Tag: Ei Ogawa

The Age of Assassins (殺人狂時代, Kihachi Okamoto, 1967)

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“Hey, what’s going on around here?” a sidekick asks directly to camera at the conclusion of Kihachi Okamoto’s characteristically anarchic conspiracy-thriller-cum-spy-spoof The Age of Assassins (殺人狂時代, Satsujinkyo Jidai). Sparked by Bond mania, the late 1960s saw a marked trend in B-movie espionage parody though Okamoto’s take on the genre is darker than the norm even if embracing his trademark taste for absurdist humour leaving us wondering who our hero really is and which side, if any, he’s really on in the confusing geopolitical realities of 1967 Japan. 

As we first meet him, the hero is bumbling professor of criminal psychology Shinji Kikyo (Tatsuya Nakadai) who has extreme myopia and a persistent case of athlete’s foot not to mention a prominent mother complex. Unbeknownst to him, he’s one of three targets picked not quite at random by Rudolf von Bruckmayer (Bruno Lucique), former Gestapo chief, who is interested in hiring some assassins trained by the megalomaniac psychiatrist Mizorogi (Hideyo Amamoto) who’s been turning his mentally distressed patients into hyper-efficient killing machines (sometimes literally) under the rationale that all great men throughout history have been in a certain sense “crazy”. Mizorogi is also in charge of a eugenicist project titled “The Greater Japan Population Control Council” which believes that Japan is already overpopulated but they have to ensure that “the lives of people who might become useful in the future must not be destroyed before they’re born.” Therefore, “the people who will be useless should be asked to bow out”, the assassin calmly explains shortly before Shinji is saved by the divine energy of his late mother as her bust falls from a shelf and knocks the killer out. 

The central conceit plays into a real anxiety about the post-war baby boom expressed in earlier films such as Yuzo Kawashima’s Burden of Love while attacking the capitalistic philosophy that regards some people as more useful than others. By the late 1960s, Nazis had begun to make frequent appearances in these kinds spy spoofs as comedy villains usually crazed to the point of being little real threat. Mizorogi too is eventually exposed as exalting the “mad” interested more in the art of chaos and the impulse to murder than in any greater political goal. Indeed, the central MacGuffin turns out to be less to do with a grand conspiracy to create some kind of super society than the very B-movie-esque missing diamond known as Cleopatra’s Tear.

Okamoto piles each of these subplots one on top of the other as if he were making it up as he goes along suddenly undercutting what we thought we knew with an unexpected reversal. Shedding his glasses and shaving his scraggly beard, Shinji shifts from myopic professor to suave super agent using profiling and psychology to stay one step ahead while encountering plots by spiritualist cults, overly cheerful self defence force officers in the middle of training exercises, and eccentric assassins. From a modern standpoint, it might seem uncomfortable that each of the killers is manifesting disability in order to seem non-threatening, a female operative concealing a deadly weapon behind an eyepatch, while her poetry-obsessed colleague stores his in a fake crutch, but then again they are each pawns of a game being played by the crazed Mizorogi. Aided by female reporter Keiko (Reiko Dan) and car thief sidekick Otomo Bill (Hideo Sunazuka), Shinji seems to bumble from one bizarre episode to another but may actually be far more in charge of the situation than we might have assumed. 

Among the most visually striking of Okamoto’s late ‘60s pictures and once again making great use of animation, Age of Assassins features high concept production design, Mizorogi’s asylum lair a maddening corridor of Omega-shaped passages with ornate cell bars on either side behind which we can see a room full of men often engaged in what seems to be a military exercise regime while the plaster effigies of human form seem to be bursting from the walls. As in all of Okamoto’s films the central message lies in the absurdity of violence suggesting in a sense that the dog-eat-dog ethos of contemporary capitalist consumerism is in itself a kind of internecine madness countered only by Shinji’s rather childish mentality crafting his various gadgets out of household objects while attacking this elitist individualism with nothing more sophisticated than a vegetable peeler. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Black Gambler (黒い賭博師, Ko Nakahira, 1965)

