficionado’s of Japanese monster movies. They are hokey and silly, very unconvincing, but still has that fantastic charm that only Japanese monsters can have. The suit-actors do a good job and makes us believe in what we see, even if it’s never convincing. The script is the most interesting thing. While I’m not buying young attractive blondes getting horny on old drunken Boone, his character is well-written and the tension between him and the younger members of the expedition is quite complex. In the end, it’s a very good ending by the way, it’s very clear that The Last Dinosaur probably his as much him as the dinosaur. Two dinosaurs who done their job, one last time.

If you can stand the sight of the token black guy with the name BUNTA, Japanese extras dressed as cavemen and Richard Boone going from crap to really good over the course of one single feature length movie, this is something for you. And yes, if you love rubbery dinosaurs in every corner of the frame. A movie for me, I guess.

The Werewolf and the Magic Sword (1983)

Count Waldemar Daninsky is back in action, in another dimension of his life. Yeah, another backstory, another ending, another in-between. Just the way we want it. The only really bad thing with The Werewolf and the Magic Sword is that they can’t have a motor trouble on a forest road and getting attacked by gangster, until Paul Naschy comes and saves them. Like in all of his other movies.

Bascially Paul Naschy did movies about himself, by himself and around his own persona. Very few actors can handle this egomaniacal trip (look at Tom Cruise), but Naschy has such a cool charisma, nice beard and wide chest that he can do this completely without shame. This is about him fucking maidens, if you cut away the horror parts.

In this part of the saga Daninsky and some Hungarian chick travels to Japan to find a cure for his werewolfness. But like Europe, Japan is one of those parts of the worlds where the full moon appears several times a week and this means Daninsky gets a lot of yellow flesh to eat and lots of virgin-blood to suck (I’m sure those samurais were virgins to!). They meet up and be-friends Kian (Shigeru Amachi) who soon feels guilty over not stopping Daninsky’s slaughter of the proud Japanese people. The only salvation is an evil witch… but first some maidens to make love to!

Here we have a Daninsky-movie with, it seem, higher budget and longer shooting schedule. It’s a more even movie than some of the other flicks he made during the same period, but my main complain is that it’s slightly too long. There are one or two scenes to much of him trying to get someone in bed or just walking around whining about his werewolf-illness. The werewolf action is nice, with the normal amounts of blood and with a couple of very entertaining sequences when Naschy burst into a room (or camp), just throwing people in every direction and spitting blood. Pure poetry.

Naschy is one of those actors that live on his charisma and big ego, because in his case it never was a problem with a big ego. It just made everything he did even better, more colorful and spectacular. The Werewolf and the Magic Sword is not his best movie, but it’s a good-looking production with nice production values and Naschy having a ball in the Japanese setting.

As usual, it’s recommended to everyone with a great taste in movies – and awesome Spanish macho-actors.

Tidal Wave (1975)

In his memoirs, Roger Corman mentions Submersion of Japan (1973), a big budget disaster movie from Toho, which he bought the rights to, removed most of the drama, let Joe Dante and some people at the office re-dub and added Lorne Greene as “Ambassador Warren Richards” in three scenes. The result was Tidal Wave, a movie never – what I know – released on home video, but shown on television later on. I’ve been trying to find the Corman-version for many years now, and thanks to the magic of torrents I’ve just seen it. Was it worth the wait? Ah, maybe not, but it’s still good to close that chapter of my nerd-life.

Submersion of Japan, read my review here, is actually one of my favourite disaster movies ever (together with Earthquake, Avalanche and City on Fire – even Meteor is high up among my favourite disasters). An impressive spectacle about how Japan starts to sinks, getting torn apart by earthquakes and volcano eruptions, and at the same time a low key drama about life and death and the future of the Japanese people. That last part is completely gone in this version, where we instead have a very fast-told story about some dubbed Japanese dudes talking about nothing in-between the disaster scenes and then Lorne Greene doing his job for a quick paycheck.

It’s not actually bad in boring way, but if you’ve seen the long version (which has way over an hour of more drama) it’s a thin and silly little movie which just showcases the impressive special effects and rides on the popularity of bigger disaster movies from the same time. The dubbing is very sloppy and sometimes you can notice how the voice actors talks more slow to try to fit in their words in the original lip movements. It works so-so. But like all Corman-productions there’s always entertainment and here they just jump from one disaster to another and uses that footage well. The effects are very impressive, and some scenes with people are quite gory and sadistic. It’s a Godzilla-movie without Godzilla, which is the best way to explain this version.

The title is actually most stupid thing with the whole movie, because there’s hardly any tidal wave in the story – just a short not especially impressive one at the end. The rest is earthquakes and volcano’s doing their job.

