Your intrepid author needs a break again this week.

We shall return next week with horror movie reviews for the spooky season.

I don't like skipping weeks, and I don't like that I've done it twice now, but I'm taking on a lot of subtitling projects and 100% of my energy is currently going into that, so I do not have time to do things such as sleep or watch movies and focus on them enough to have coherent thoughts that I can turn into a review.

May I offer a mediocre group portrait of the Ultra Q crew in compensation?

Ju-on: The Curse (2000)

directed by Takashi Shimizu

Japan

70 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

_____

As I mentioned last week, I've been reading David Kalat's J-Horror book, and his treatment of movies that I had seen before but was well overdue to give a second look to has been compelling me to go back and revisit some old favorites. In particular, I enjoy his enthusiasm for V-Cin, seeing it not as a wasteland full of trashy splatter flicks but a breeding ground for creative freedom that spawned some of the scariest and most original films in J-Horror.

Ju-on: The Curse is about the house. Shimizu himself has stated that if he had to posit a main character for this strange, free-floating, non-linear film, it would be the house wherein the horror unfolds. As Kalat says, this is a real house, not a constructed set, but the cinematography (Nobuhito Kitsugi) and the lighting (Hideo Oka) manage to transform a normal house into a Skinamarink-esque labyrinth of pain and misery. There's a shot early on in the film where one of the house's unwitting inhabitants starts hearing the tell-tale moans that signify her doom is close at hand, and when she runs out of the room she's in, the hallway outside is dark and she is framed in a classic Dutch angle - the house transformed, all of a sudden, the house itself conveying the ghosts to her, not content simply to let itself be haunted but insisting that it plays a hand in the horror continuously playing out within it. There's something oppressive about the interior of the house - we see characters throw open windows to daylight; look outside; enter and exit, but as long as they're physically inside the house, it could be as dark or as light as the house wants it to be.

It feels like there's too many stairs, too many angles. Not in an obtrusive way - just subtly. I kept catching scenes where the actors were framed inside doors or windows, boxed in by the house (perhaps, if I may be allowed to risk committing the sin of unforgivable pretentiousness, by the house). During that most famous scene at the end of the film I had a thought that somehow hadn't occurred to me before: "oh, wow, the house is giving birth to Kayako". Sliding down the stairs, wet and blood-matted, there's something disturbingly biological about the whole affair.

It kind of feels like one of those dreams where you're in a house that you used to live in, but something is not right about it.

The plot of Ju-on is deliberately told as a disjointed collection of scenes that aren't arranged in chronological order. When Kobayashi (the appropriately-named Yūrei Yanagi) discusses his missing student Toshio (Ryōta Kayama) with his pregnant wife Manami (Yue), the narrative flashes to a memory - whether it's of the past or of the future, we don't exactly know - that foretells the rest of the film. Kayako bows to him slowly, itself not an unusual action but disconcerting in the way it allows her long hair to fall in front of her face as she advances, out-of-focus, towards Kobayashi. It's not clear what the timeline is here: we see Toshio variously alive and dead at different points as the movie progresses. It's not that we never figure out what events set other events in motion - it's that everything seems to be happening at once.

Aside from how effective this movie is, what's also impressive is the influence it had. From the way Kalat describes it, the film garnered a reputation essentially through people spreading it around Ring cursed videotape style and telling all their friends "Have you seen this? It's the scariest thing I've ever watched". While it is not a perfect film and some aspects of it do still manage to feel superfluous despite its short running time, there's a core of pure, unrefined architectural horror goodness here that went on to have a ripple effect on horror as a whole down the line - much like the violent deaths of Kayako and Toshio Saeki would forever curse the space around where it happened, reaching out and touching any and all who come too close.

Long Dream (2000)

directed by Higuchinsky

Japan

58 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

____

I originally watched Long Dream a while ago but decided to give it another look since I'm in the middle of David Kalat's J-Horror book and it's making me nostalgic for movies I haven't seen in a decade. I have very fond memories of being in less-than-ideal situations during which I spent my free time reading volumes and volumes of Junji Ito - wasting an entire day reading Hellstar Remina in the spare room of my grandmother's apartment was a formative time for me. That being said, I don't remember Long Dream well enough to compare it to this film, so I'm going to leave that aside and focus on the movie alone.