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Black Gambler posterNikkatsu’s “Mighty Guy” Akira Kobayashi occupied a very particular space in the studio’s collection of leading men. Where Yujiro Ishihara was known for his roguish cheek, Tetsuya Watari for his bruiser nobility, and Joe Shishido for his detached efficiency, Kobayashi’s chief selling point was his gentlemanly charm and unflappable decency. The “Gambler” series which ran to eight films in all cast him as a James Bond-esque wandering cardsharp with a well tailored suit and keen intellect capable of defeating even the most devious of opponents. The sixth in the series, simply titled The Black Gambler (黒い賭博師, Kuroi Tobakushi), finds Koji Himuro (Akira Kobayashi) returning to Tokyo and straight into the middle of international intrigue as he gets mixed up with a global gambling syndicate hellbent on bringing its particular brand of funny business to the Japanese capital.

Himuro, renowned for his skills at the gaming table, is called to an exclusive gambling party where he entertains the French Ambassador and ruins a cheating rival in the process. Inumaru (Asao Koike), humiliated by his defeat, sends his mistress Reiko (Manami Fuji) to spy on Himuro and figure out all his secrets so they can get their revenge. However, Himuro gets himself mixed up in a bigger crisis when he comes to the rescue of a foreign woman in a park running away from a scary looking gangster. The woman, Nina, claims to be an air stewardess flown in from Hong Kong who has fallen foul of a Chinese gangster named Yang. Yang has apparently tricked her into amassing vast debts and thereafter attempted to recoup his investment in other ways. Himuro is a noble sort of guy and so decides to pay off Nina’s debt by defeating Yang in a game of cards, but Yang is a different kind of opponent than he’s hitherto faced and Himuro finds himself floundering unable to figure out Yang’s particular cheat.

Nikkatsu’s action line was famous for its “borderless” approach, making an international milieu one of its many selling points. This is not to say its vision of global Japan was altogether positive – in fact the reverse was often true. Once again, the Chinese have been designated the criminal element of choice with Yang painted as a villainous cheater complete with a horrible Fu Manchu beard and delirious cackle, sure that his unique method for ensuring victory cannot be beaten. Meanwhile, Himuro’s first engagement dropped him straight into a world of international diplomacy and it comes as no surprise to learn that Yang’s activities are merely a facet of a wider conspiracy which turns out to be run by a Jewish gambler who apparently used his ill gotten gambling gains to finance the Nazis during the second world war. Perhaps it’s wise not to even start trying to unpack that one.

Himuro’s upscale world of high stakes games played in well appointed rooms by men wearing tuxedos and drinking martinis may be a world away from the dirty backstreet shenanigans of Nikkatsu’s other gambling adventures, but there is bite in its defiant bid for frivolity. When Himuro first rocks up at the French Ambassador’s residence, his assistant doesn’t really want to let him in. He is infuriated that with a war going on in Vietnam his boss is taking time out to play silly games of chance rather than getting on the with real business of diplomacy. Vietnam is referenced again in the ironic closing freeze frame in which Himuro covers his face with a newspaper bearing the headline “America bets on bombing North Vietnam” – politics itself is now a game played by men in smart suits trying to stave off the boredom of being alive by using the lives of real men and women as gambling chips with little more feeling for them than for the tiny scraps of plastic which stand in for meaningless little bits of paper in the centre of a table covered in green felt.

Women, it seems, are a more immediate casualty of a gambler’s vice. Reiko, sent to spy on Himuro but drawn to his cardsharp’s acumen, was herself gambled away by her father who lost her to Inumaru in a bet. She holds no affection for the man who won her, but feels bound to him all the same and has vowed to become a top gambler as an odd kind of revenge. Nina too suffers at the hands of gangsters and criminals, drawn to Himuro because of his heroic nobility and unable to escape the underground world of grifters and chancers without the help of a seasoned player.

