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.