Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters (1968)

directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda

Japan

80 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I'm going to be screening the third film in the '60s Yokai Monsters trilogy pretty soon, so I figured I should have a review up of at least one of them.

This comes from Daiei back when they still had some kind of a budget, and it looks gorgeous. I remember the first time I watched this I got almost emotional seeing the kasa-obake puppet because something about it is so striking, despite its inherently silly vibe. Puppeteering just gets me, man - the way that thing moves and dances, it really looks like it's had life breathed into it. I might like the kasa-obake more than all the other yokai combined.

I think the most interesting thing about this movie is how the various human characters interact with the yokai - not even always the yokai themselves, just the hints and rumors of them. The story is centered around the impending destruction of a tenement house and the forced eviction of its residents following one of the owners getting blackmailed into selling his property, and when I first watched it, I got the impression that the residents were using the yokai as a kind of weapon against their would-be evictors. But now I'm realizing that that isn't quite the case.

Every side in this - humans, greedy developers, and yokai - moves independently of one another, although they are all ultimately intertwined. It takes a long time for the land developers to figure out that they're being besieged by yokai as a direct result of their greed, and if I'm remembering correctly (full disclosure, I just finished watching this 10 minutes ago, so if I'm not remembering correctly, there is probably something wrong with me) the tenement residents barely even mention the yokai, if at all. The picture I'm getting from this is a kind of GMK guardian spirits idea: the yokai guard the land, and if the people on that land can live in harmony with them - which, in this case, they do - then that's great. But if not, human lives aren't their concern.

The pacing of this thing is really its only problem, but it's a problem that is familiar to anybody who watches a lot of jidaigeki. I think this movie can be somewhat handicapped by modern ideas of the horror genre, despite being such a great Halloween watch, because if you go into it expecting a horror movie period, you'll probably be disappointed when you get jidaigeki with a side of monsters. But that's by design, and when the film decides to go whole hog - like the finale, and the scene where the last surviving would-be evictor is menaced by a troupe of yokai - it's pretty awesome.

The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty (1957)

directed by Kyōtarō Namiki

Japan

73 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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Let's just get it out of the way: this movie's claim to fame is that it was playing in the theater that the creator of the video game Earthbound accidentally walked into as a child and it traumatized him so bad he eventually turned that memory into Giygas, famously one of the most viscerally terrifying video game enemies of all time.

The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty is a slightly spooky murder mystery set, as the title would imply, within the military,  ~10 years prior to the present day as of its release. The film opens with the murder itself: we find out that someone - it's not clear who - murdered his pregnant girlfriend and dumped her dismembered body in a well because she was becoming too insistent on him marrying her, and he wanted to continue to fool around. It's true that this is a bit more lurid than other contemporary films, since it's Shintoho, but all of this is depicted in a way that would seem pretty tame to our modern sensibilities. In fact the scene that gave rise to Giygas was not actually a thing that ever happened in the film: Shigesato Itoi walked in on the murder scene and thought he was seeing a rape scene, which, although many horrible acts are committed in this film, is not something that's ever shown on screen.

I'm rewriting paragraphs a lot while trying to review this because I can't decide how I feel about it. The hints of the supernatural that lurk in the corners of the film are restrained so much that they're barely there, and on the one hand that feels like a tease, but on the other it gives the whole thing a sense of mystery. This isn't the scene that Itoi was so affected by, but one of the creepiest parts of the whole film is a shot that lasts all of maybe 30 seconds where the protagonist (played by Kiriyama taichou himself, Shoji Nakayama) thinks he sees the specter of the murdered woman in a window - but it's only a cat. The dead woman haunts the plot, if not in the sense of her actual ghost being there, then in the sense that her murder bothers Kosaka and his strong sense of morality - despite his obligation as a military policeman - enough to spur him to investigate when everyone around him just wants to speed up a confession, even if it's from the wrong man.

The moral implications of the film are what drive the central conflict between Kosaka and the rest of the characters: although he is also a soldier, he disagrees with the cruelty he sees from the men in the military around him, who are quick to torture someone who might be innocent just to get a neat resolution to the murder case. There's a few twists and turns to the plot and a satisfying reveal at the end that leaves no detail unexplained - it's a perfectly serviceable murder mystery at its core, and a ghost story as an afterthought.

If you want to watch a supernatural mystery set in the military that stars both Shoji Nakayama and Shigeru Amachi, you're way better off watching Ghost in the Regiment, which is much more eerie and atmospheric. I kept thinking about how good this one could have been if it were in the hands of Nobuo Nakagawa. If it had pushed a little harder with the shadowy, ghostly vibes, The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty might have gotten a higher rating from me, but as it is, although it was a solid and enjoyable movie, it feels somewhat rote.