Sticking to a house style, Nakahira finds little scope to express himself in another B-movie adventure for the sophisticated gambling man. Nevertheless, there’s enough Bond-inspired silliness to keep the franchise fans happy from Himuro’s ball bearing loaded car to the gaming intrigue and intricate cheats that define it. The Black Gambler is a fairly typical example of Nikkatsu’s regular programme picture with little to distinguish it but it does what it sets out to well enough and with crowd pleasing style.

Opening scene (no subtitles)

Evil of Dracula (血を吸う薔薇, Michio Yamamoto, 1974)

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Evil of Dracula posterThe first two of Michio Yamamoto’s “vampire” movies for Toho made a valiant attempt to repurpose the idea of the bloodsucking ghoul to explore something other than their usual reason for being. In The Vampire Doll, the vampiress at the centre was a knife wilding, grudge bearing ghost of vengeance in keeping with the familiar image from Japanese folklore. In Lake of Dracula, Dracula was (uncomfortably) a bearer of bad blood and a symbol of the destructive capabilities of a repressed memory. Evil of Dracula (血を吸う薔薇, Chi wo Su Bara) takes us back to source as this time Dracula really is a sex crazed, bloodsucking maniac with a sideline in strange ambitions which include being the headmaster of an all girls’ high school in a no horse town somewhere in the frozen north.

Professor Shiraki (Toshio Kurosawa) gets off the train in a tiny provincial town but there’s no welcoming party there to great him. The station seems to work on an honour system and he drops his money in the box, but when Shiraki walks past the ticket office there is an employee, only he seems to be allergic to customers. The attendant gruffly explains that there are no busses running today and goes back to his paper, leaving Shiraki to wonder what to do next. Someone from the school he’ll shortly be working at eventually comes to fetch him but Mr. Yoshii (Katsuhiko Sasaki) is a bit strange too. It’s nothing, however, next to his new employer (Shin Kishida) whom, he learns, was widowed a few days ago when his wife died in a terrible car accident. In fact the headmaster’s wife is still at rest in the cellar – a “local custom” apparently demands holding off on burial for seven days while praying for the deceased’s “resurrection”. Shiraki is surprised to learn from the headmaster that he is being groomed as a potential successor which is why he asks him to stay over so they can get to know each other better. Whilst there, however, Shiraki has a “dream” in which he’s attacked by (he presumes) the headmaster’s wife and another much younger woman dressed in blue…

Evil of Dracula situates itself neatly in the middle of the girls’ school exposé, upping the camp factor with its overexcited adolescent girls apparently chomping at the bit for a little male attention. Shiraki is the new psychology teacher and one would expect him to be a paragon of ethics and an astute judge of character. He is, however, very much of his time and has a distinctly ‘70s approach to sexual politics. When the girls, flirting with him while he (refusing to deflect) appears flattered, complain to him about the “creepy” Mr. Yoshii who keeps leering at them from behind chainlink fences, he tells them Yoshii can’t be blamed because the girls are all so pretty to which they giggle and turn coy. Of course, they’ve all instantly fallen in love with Mr. Shiraki but unbeknownst to them there’s much more going on with creepy guys at the school than they could ever have guessed.

Shiraki finds out a girl recently went missing (apparently that’s something that happens often enough that no one thinks much of it), and can’t get it out of his mind that that’s the girl he saw in his “dream” even though he obviously didn’t know what she looked like. Meanwhile another of his charges, Kyoko (Keiko Aramaki), has turned pale and entered a semi-catatonic state. Her friends have agreed to stay behind and look after her while everyone else goes on vacation but Shiraki remains worried, especially as the school’s folklore obsessed doctor (Kunie Tanaka) has told him what happened to his predecessor.

Yamamoto goes back to source in partially blaming the girls for being led to destruction, allowing their nascent sexuality to pull them into the path of a supernatural evil rather than remaining chaste and innocent as schoolgirls should, punishing them for being flattered when Shiraki (with a slightly condescending air) tells them they can’t be annoyed by men looking them because that’s their fault too in being so very “pretty”. This time around the vampires like to bite their prey above the heart which takes us into the artier realms of exploitation as blood drips salacious from the girls’ bared breasts, though Yamamoto does his best to mitigate the sleaze factor by pushing a heavily romanticised gothic aesthetic complete with innocent white roses which ultimately turn a violent blood red once the vampires have had their way.

