Tag: Ralph Jesser

Genocide (昆虫大戦争, Kazui Nihonmatsu, 1968)

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In the early 1960s, tokusatsu movies had begun to slide towards something which was much less serious than the early days of the genre, but as the decade went on others edged in the direction of the ‘70s paranoia thriller expressing a nihilistic view of contemporary Cold War geopoliticking. Given the rather provocative English title Genocide (昆虫大戦争, Konchu daisenso), as opposed to the more recognisably genre-inflected “great insect war”, Kazui Nihonmatsu’s wasp-themed disaster film is part anti-nuclear eco-treatise and part anti-US spy movie.

Then again, the film’s secondary hero, Joji (Yusuke Kawazu), a Japanese man obsessed with collecting rare insects he sends alternately to a researcher in Tokyo and a foreign woman living locally, cannot exactly claim the moral high ground. When he spots a US bomber falling out of the sky and runs to investigate the descending parachutes, he’s in the middle of tryst with Annabelle (Kathy Horan) while his wife waits for him patiently at home. Not only that, he picks up an expensive watch dropped by one of the airmen and attempts to sell it, he later claims to buy something nice for his wife, Yukari (Emi Shindo). Meanwhile, the voice of reason Dr. Nagumo (Keisuke Sonoi) is also seen conducting experiments on animals, injecting insect venom into a squirming guinea pig while explaining that the toxin affects the nervous system and causes madness and death. 

For all his own moralising, it’s this callous and selfish disregard for life which caused so many problems. The insects have apparently become fed up with human volatility and have decided that they don’t care what humans do to each other but they won’t go down with us in a nuclear war so the only solution is total eradication. The film’s true moral centre, the innocent Yukari, had tried to stop Joji capturing insects, reminding him that “insects have babies too,” while unbeknownst to him the insects he’d been capturing for Annabelle had been used for her sinister experiments to “breed vast numbers of insects that drive people mad and scatter them across the world.”

Annabelle’s quest is one of revenge, claiming that she doesn’t trust humans and likes insects because they don’t lie. She’s currently working with Communist spies supposedly researching deadly nerve toxins but with no loyalty to the regime, only the desire for the eradication of humanity in revenge for the murder of her parents in the holocaust. The Americans, meanwhile, only care about getting the H-bomb that the downed bomber had been carrying, eventually admitting that they’re considering simply detonating it to wipe out the insect threat in total indifference to the lives of those who live on the islands. When Nagumo challenges him, the American officer pulls a gun. One of the soldiers refuses the command to detonate, but is then killed. 

The Americans reject the idea that it was “insects” that brought the plane down, but tell on themselves on insisting that the airman onboard was hallucinating having become addicted to drugs to help him overcome his fear of combat situations. The insects do indeed cause him to hallucinate but with flashbacks back to his time in Vietnam, loudly exclaiming that he won’t go back there before asking for more drugs and being injected by a medic. The American officers claim they’re fighting for “freedom and independence,” but it rings somewhat hollow and is immediately challenged by Nagumo. “Sacrifices must be made in war,” they retort when he points out that detonating the bomb will not only kill everyone on the islands but irradiate the rest of Japan, wiping out the Japanese as if they too were merely insects. 

Even so, Nagumo too wants to wipe out the insects rather than consider the implications of their concern or find a way to live with them. Annabelle might have had a point when she said that human beings only knew hate despite her entirely twisted and exploitative plan to use the insects to complete her mission of eradicating humanity. In any case, in contrast to other similarly themed films, Nihonmatsu keeps things fairly realistic despite the outlandishness of the narrative, frequently cutting back to closeup footage of an insect biting into human flesh with its pincers before ending on an image of a nihilistic and internecine destruction that suggests there may be no real hope for us after all.

Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (０課の女　赤い手錠, Yukio Noda, 1974)

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“Your sense of duty is too strong! The world isn’t a pretty place,” barks an irate policeman, scolding a female officer with a tendency to take things, in his view at least, too far. Yukio Noda’s kidnap drama Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (０課の女　赤い手錠, Zeroka no onna: Akai Tejo) is on the extreme end of pinky violence and soaked in the political concerns of the 1970s along with all their concurrent paranoia but nevertheless positions its fearless avenger as a lone arbiter of justice in an incredibly unjust world. 

We know this from the start as we see Zero (Miki Sugimoto) almost date raped by an apparent serial killer who has his own torture suitcase and apparently killed her friend. Knowing that he is a diplomat and therefore has diplomatic immunity, she simply shoots him in the balls in the film’s extraordinary opening sequence. But even though it could be argued what she did was self-defence, Zero is kicked off the force and thrown into a woman’s prison for an indefinite period of detention to keep the lid on any possible scandal. Zero is only reprieved when the daughter of a politician is kidnapped by thugs and, wanting to keep things quiet, they need someone to rescue her and also wipe out all of the kidnappers to ensure no one ever finds out.