Compared to the original movie this is crap, but fun and crazy crap like we all love. I wish all versions (there’s three edits in all) could be released in a nice fat, DVD and/or Blu-Ray box for people like me to worship.

The Green Slime (1968)

I like logical titles, and The Green Slime might be the most logical title since The Blob. You get what you expect and neither of them are disappointments. The Green Slime has been in my mind for many years, since I saw it on TNT (now TCM I think) and was extremely enjoyed by its goofiness and charming execution. My memory fooled me on one detail, because I kinda expected a lot of Japanese actors too – but except the children in monster suits, this was a 100 % Caucasian monster-orgy. But that don’t matter at all, because it’s the great Kinji Fukasaku in the directors chair, Yukio Manoda and Akira Watanabe doing the special effects and the might Toei producing it! Can’t go wrong, eh?

Richard Jaeckel is Vince Elliott, the proud commander over Gamma III, an advanced space station. After saving the earth from a threatening meteorite, the accidentally bring a small sample of a green slime (surprise!) in to the space station and not long after it’s starts growing and growing and creates a horde of evil, tentacle-monsters with huge eyes and electricity inside them! A visiting colleague, Commander Jack Rankin (Robert Horton), tries to take over the station in order to save them – both of course everything goes wrong, and now it’s up to Elliott and Rankin to solve the problem, kill the monsters and get the girl!

First of all, those fuckers at MST3K should be ashamed for having (so I heard anyway) this movie for their first episode. Clearly they, just like all the episodes, they have no understanding of what they’re watching or any sense of taste. The Green Slime might be very kitchy, but it’s a damn effect sci-fi movie with a lot of excitement and action. It begins quite slow, with very colourful sets and a cheesy episode on the meteorite where they first find the green slime. But then it’s get more violent and from that moment it’s non-stop action and monster-mayhem until the last frame.

The action is intensive and a lot of fun, a high body count and a lot of tentacles electrifying blonde space marines. Fukasaku crafts a very nice atmosphere, for example in the scene where the first try to lure the monsters from the shadows with the help of some spotlights, which reminded me of more modern horror- and sci-fi movies. Can’t name any example, but it’s something with that scene that’s very familiar. I know that the Japanese version of the movie is shorter and deletes the love triangle, but I can’t ignore that fact that those scenes – and overall the interaction between Elliott and Rankin – feels very inspired, a bit edgy. It’s very easy to see Fukasaku’s style in those sequences: his use of small subtle eye movements, the editing back and forth between the rivals. It echoes of the gangster movies he made later, more than you think when you watch it the first time.

One interesting thing is that the budget seem fairly high for this movie and it’s made by brilliant Japanese technicians – but still, the miniatures looks quite primitive compared to other movies from this time. Why? Jocke at Rubbermonsterfetischism suggested that Fukasaku just didn’t have the experience to shoot effects and miniatures. Maybe he just didn’t plan enough time to shoot the effect scenes? Could be, because it’s very unusual to see weak miniatures in Japanese sci-fi movies. But I’m not really saying they’re bad, just very strongly lit and maybe too may close-ups. For a monster-nerd like me this is heaven and I love every second of the effects.

The DVD from Warner Archive is amazing. It’s not perfect, it has some scratches and dust, but who the f**k cares about that? The colours is vibrant, it’s sharp as hell (except when the lens of the camera seem a bit out of touch with what it’s trying to capture) and good sound too. This is easily one of my favourite DVDs from 2010. Its worth every penny, you can bet on it!

Visitor Q (2001)

Sometime all you need is a whack in the head with a huge stone, and everything will be alright. So seem the case with Visitor Q, Takashi Miike's ultra-lowbudget family-drama. It's a story about an ex-TV producer who wants to make a reality series about youth violence - but ends up raped by... and ice cream? Anyway, if that wasn't enough, the movie begins with a long sequence with him have sex with his daughter. His wife is a heroine-addict who is beaten bloody everyday by their teenage son - who are beaten and tortured by some other kids at school. One day the father is beaten in the head by an unknown man, brings him home and everything will change...

It's absurd to even write it, but Visitor Q is very old-fashioned. Close to conservative when it comes to family values. It's about a very dysfunctional family, who finds connection to each other by breast milk, necrophilia and murder. Throw in some shit-playing and you'll have a movie like no other. It's all made with a lot of comedy to, and when the infamous corpse-fucking scene comes it's so absurd that you just have a big fucking smile all over your face. Even when the shit comes pouring from the body and the fucking continues, because the shit works fine as lubricant!