Once again, the “corruption” is foreign born though this time it has a Japanese catalyst, as folklore expert Dr. Shimomura explains. Long ago, a European washed up in Japan after a shipwreck, but he was a Christian when Christianity was illegal. He was persecuted, they made him betray his god and it turned him into a bloodsucking demon whose rage has lived on through a succession of Japanese hosts for more than a century. Why he particularly wants to be the headmaster of an elite girls boarding school in the middle of nowhere is never explained but it does at least seem to give him ready access not only to young and innocent victims, but also to weak willed minions.

The police, deciding vampires aren’t in their remit, declare themselves disinterested leaving Shiraki all that stands between the innocent young girls and the bloodsucking predator. The atmosphere is florid in the extreme, each frame filled with a macabre beauty as bodies fall artfully and vampires move with the elegance of dancers, but Yamamato also gives free reign to Hammer-inflected camp humour as hands almost wave from an open coffin behind the still unsuspecting Shiraki and the headmaster comes to a sticky end on the point of his own poker. Repeating the death motif from the second film which itself echoed Christopher Lee’s demise in the 1958 Hammer classic, romanticism is where Yamamoto chooses to end as his vampires decay, melting into skeletons but together, caught in one last gesture of an oddly eternal “love”.

Evil of Dracula is the third of three films included in Arrow’s Bloodthirsty Trilogy box set which also includes extensive liner notes by Jasper Sharp detailing the history of vampires and horror cinema in Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Lake of Dracula (呪いの館 血を吸う眼, Michio Yamamoto, 1971)

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Lake of Dracula posterThe Vampire Doll, the first in a loose trilogy of films along vampiric themes released by Toho in the 1970s, had done its best to relocate Hammer-style horror to contemporary Japan. Adopting the best of the gothic from thundery skies to creepy mansions in the middle of nowhere, Vampire Doll successfully merged the Japanese longhaired grudge bearing ghost with the “romantic” bloodsucking tragedy of a young woman corrupted by illicit desires (though in this case for revenge). Returning to the theme a year later, Michio Yamamoto steps away from Japanese folklore altogether and positions his “foreign” Dracula as a “living” embodiment of repressed trauma, sucking the life out of his unwitting enemy until she finally learns to remember him, burning him away in the bright sunlight of his own eye.

Unlike Vampire Doll, Lake of Dracula (呪いの館 血を吸う眼, Noroi no Yakata: Chi wo Su Me) begins with a short prologue in which some children play on a rocky outcrop underneath a strangely ominous pink sky. When little Akiko’s pet dog Leo uncharacteristically runs off, she follows him and he leads her straight into the path of danger. Finding herself in a creepy mansion complete with stained glass windows and a dead body posed at a piano, the last thing that Akiko remembers is the pale face of a strange man with golden eyes and blood staining his chin.

Flashforward 20 years and Akiko (Midori Fujita) is a school teacher still living with her younger sister Natsuko (Sanae Emi) in their childhood home. She is convinced her traumatic childhood incident must have been a dream though it continues to haunt her enough to be a frequent subject in her artwork including a striking canvas she has just completed featuring a frightening golden eye looming over a tiny girl and her dog. Akiko has nice boyfriend, Takashi (Choei Takahashi), who is a doctor in the city, and all things considered a pretty nice life. Sadly it is not to last.

The trouble begins when someone randomly delivers a coffin to the local boathouse. First Akiko’s dog goes missing, then her trusted uncle figure tries to attack her before running off never to be seen again. Meanwhile, at Takashi’s hospital, a young “runaway” has been brought in in a catatonic state though no one can find much wrong with her until Takashi spots two suspicious bite marks on her neck. In case you’d forgotten about Natsuko, she has also begun behaving strangely – offering snide comments to her sister, going out alone in the middle of the night, and most alarmingly she has begun to grow pale.