Kyoko (Hiromi Kishi), the politician’s daughter, claims that her father will do “anything” to ingratiate himself with the prime minister and has in fact already arranged her marriage to his son. Kyoko, however, already has a boyfriend who, inconveniently, is quite obviously a student protestor given his yellow construction hat and other paraphernalia. The pair are accosted while sitting in a car near an old American base, and as Kyoko is gang raped, firstly by the gang leader Nakahara (Eiji Go) who is wearing a hoodie with the words US Navy printed on the back, US planes fly over her as if she were being raped by America in an obvious metaphor for the legacy of the occupation. 

Indeed, the flashbacks later experienced by Nakahara are of his mother whom he describes as a sex worker who worked at the base suggesting a very literal allusion to the corrupting influence of American servicemen. The gang operate out of a bar called “Manhattan” which is surrounded by other similar bars with Western names in a neon-lit area, while they constantly run across various signs written in English in fact peeing directly on a no peeing sign outside a largely disused residential area on the edge of the base where they later take hostage some kind of amateur dramatics / English-language class currently in the middle of a production of Romeo and Juliet. 

Yet the big bad turns out to be essentially homegrown in the form of the corrupt lackey policeman Osaka, and the politician Nagumo (Tetsuro Tanba), who is more concerned with his political capital than his daughter’s safety keen that the police keep everything out of the papers otherwise the wedding will be called off and he’ll have a problem with the prime minister. Seeing a very pale Kyoko, her clothes torn, barely conscious having been drugged by the gang, he says he no longer cares to think of her as his daughter and perhaps it would be better if she simply passed away in an “accident”, instructing Osaka to care of loose ends like Zero too. 

It’s very clear that women’s lives have little currency in this very patriarchal world, something Zero seems to know all too well even if at the beginning of the film she was content to work for the oppressive organisation of the police force though she later tears up her warrant card in disgust. The fact that division zero, operating like a secret police force on the behalf of an authoritarian government, exists at all is a clear indication that this is already a police state though one subverted by Zero who uses her red handcuffs to deliver ironic justice to all those who deserve it. Then again, unlike other pinky violence films there’s precious little solidarity that arises between herself and Kyoko whom she later describes as nothing more her mission objective seemingly caring little for her as a fellow human being. Noda cuts back between the Diet building and police HQ as if actively critiquing the latent authoritarianism of the early 70s society but even if Nagumo gets a kind of comeuppance it’s abundantly clear that nothing really will change and Zero stands alone wilfully freeing herself of the handcuffs of a controlling society. 

The Target of Roses (薔薇の標的, Kiyoshi Nishimura, 1972)

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One of a series of internationalist conspiracy thrillers arriving in the early 1970s, Kiyoshi Nishimura’s Target of Roses (薔薇の標的, Bara no Hyoteki, AKA Red Target) finds itself at a particular moment of paranoid anxiety. In the immediate wake of Asama-Sanso, its villains are a band of revolutionaries hiding out in the mountains behind the shield of “New Religion” as they plot the over throw of the state. Yet these villains are not left-wing former student protestors but Nazi holdovers branding themselves as the “Fourth Reich” while insisting that they are not “fascists” but merely trying to create a new world order free of “corrupt governments”. 

The hero, Akira, in keeping with similar roles Yuzo Kayama played in this period, is a former Olympic sharpshooter who fled to America after being implicated in the death of a teammate. You can tell that things haven’t been going well for him by the terrible mutton chops haircut he is forced to wear throughout the film, but his problem seems to be that he has lost all interest in living. That’s one reason he’s recruited by the Fourth Reich’s local leader Tachibana who theorises that Akira is a man who lives for the gun and is good as dead without one. He and his one-eyed associate Nomura (Toby Kadoguchi), a former sharpshooter himself, begin training him with various strange exercises never revealing their true purpose until asking him to shoot a prisoner they’ve tricked into trying to escape from their secret base. Realising the target is human Akira refuses but then changes his mind shooting the man at much closer range as he runs through a forest. 

Meanwhile, foreign photographer Robert (Ralph Jesser) and his assistant Ling Ling (Taiwanese actress Chen Chen) accidentally end up finding the secret camp after becoming lost in the forest, Robert returning later to investigate and take more photos. Akira is then sent to Hong Kong where the pair have travelled to visit the grave of Ling Ling’s brother, a war photographer killed by a landmine in Laos, in order to take out Robert before he exposes their operation in the newspapers. Never asking any questions of his new job, Akira is unexpectedly moved on seeing Ling Ling’s distress over Robert’s body, later striking up a relationship with her when she too becomes a target for the Fourth Reich. 