Conceptually - and this is where it does owe a debt to the original Ito manga, of course - you can't really get more unsettling than this. The idea of people having "long dreams" where they live enormous chunks of time somewhere outside of physical reality while their bodies appear asleep to outside observers is downright horrifying. It starts with relatively small spans - a week, a month, a year - but then devolves into scenarios of unimaginable torture. Spending eight years of objective time searching for a bathroom. Experiencing every second of a dream in which you're a soldier hiding out in the jungle forced to auto-cannibalize to stay alive. And all the while gradually mutating into some other form of humanity the further into the future you go, becoming unrecognizable, a thing from another time, another place, alienated from everyone you may once have known.

While Long Dream does get the point of this scenario's implications across quite well, I think it fumbles a bit in trying to stretch out the manga to even the short length of the film. Dr. Kuroda's (weird-ass) personal life isn't a part of the original manga, although his questionable medical ethics were, and while it does provide more depth to the story and a slightly disquieting sense that the "long dreams" cannot be contained to one person, it's also just kinda your run-of-the-mill Dead Wife Backstory that I didn't feel particularly engaged with, capped off with an ending that in anything else would have been an unforgivable cliche but actually kind of works here.

But isn't it spooky? The little details are where the movie really gets you. If I may be allowed to get into the weeds a bit here, I think the reason why watching Mukouda slowly mutate as he experiences jaunts further and further into the future is the same reason why séances and Victorian spirit mediums were so effective (setting aside the overwhelming need people felt to contact their deceased loved ones). You, an outsider (Mukouda's medical team), are witnessing a medium (Mukouda) engage not bodily but mentally with another place or another plane of existence that is forbidden to you, and the only testament to what that place is like is the medium's reaction. Us normal people cannot go there, but we can watch someone else go there. But because Mukouda's mental state eventually begins to deteriorate, we don't really even get clear testimony of where he's going, and that makes it scarier. All we can tell is that it's someplace where humans have become very, very different from what they are now.

After this, I think Uzumaki is due for a rewatch and possibly a re-read as well, although based on other people's accounts, the anime adaptation was so profoundly disappointing that it will not be part of my Uzumaki experience going forward.

Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan (1987)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

47 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

____

The last movie I watched before this one was Hideo Gosha's Goyokin. Only real cinema for me, thank you.

It's easy to put on Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan and just think "oh, this is bad". I admit I thought that at the start. This is compounded by the fact that I still haven't quite figured Minoru Kawasaki out, despite how many of his films I've watched; I'm never entirely sure when he intends for us to laugh at something and when we're meant to be laughing with it. But the further Iko-chan goes, the clearer things become: Kawasaki understands tokusatsu intimately. I don't think - and I could be wrong here, because I still haven't read any statements from the director himself - any of this is intended in a mean-spirited way. Tokusatsu is the kind of thing where even though us fans love it dearly and defend its genuine artistic merit wholeheartedly, we are, at least every once in a while, guilty of laughing at it a little when it's not trying to be funny.

The protagonist of the film is Iko Kawai, a schoolgirl of no particular importance until she chances upon an alien who gives her a magical pink headset that can give her special powers and grant wishes. Iko, being possessed of a pure heart, uses the headset to stop a rampaging kaiju by communicating with it and finding out that it's not really mad or hateful, it just doesn't like living in a monstrous body that it never asked to be born in. (So right off the bat there's your transgender subtext.) She shrinks it down to a smaller size and it eventually repays the favor later on in the film. From there, as a matter of course, Iko finds herself drawn to the obligatory vaguely useless defense team, which counts among their members a very useless kyodai hero. Tension ramps up when Iko helps out two wounded Martians who tell her that their planet has been taken over by an evil dictator who plans on deploying a bomb that kills all humans but leaves everything else untouched.