Like Vampire Doll, Lake of Dracula is also an experimental vampire movie hybrid – a B-movie stalker picture in which Dracula is the creepy guy who can’t seem to take no for an answer. Yamamoto films the “naturalistic” action in standard Toho fashion but shifts into a higher register for his conception of heightened vampiric romanticism as Akiko’s “dream” erupts under a blood red sky and eventually leads her to an artfully appointed gothic cottage in which even the dead bodies are tastefully arranged.

Yet what Dracula comes to represent is the soul sucking power of the repressed past. Akiko has largely been able to move past her traumatic childhood adventure, convincing herself it was nothing more than a dream, and seems to be living a pleasant enough life even if her paintings betray her continuing anxiety. As we later find out, it is not quite so much the episode itself as the refusal to accept it which has caused Akiko so many problems – not least a buried rift with her treasured sister resulting from unfortunate sibling rivalry never fully dealt with both because of the incident and the early death of their parents. Akiko, resentful of having a new sister who had “displaced” her in her parents’ affections, sought to win back her rightful place by being the ideal child – good and obedient. Hence when no one believed her about the creepy house and strange man, she backed down, let them tell her it was only a dream to avoid being thought argumentative. Now she wonders if Natsuko harboured ill will towards her too for “stealing” back her parents’ love through her crazy story and perhaps relegating her to second place when she had become used to first.

Familial love becomes an odd kind of theme as we discover Dracula had a father of his own – a descendent of non-Japanese immigrants who had purposefully built a creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere in order to limit the possibility of his “bad blood” wreaking havoc in the world. The bad blood apparently skips a generation here and there and so Dracula, the third generation, is the first to be affected by it. His father tried to sacrifice himself to control his son, but now the demon is loose and is after Akiko who, creepily enough, seems to have caught his eye all those years ago (when she was five!) and he is determined to make her his “wife”. Vampirising someone’s sister is probably not a good way to win their heart, but Dracula, oddly, has never been very good at conventional romance.

Dracula’s “foreign” origins are perhaps an uncomfortable nod back to the xenophobic nature of the vampire myth. Despite being 3/4 Japanese and born and raised in Japan, Dracula’s late in the game exposure as not properly “Japanese” enough unfortunately reinforces the idea that “mixed” blood is somehow “impure”, even dangerous, and that even those who’ve spent their lives in Japan are not the same as those who are descended from long lines fully recorded 100% Japanese ancestors. Thus the danger becomes a “foreign object” which must be expelled to restore the integrity of the whole.

Restoring integrity is Akiko’s quest as she, along with her doctor boyfriend, attempts to solve the mystery through revisiting her traumatic childhood incident and finally learns to put it behind her. Yamamoto’s direction shifts between standard B-movie naturalism and florid avant-garde compositions but perhaps fails to capitalise on their inherent theatricality. Picking up the pace for the final set piece, Yamamoto also allows himself to go grim in taking a leaf directly out of the Hammer book by lifting the final death scene from the Christopher Lee starring Hammer Horror from 1958 in his crumbling, melting vampire, not to mention the other decomposing corpse resting in the house whose skin slides sickeningly from his body. A strange, hybrid adventure, Lake of Dracula makes an early attempt to pair the vampire chiller with serial killer thriller and does so moderately successfully even if its psychology remains firmly within the realms of the B-movie.

Lake of Dracula is the second of three films included in Arrow’s Bloodthirsty Trilogy box set which also includes extensive liner notes by Jasper Sharp detailing the history of vampires and horror cinema in Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Vampire Doll (幽霊屋敷の恐怖 血を吸う人形, Michio Yamamoto, 1970)

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Vampire doll posterIn a roundabout way, Toho can almost be thought of as the most “international” of mainstream Japanese cinemas operating in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. Though their view of “the foreign” was not always positive, their forays into science fiction often made a point of the need for international co-operation to combat extraterrestrial threats and “Interpol” became a (slightly humorous) fixture in the studio’s small number of sci-fi inflected spy films. If the spy movies were an attempt to echo the increasing ‘70s cold-war paranoia coupled by post-Bond camp, Toho was also looking overseas for inspiration in its wider genre output which is presumably how they wound up adding Hammer-esque vampire horror to their tokusatsu world.