In a surprising contrast to similar contemporary crime thrillers, Hong Konger Ling Ling represents a kind of innocent beauty as symbolised in her interest in photographing flowers rather than the war zones covered by her brother. At one point she and Akira are even seen tiptoeing on the railway tracks just like innocent lovers only for Akira to then reflect on the sight of an obsolete steam train likening it to himself, abandoned and destined to be torn to pieces. His love for Ling Ling gives him new reason to live, breaking the nihilistic spell which he claims had led him to want to destroy everything. To that extent Tachibana is correct when he says that Akira has no interest in the future of mankind, but he has become determined to preserve the world of two which exists between himself and Ling Ling which leads him to oppose The Fourth Reich, of whose activities he had been previously ignorant. 

It has to be said that Nishimura’s repurposing of Holocaust imagery, the failed “trainees” of the Fourth Reich’s re-education programme driven to vacant madness and piled up on wooden bunk beds later to be gassed and burned on mass funeral pyres, may be a little inappropriate in its accidental flippancy. Nomura’s claim that the Fourth Reich is not a resurrection of fascism is somewhat disingenuous even if they seem to have no other ideology than their weird super soldier brainwashing programme designed to create some kind of new society, later suggesting that the conspiracy already has assets within the Japanese government. Yet Akira is indifferent to fascism, as Tachibana had framed him a man of the gun born only to pull a trigger a function he later uses in order to convince him to destroy himself. Often marred by overly theatrical dialogue rendered in sometimes awkward English which plays much less well than it might in Japanese, Target of Roses remains a little on the pretentious side despite Nishimura’s characteristic artistry but nevertheless embraces its nihilistic philosophy in the vast emptiness of its internecine conclusion. 

Bullet Wound (弾痕, Shiro Moritani, 1969)

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“Your love for your country can’t change anything now” the conflicted hero of Shiro Moritani’s conspiracy thriller Bullet Wound (弾痕, Dankon) is advised as a villainous chaos agent attempts to convince him to switch sides. Like many of Toho’s gunman dramas of the late ‘60s, Bullet Wound anticipates the cinema of paranoia which would take hold in the following decade set against the constant anxiety of the ANPO protests while the Japanese-American CIA agent hero struggles with his uncertain place in a world of geopolitical instability. 

Takimura (Yuzo Kayama) is a man with two countries, born in the US to Japanese parents but later orphaned, now working for the CIA in Japan. Perhaps tellingly, we can’t initially tell what side he’s on even as he tries to prevent an assignation attempt on some kind of dignitary connected to the US. The main crisis occurs when Takamura helps a Chinese man, Yang (Shin Kishida), escape a trade summit in order to defect and chase freedom in America. The Americans, however, then torture him until he finally admits that he’s a stooge, the defection was merely a means of getting him into the US as a spy while the trade delegation is only a front for an upcoming arms deal with a international smuggler known as “Tony Rose” (Andy Seams). Takimura and his team are obviously keen the transaction not take place, but are unable to take Rose out because as Takimura’s boss points out they’ve used him too and he’s too well connected. If they move against him, someone will move against them. 

The Chinese arms deal is linked back to a sense of cold war paranoia which spreads to the young students protesting the ANPO treaty. Takimura’s boss calls them “terrorists” unable to understand how there can be Japanese people who could do this to their own country seemingly unaware of the minor irony in his statement. Meanwhile, he prepares to sacrifice Takimura as need be, callously remarking that a man with two countries who can’t choose between them can be dangerous while admitting that his services have been useful to the Americans but they may not always be so. The Americans meanwhile make crass racist remarks while chasing down the Chinese spies, taking altogether too much pleasure in eradicating them while the hitherto stoical Takimura looks on with disapproval mixed with hurt and shame beginning to wonder if he’s really on the right side. “You and the US will never defeat us” his rivals insist, revealing a mind-blowing piece of info that sets Takimura on a collision course with fate. 

Meanwhile, a strange young artist crafts horrifying statues displaying the “agony of loneliness” and longs to escape Japan for South America where they apparently have the best stone. But as someone later tells her, the desire to go to a new land is not born of hope, and expectations are almost always betrayed. Only love can change everything into hope he tells her, as she pins hers on running away with Takimura while he tries to tie up a few loose ends. Yet there’s also a kind of fatalism that defines their relationship, Takimura reflecting on watching a man die up close and haunted by the searching look in his eyes as if he were trying to understand the meaning not of life but of death. An ironic street singer sings a sad song about those who die and what they leave behind, the soldier apparently leaving not a trace of peace. 