If this sounds goofy, it's because it is. And it's meant to be. Akiko Isozaki, who plays Iko, is very obviously not a great actress, but she does feel like she's trying, and that authentically amateur performance accounts for a lot of Iko's charm. The kaiju suits and puppets are inordinately good for something this low-budget (I genuinely thought they'd managed to commandeer a Baragon suit for a few seconds) and the acting behind them is also top-notch - god, those Martians, the puppeteers really knew how to get emotion out of a face that has about as much expression as Kermit the Frog when someone's hand is up him. This movie is silly but it isn't cynical. It's exactly what the people who made it wanted it to be.

I can't really put my finger on exactly what it is about this movie that makes it so good, but it is So Good. I'm going to quote from its current top review on Letterboxd by the eloquent and well-stated "PeepeeDoodooBitch ?" to make up for my lack of insight: "[...]pure and unadulterated passion that manifests in the form of over ambitious props and special effects, fast little story lines carefully crafted to utilize all of the film’s minuscule budget, and gloriously weird moments and plots that are absent of studio interference. "

The Age of Assassins (1967)

directed by Kihachi Okamoto

Japan

99 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

____

Kihachi Okamoto is one of my favorite directors. His filmography is a bit unusual because each of what I would consider his "great films" (or even good films) are very distinctive from each other. While he certainly does have a trademark style that's present even in the late-'50s work he considered "just doing a job", it's hard to imagine the same person who made The Age of Assassins made Sword of Doom and by that token it's hard to imagine the same person who made Sword of Doom also made University Bandits. But the majority of his films seem to be united by a philosophy that is as nihilistic as it is absurdist: in movies like Age of Assassins and to an extent many of his more socially critical war films, there's something deeply wrong with the world, something rotten that is inherent in the way society functions, and the only way to really deal with it is to just be insane, because the world itself is insane, corrupt, and morally bankrupt, and we're all going to die eventually, probably at the hands of our fellow human beings in some way or another. I think it's impossible to separate this common thread running through all of Okamoto's films from the fact that he himself had seen active combat during the war - something that you feel more than anything in the way he shoots his action sequences.

At least, that's what I get out of it.

The Age of Assassins is one of his most boundary-pushing films, at times feeling like it has a vague notion of being film noir but too fond of the '60s avant-garde movement within Japanese cinema to really push in that direction. It's a hard movie to write about because it gives you almost nothing. Upon first watch, it can feel almost plotless; events happen according to a logic that is known only to the characters within the film. I think this is, in large part, because the protagonist of the movie spends the entire thing knowing exactly what's going on but not letting on to either the viewer or anybody around him that he knows what's going on.

Tatsuya Nakadai plays Shinji Kikyo, outwardly a scruffy, scatterbrained college professor but internally an enigma. He is targeted by a murder association in league with the Nazi Party for reasons that remain fairly murky throughout the entire film. At first he seems to just be an unfortunate bystander, the third in a line of random killings that the Nazis demand the murder association commit to prove the viability of their plan to train residents of an insane asylum to be professional killers (or maybe just killers). But then it starts to seem like that might have been a ruse when it's revealed that he was injured in Nazi Germany as a young boy and a Nazi surgeon took the opportunity to hide a precious diamond within his body. For anyone in this film to have a motivation so clear and comprehensible as wanting to steal a diamond is almost laughable, though - whatever is going on with Kikyo and why everybody wants to kill him is still something that, three rewatches later, I have trouble straightening out in my head.

The strength of this movie comes largely from the performances of Nakadai as Kikyo and also of Hideyo Amamoto as Shogo Mizorogi, mastermind of the murder association and the primary villain of the film. Nakadai does this thing throughout the movie where he very slowly sheds his nerdy professor disguise with such subtlety that halfway through the film you start thinking "wait a minute, is this still that weird guy we saw at the beginning?" Kikyo is a master of the long game, and it's only after we've watched the movie (preferably more than once) that we can see several moments where it's obvious that he's far more aware of what he's involved in than he lets on. Seeing Hideyo Amamoto play a villain is nothing unusual (in fact it's more unusual when he's not the villain in whatever movie he's in) but as Mizorogi he's got an edge that his villain performances don't typically have. While Kikyo's motivations remain largely personal for the entire film, Mizorogi is very open and philosophical about his beliefs about mass murder; it's a bit of a reverse-card version of the usual good vs. bad format, where the hero is plain-spoken and relatable and the villain remains a spooky unknown.