The Vampire Doll (幽霊屋敷の恐怖 血を吸う人形, Yurei Yashiki no Kyofu: Chi wo Su Ningyo) draws influence both from classic European gothic and, perhaps less predictably, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to create a new hybrid horror model which effectively merges the Western “vampire” mythology with the “traditional” long haired, grudge bearing ghost. The tale begins with a young man who has recently been “abroad” for a number of months and has been looking forward to reuniting with his fiancée. When Sagawa (Atsuo Nakamura) reaches the gothic country mansion owned the family of Yuko (Yukiko Kobayashi), his longed for love, he learns that she has, unfortunately, passed away in a car crash just two weeks previously. Heartbroken he decides to stay over but is unable to sleep, not because of the grief or shock, but because of strange noises and the conviction that he has seen Yuko wandering around the house. Visiting her grave the next day, he finally meets her but she seems “different” and tearfully asks him to end her life.

Cut to the city, Sagawa’s sister Keiko (Kayo Matsuo) wakes up from a nightmare in which Yuko killed her brother and tries to cancel a date with her boyfriend to go look for him. Keiko’s boyfriend Hiroshi (Akira Nakao) eventually agrees to drive her to Yuko’s country pile to help investigate. On arrival, Yuko’s mother Shidu (Yoko Minakaze) tells them Sagawa left in heartbreak the day before, but Keiko doesn’t believe her and the couple fake car trouble to stay the night and investigate further.

Yamamoto’s film does indeed raid classic vampire movie tropes and mine them for all they’re worth. The curiously gothic architecture is explained away by Shidu’s husband having been a diplomat who developed a fondness for the European while overseas, but the presence of the hunched over, barely verbal servant Genzo (Kaku Takashina) seems a much more obvious Hammer homage. Shidu laments that the house is now “very old” and crumbling, a remnant of a pre-war world of lingering feudalism, all faded grandeur and declining influence – a fitting seat for a vampiric meditation of changing class and value systems with its kimono’d mistress and seemingly incongruous temporality.

Yet Yuko, not quite a “vampire” as we would usually think of them, is an extension of the traditional ghost story villainess rather than the sex crazed bloodsucker of European literature. Once again, the war is raised as a partial explanation of the tragedies which have befallen the family, if in a more logical fashion than the otherwise outlandish narrative would imply. Shidu carries a prominent scar across her neck – the mark of having tried to take her own life after a frustrated demobbed soldier massacred the family on learning that the woman he loved had married someone else while he was away fighting. This is apparently the origin of Yuko’s grudge (as the film clumsily explains), leaving her with a profound sense of rage against the world that killed her mother’s husband as well as intense resentment that she would die mere days before true happiness was finally in her grasp after enduring so much suffering.

Yuko may put on the billowing white nightgown of the repressed vampiress, her hair a flowing a chestnut-brown, but her blood lust is born of vengeance – she craves destruction rather than satisfaction. Toho flexes its tokusatsu muscles as lightning forks over the gothic mansion, perfectly achieving the air of oppressive supernatural unease provoked by the claustrophobic Western estate which seems to have even the local residents resolved to take the long way home to avoid it. Fusing European gothic with Japanese ghost story, Yamamoto’s first “vampire” movie is an unusual take on the material, refusing the foreign origins of the demonic for a homegrown tale of violence and tragedy consuming the life of a young woman attempting to find happiness in the rapidly changing post-war society.

The Vampire Doll is the first of three films included in Arrow’s Bloodthirsty Trilogy box set which also includes extensive liner notes by Jasper Sharp detailing the history of vampires and horror cinema in Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)