The implication is perhaps that Takimura’s dual nationalities are not viable, that a man with two countries cannot escape by choosing a third nor can he survive without sacrificing one or the other. Meanwhile, Moritani slides into anti-Americanism painting the CIA as duplicitous and exploitative as they simultaneously demonise the Japanese and position men like Tony Rose as international chaos agents destabilising the global order. Handheld photography adds to the sense of anxious immediacy and confusion as Takimura attempts to define his own identity only to discover perhaps that he no longer has one caught as he is between two nations as two selves at the heart of a silent war. 

Espy (エスパイ, Jun Fukuda, 1974)

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espy posterBy 1974 the Toho SFX movie was perhaps long past its heyday though Jun Fukuda’s Espy (エスパイ) was far from the last. Clearly influenced by popular spy franchises such as James Bond as well as more serious cold war spy dramas, Espy is a jet setting tale of superpowered assassins, international conspiracy, and love as an unexpected source of salvation, but as much as it embraces its hippyish message of total communication it also moves further into the realms of exploitation, skewing closer to Nikkatsu’s ’70s output than the more child friendly supernatural adventures of ages past.

The world is at breaking point. A small conflict in a tiny East European nation known as Baltonia threatens to spark a third world war. A UN delegation is currently en route to a conference in which they hope to settle the conflict in a peaceful way but all hope is lost when a sniper equipped with X-ray vision takes them all out with maximum precision.

Meanwhile, back in Japan, test driver Miki (Masao Kusakari) gets into trouble on the course when he swerves to avoid some pigeons. The car spins out of control but just at the last minute, Miki turns it around through his dormant psychic powers which brings him to the attention of the IPPG – the International Psychic Power Group. Following the assassination of the UN delegation, all eyes are on Japan where the prime minister of Baltonia is due to meet the US president in what is hoped will be a bold new development in international relations but the IPPG have reason to believe an attempt will be made on the prime minister’s life and only their ESP equipped team can stop it.

Espy takes the essential components of both the spy thriller in its international conspiracy set up, and the B-movie science fiction adventure in its presentation of the good and evil possibilities of advanced technologies or in this case innate superpowers. The Espy team are pitted against the Anti-Espy who have similar powers but are committed to using them to harm mankind. The leader of the Anti-Espy, Ulrov (Tomisaburo Wakayama), sees himself as a superior being to regular Earthlings and, believing that humans have overpopulated the planet which they continue to damage, is convinced the best solution is a mass cull. He plans to do this by helping the “lesser” humans destroy themselves by provoking a third world war or a hundred mini conflicts in which thousands will die.

Ulrov’s arguments tie in nicely with Toho’s trademark environmentalism and ambivalent attitude towards scientific development, but they go against the prevailing sense of humanism which is to be found in the studio’s genre output. In Ulrov’s fascistic view of the world, he and the other ESPers are a superior race whose existence is threatened by weaker humans and their reckless disregard for the planet as a whole. Due to a traumatic childhood incident, he believes that humans are cruel beasts who lust for blood and talk of peace with hearts filled with hate. He may have a point, but his message conflicts with the positive movement for peace which is advanced by the Baltonian PM who doesn’t want a world in which peace is brokered and balanced but one of true unity.

Espy is, however, of its time and fails to fully live out its peace and love ideals. Team member Maria (Kaoru Yumi) is kidnapped by Anti-Espy and taken to Ulrov’s lair where she is forced to dance lasciviously in front of fellow team member Tamura (Hiroshi Fujioka) with whom she shares an especially strong connection. Tamura’s arms and legs are cuffed as he communicates telepathically with Ulrov, semi-hypnotised by Maria’s strange dance. Maria is then approached by a large dark-skinned man wearing only a loincloth who proceeds to tear open her shirt at which point she snaps out of her trance, frees Tamura, and rips out the attacker’s tongue.

Meanwhile, new recruit Miki has failed in his mission and killed a man for the first time sending him into a kind of depression. Though Miki was introduced as the protagonist, he is in fact absent for most of the film though his journey is among the strangest as he reminisces about a foreign girl he was friends with as a child and enjoys an unusually strong bond with his intrepid dog, Caesar, who teaches the gang a few lessons about unconditional love. Maria is severely traumatised by her attack while Tamura reconsiders his sense of self worth having temporarily lost his powers, but eventually the team realise that their psychic abilities are nothing more than a manifestation of a great love. Ulrov later has the same epiphany but the team’s decision to consider him possessed by something “inhuman” is a worrying one. They don’t want to accept that it was humans who made him that way because it would be too sad, but not to do so is a failure to recognise humanity’s darkness as well as its light.

Espy bites off a little more than it can chew in failing to deal with some of the more interesting ideas it raises though it makes the most of its meagre budget to present an exciting spy thriller voyaging from Japan to Turkey and Switzerland. Skewing more towards Nikkatsu’s brand of exploitation action, Espy is definitely among the more adult orientated of Toho’s SFX adventures but its messages are broadly the same in its insistence on human interconnectedness as the ultimate superpower.