I don't think Toho was entirely comfortable with how out there this movie was, and for that matter I don't think any other studio was, either. Even Nikkatsu apparently decided to pass on it, and Toho shelved it for a while before finally releasing it very quietly in 1967. It was not promoted, was released along with a racing documentary that was not expected to draw high viewership, and was scheduled for release in February, the month with the lowest theater attendance. From its birth it seems like Age of Assassins was destined to be a cult classic only, and that makes sense; there's something too vicious about it for polite society, something a little too incisive and nasty, presented in a way that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But it is one of my favorite Okamoto movies, and one of my favorite movies in general, because it is all of those things and it's also really fun. It wants you to have fun with murder. It's gleeful in its depiction of madness and death. It's an Okamoto movie to the core, made great by its cast and cinematography, and it's something that benefits greatly from more than one viewing.

The Viper Brothers (1971)

directed by Sadao Nakajima

Japan

87 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

____

Does anybody else remember the joke where somebody hears a sinister-sounding guy outside his door saying "I am the viper! I am the viper!" and he's all scared until finally the guy says "I come to vipe your vindows"? That isn't relevant here, just thought I'd mention it.

I don't believe I've ever reviewed a yakuza movie before, mostly because the vast majority of them tend to blend together in my brain. I always have fun watching them, but afterward I sometimes have trouble remembering exactly what went on in which one; exceptions made for the really really good ones, the classics of the genre like Violent Streets and Cops vs. Thugs. While The Viper Brothers isn't the single greatest yakuza movie of all time, the strength of its two leads and the solid direction by possibly my favorite yakuza director Sadao Nakajima make this one more memorable than your average outing.

The film follows two sworn brothers, Masa (Bunta Sugawara) and Katsuji (Tamio Kawachi), who are more enthusiastic about the idea of being yakuza than they are about actually being yakuza. The first shot of the film shows Masa getting out of his 12th stint in jail, and we can tell right away from how the shot is framed that this is a movie with style: Masa stands dwarfed by the massive wall outside the jail, looming over him almost like it's threatening to swallow him back up - which it will, eventually, and probably for the rest of his life. His brother Katsuji on the outside quickly gets him up to speed on all the latest fashions among the modern punks and they have a bad time trying to eat at a fancy French restaurant. All of this is to introduce us to them as characters but also, more subtly, to introduce one of two female characters, Sayako (Tomomi Satō), who Katsuji tries to pay to get her to have sex with Masa. (The movie is not as bad about women as a lot of yakuza flicks, but it's still gross-ish.)

While The Viper Brothers isn't an out-and-out comedy, it does have some humorous elements. But that humor is used in service of what is actually a fairly devastating bigger picture. Masa and Katsuji's antics as they try as hard as possible to perform the duties involved in being Bad Dudes are funny, but ultimately this is a story about two guys who were cast aside by the world and are spending their lives self-destructively trying to figure out how to fit into whatever parts of society are left to them after growing up in orphanages and juvie leaves them with no practical skills other than dirty tricks and violence. They aren't "bad people" - Masa almost instantly has concern for the film's secondary female character, a 15-year-old girl named Yuki (Keiko Yamada) who has dropped out of school to care for her siblings, and Katsuji eventually feels bad for stealing some fruit.

There's a thing about masculinity here that I thought was really interesting too - Masa begging practically on his hands and knees to be given a tattoo because he's so certain that that's the key to finally Being A Man, finally making something of himself, as if the role he so desires is something he can just put on and wear, externally, superficially. It would be easier if it was.