Shot on video, both pro-equipment and with home video-cam, this is a beautiful movie that really takes advantages of the format. It might look cheap, but the story is so well written and funny that you'll forget that after the first scene. Actually, the first scene when the father has sex with his daughter is so long and realistic that even I feel awkward watching it. It almost feels illegal, or at least very private.

When the last scene comes, in the greenhouse with the blue plastic wrapped around our main characters and that nice song starts playing, it gives me goosebumps. It's so beautiful, so real, so stunningly emotional. A boy laying on a floor filled with breast milk, a prostitute daughter finally comes home. A dysfunctional family becomes maybe more dysfunctional, but accepts that and finally finds peace and happiness.

That's fucking movie poetry.

Sweet Home (1989)

Sweet Home has been on my hard drive for a long time now. There's no easy way to obtain a legal copy, so downloading is the way until there's a 4 disc Blu-Ray special edition of this awesome haunted house-movie. It was release simultaneously as a Famicom-game with the same name, and the fun trailer for the movie is plugging both of them at the same time. And the movie looks way much more fun.

A TV-crew is going to an old mansion out in the forest to restore and make a TV-episode about a famous painter and the murals that are suppose to be inside the house. It's the middle aged producer, his daughter, their female director, a camera man and the woman that's suppose to restore and examine the murals. When they arrive they find not only one mural, but several, each one more bizarre than the other... and it won't take long until one of the characters being possessed by a ghost and starting to dig up dead babies in the woods... soon they are trapped inside a building where the shadows want them dead!

No, as you understand, Sweet Home don't offer anything new at all. It's a mix between every ghost movie ever made, but with a touch of both Japanese craftmanship and not so little inspiration from Argento and his Italian colleagues of horror. Sweet Home is thick with atmosphere, which easy compensates the quite underwritten characters. Not that they are boring, but to be honest: this is a special effects movie and it's made only to scare the shit out of the Japanese audience with gore, visual effects and a big scary house.

The colors and shadows are strong, and there's no way Kiyoshi Kurosawa is trying to hide the cool stuff for his audience. You'll see people being melted in two parts, hatchet in head, graphic melting, dead babies screaming, one of the coolest final-ghosts I've ever seen in a movie. It's both rubber-deluxe and a lot of fantastic visual effects that clearly are on the same level as the Americans during this time. Dick Smith was involved in this movie too, and I have no idea how much - but the make up-effects and everything else looks amazing. His trademark old age-make up is included anyway, but I guess he had a lot of other things to do too.

But I would also say, even if the movie is so cool it's not real, that it's a bit to long. It drags even with non-stop effects and scares, and could have a lot more powerful with 10-15 minutes on the cutting room-floor, just to tighten up the pace. But maybe it would have been different in 1989, when I would never have the possibility to check Facebook or the email on my iPhone.

This is a movie that we need a remastered DVD or blu-ray of, and why there's no such thing is a mystery.

Submersion of Japan (1973)

I think the main reason why I'm so much in love with disaster movies is the miniatures. No, don't misunderstand me. I enjoy modern disaster movies too (even 2012), though they have very little of miniatures to show us. But if we go back to the glory that was the seventies, the movie producers just had to recreate the worst disaster people could imagine. Honest, Mark Robson's Earthquake is one of my favorite movies EVER - and it's still just built of silly clichés and cool miniatures. But Submersion of Japan is in a league of it's own.

Dr. Tadokoro (Keiju Kobayashi) discovers that Japan will sink. The tectonic plates is slowly moving, and Japan is right on top of the biggest one! At first he's met with scepticism, as usual, but when there's proof of a giant rift underneath the Japanese sea, everyone understand that something has to be done. The prime minister Yamamoto (played by beyond awesome actor Tetsurô Tanba) starts a huge operation to first see if there's something to do, and then how they're gonna save the 110 million Japanese citizens from a certain death! But the political consultant and wise man Watari (Shogo Shimada) has a more controversial idea: don't save anyone. Because with out a country there's no Japan and the Japanese people need a home...

When the first big earthquake hits Tokyo and levels it to the ground, the panic spreads and now Japan needs the help of the whole world, from old arch enemies China, to the US and Europe. But will they help? Japan hasn't been so helpful themselves over the years...

Submersion of Japan is very far from the typical disaster movie. It's focused on the politics and the drama around those characters. There's very few persons we follow, mostly the Prime Minister and his staff - they only exception is the ultra cool Onodera Toshio (Hiroshi Fujioka), the brave submarine-pilot that just want to save his girlfriend. A lot of the time is spent on politics and philosophical discussions and there's no Charlton Heston hamming it up to the background of a crumbling LA.