Essentially the entire reason why I wanted to review this is because there are two moments that made me think "okay, this is not your typical yakuza movie". The first was when Masa and Katsuji are driving to the final raid and all the background noise drops out and is replaced with a woman's voice singing. We the viewers can hear it but so do the characters, somehow, and Katsuji tries to remember why he knows it - maybe it was his mother who sang it for him, he says, and both seem to relive, for a moment, life before they were forced to fend for themselves. The second moment is the very last shot of the film, the two of them walking together in the rain as we see their elaborate back tattoos washing off. I thought that was just one of the most brilliant shots I've ever seen in a yakuza movie. It's not how you expect that sort of thing to end; usually the main characters end up dying in a blaze of glory or getting sent to jail, or returning to fight again in the sequel. But Masa and Katsuji just kind of... decide to call it quits. We see the remnants of their old life of violence literally washing away. It was a beautiful way to end a movie that, while it had a slightly uneven second act, is one of the better yakuza films I've watched recently.

Murder on D Street (1998)

directed by Akio Jissōji

Japan

95 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

____

The murder in Murder on D Street doesn't occur until well over halfway through the film. As with most murder mysteries, following the murder there is an investigation (here conducted by Edogawa Ranpo's detective character Kogoro Akechi, played by erstwhile Yasunori Katō Kyūsaku Shimada, nearly unrecognizable with a goatee), but even this is decentralized from the plot. The murder and subsequent investigation, in fact, feels like it derails the plot; it interrupts what had been a perfectly good sequence of voyeuristic glimpses into the weird little private lives of some somewhat well-off business owners ca. 1927.

Hiroyuki Sanada plays Fukiya, an art forger, who is possibly the closest thing we have to a "protagonist". Fukiya is hired to produce sophisticated forgeries of classic pornographic art prints for Tokiko Sunaga, the wife of a ramen shop owner (Yumi Yoshiyuki) - herself later revealed to have been the model for the original artist. Fukiya, somewhat abruptly, murders his client after she discovers that Fukiya had been sneaking a little too much of himself into the forgeries he was giving her: painting a small mole - his own - onto the faces of the women in the prints. What exactly his motive was, though, I can only assume; we don't, if I'm remembering the film correctly, ever see that Fukiya has discovered that Sunaga has discovered what he's done with the prints (although she has). He simply decides that she has to die.

We're introduced to Akechi, again, well over halfway through, and this is not the smooth, confident Detective Akechi of later adaptations but a disheveled recluse living alone surrounded by stacks of novels in a room he doesn't pay the rent for. The reason for Akechi's seemingly having fallen into a deep depression is not explained by the plot, nor is his springing into action with no trace of his temporary ennui after the murder is committed. It's almost like - and this is about to bring me to my main point about this film - the murder activates him. He becomes a detective again because the plot needs him. Because the viewers need him. The Akechi we see in his dirty rented room is the offscreen, off-page Akechi; he only becomes Akechi when he has something to investigate.

What I took away from this movie was that it was a study of art and literature and how the act of reading something that someone else has written or viewing something that someone else has drawn carries with it an inherent perversion, an inherent voyeurism. The characters in Murder on D Street encounter the fantasies of others within novels and paintings and then replicate them in their own lives: Fukiya becomes the subject of the paintings he's faking, paintings in which Sunaga became the subject of torture scenes from a play that the artist Shundei painted her into. We can read a weird book or watch a weird movie and become aware of the internal lives of others in ways that are not acceptable to demonstrate openly in polite society. So much of Ranpo's work seems to reflect this: intellectual characters with secrets, violating societal norms with each other.

When you watch a Jissōji movie, you kind of know what you're going to get: disorienting camera angles framing nearly every shot, a pervasive and discordant soundtrack even during innocuous scenes, a stance on eroticism where it's almost impossible to tell if the director is condemning or celebrating it, and characters who feel as if they're completely unaware they're fictional. Murder on D Street features an interesting framing device where we occasionally see the set as a paper diorama assembled and moved by someone clearly from contemporary times, rather than the early Showa era where the film is set. Using this device Jissōji reminds us that everything we're seeing is a façade, but he also invites us to be participants. The murder feels unimportant, but everything else is.