This is a Toho-production from a time when Jun Fukuda raped the Godzilla-franchise (I know, it was probably not his fault, but it still hurts) and the movies got sillier and sillier. So that's why this movie is such a surprise. It's dark and very serious, no humor and very merciless scenes of people getting crushed by houses, burned to ashes or watching their families die horrible deaths. Most of the disasters are spent from a distance, but sometimes we're suddenly back on the streets seeing how fucking terrible the situation are. The disaster scenes is not even the main thing with the movie, but are very impressive when they come. 

The highlight is probably when Tokyo is destroyed in darkness and fire, with collapsing skyscrapers and burning people. Very impressive miniature work and very different from the monster movies of that time. A lot of energy has been put on creating realistic landscapes and houses, and it all falls apart like the heydays of Toho. Excellent stuff. This movie was also bought by Roger Corman and reedited to Tidal Wave with inserts of, among others, Lorne Greene. And here's my question, Tidal Wave? The tidal waves in this movie is very few, and far from the most impressive special effects work. I wonder why Corman choose that disaster? It would have been easier just to focus more on the earthquakes and volcanos! Anyone seen the Corman-version by the way? Would love to get my hands on a copy of that!

I still think Submersion of Japan is a disaster-masterpiece, and probably my second favorite in this genre ever. The remake from 2006 is not bad by the way, but is more of a tear-jerker. It has cool disaster scenes though, and is well worth watching.

Okuribito (2008)

I had the pleasure to be invited to a press screening of Okuribito, aka Departures, in Sweden retitled Avsked. It won the Academy Award for best foreign language movie 2009 and might be a strange movie to write about here on Ninja Dixon. But even if it don't have explosions, martial arts, nudity (well...) and and robots, it's still an excellent movie.

Masahiro Motoki plays Daigo Kobayashi, a Tokyo-based cellist who just bought a cello for 18 million yen! That's close to 200 000 dollars. So of course he's happy about his work that can help him pay the instrument. One day, after a show, the owner of the orchestra announces that he's gonna close down the orchestra and Daigo stands there without money and has to go home to his wife to tell her both about the expensive cello - and that he lost his job.

They decided to go back to his hometown where they have an old house they can live in. Daigo also needs a new job and finds something in the newspaper that he think is a travel agency. The owner, Ikuei Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), likes him and gives him the job on the spot, and it's good salary too! Now Daigo realize that this is no travel agency, it's a funeral service. Their job is to prepare the bodies for the final resting place, clean it, make Buddhist-ceremonies, put make-up on, wrap it and so on. This job is taboo in Japan, and those working with is disliked, even that it's important and necessary. Daigo don't know so much about it, so he accepts and decided to hide it from his wife... It's just gonna be a short term job anyway, or...

I would say this movie is about death, grief and - most important - reconciliation. Though the subject is death, it's more about the living and the reactions around a death. Daigo also has a burden, his since long gone dad (who ran away with a younger woman) and how he stopped showing sorrow just to survive this ordeal. He escaped into the dream of being a cellist, but is that really what he wanted? For us westerners it can a bit of a surprise to understand the taboo and the traditions around death in Japan. I wasn't familiar myself with how controversial the handling of dead people is in Japan, that something so important can be despised by people. But also how this mission also is important to those who decides to work with it.

But now it sounds like this movie only is about sadness (but prepare to cry a lot too!), it's god damn funny - in that special Japanese way. The shock with Daigo has to learn the job is very funny, when he gets a surprise during one funeral and don't know how to react to that, and his first day where he is forced to be a model in a instruction video for how to prepare a dead body! The humor is subtle, but smart and warm. 

There's nothing to complain about really, like many Japanese movies the craftmanship is excellent and so are the acting. But if you're used to Japanese acting you know that it can range from very naturalistic and low profile to overacting in just a few seconds. For me, that's a part of the charm and tradition of Japanese cinema (well, most of the Asian cinema has this kind of acting). But the actors are great, everyone do a perfect job. Veteran actor Tsutomu Yamazaki (Sweet Home, a couple of Miike-movies, Deathquake, Kagemusha and Village of Eight Gravestones) is so calm, so relaxed in his role, that it wouldn't surprise me if he worked preparing bodies in secret, and handsome Masahiro Motoki seems to play cello like a master. His wife, played by Ryoko Hirosue, is fantastic and so are all the supporting actors.

So before this is being remaked as a slapstick-comedy with Seth Rogen, watch it... and bring some napkins :)

It's a limited release, so here is the list of where you can see it in cinema with start 15th of January. 

Stockholm - Bio Rio & Bio Sture
Malmö - Bio Spegeln
Lund - Bio Kino
Göteborg - Bio Roy
Karlstad - Bio Karlstad
Norrköping - Bio Cinema