Case of Umon: One-Eyed Wolf (1959)

Five men are found hanging from a particularly creepily picturesque tree. While an older comic relief colleague – who comes with his own comic relief sidekick – are convinced this was some kind of group suicide of unidentified merchants, young magistrate Umon (Ryutaro Otomo) begs to differ. These men clearly were experienced swordsmen and therefore samurai – and they were murdered.

Together with his comic relief sidekick (Shunji Sakai, as if you didn’t know), and the various friends he has in low places, Umon follows the case to (a surprise if you’ve never seen a jidaigeki detective movie before) a conspiracy to not just kill but blow up the shogun himself.

Even though it suffers from a surplus of comic relief characters – at the point where comic relief characters have their own comic relief characters, things have gone too far – this first film in the Umon series is a particularly fine entry into the realm of somewhat pulpy (to enable swordfights and grand villainous plans) jidaigeki detective tales. I have developed a great fondness for the genre, particularly the various series Toei produced before things became bloodier and rather more cynical in the jidaigeki realm, and nobody’d try to protect the ruling dictator anymore.

Director Tadashi Sawashima must have been in a particularly creative mood when this was made, for this is atypically dynamically filmed for a late 50s jidaigeki of this type. We start with the wonderfully creepy and atmospheric discovery of the five corpses – some shots here do rather look like the kind of painting I’d put on my walls if I had any room for them –, find the director experiment with nearly expressionist framing and rather exciting camera movement during the big fight scenes, and also see him experiment with some excellently melodramatic suspense, like Hitchcock on speed, when Umon has to fight the climactic fight while also making sure the shogun can make his temple visit not just unexploded but on time. It ain’t easy working for the Man.

One-Eyed Wolf is also rather exciting, lovely to look at and genuinely suspenseful if you’re able to roll with the importance of the shogun not being late, and keeping unexploded.

Three Films Make A Post: A Knifepoint Horror Story

Lockbox (2026): I am of course happy to see that Soren Narnia appears to reap some of the fruits of having made one of the best horror/weird fiction podcasts by now reaping the reward of that sweet, low budget adaptation money from it.

I am definitely much less happy that the first Knifepoint Horror movie coming out of that is this limp thing directed by Daniel Stamm that wastes a fantastic cast (Carla Gugino, Lou Taylor Pucci and Katherine Isabelle are certainly great for the material) on a script by one Justin Yoffe that turns what could be a great psychological horror film, or a great film about trauma, or a really weird exorcism movie into a series of shitty jump scares and been there done that set pieces, until everything crashes even further down in an orgy of exposition and an aggressively stupid climax.

Fight Against Evil 3 (2026): The first two entries into these Chinese copaganda martial arts streaming movies were deadly earnest; this third one finds our hero cop played by Xie Miao as the straight man to a number of weird characters, something the actor turns out to be nearly as convincing at as he is at doing martial arts.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a pleasant amount of excellently choreographed scenes of men grabbing each other very tightly (because the modern martial artist doesn’t really punch or kick anymore) and a plot about children abducted into slavery – director Yang Bingjia simply humanizes the mood around the action movie business with quite a few surprisingly funny jokes.

I can also report that this is a film that uses colours, perhaps excessively so.

The East Palace (2026): For its first half, this South Korean mix of supernatural shenanigans, horrible people at a horrible imperial court being extremely horrible, and a videogamer’s idea of boss fights is really good fun. Alas the streaming series starts dragging its feet considerably in the middle, trying to reach its runtime goal by repeating the same plot beats again and again instead of continuing to escalate, so that the perfectly decent climax feels like something of a relief.

Three Films Make A Post: A new breed of mystery.

Videoheaven (2025): We all have our nostalgias; some of us feel the need to make three hour long essay films that attempt to defend them by amateurish attempts at intellectualizing, layered over endless clips of movie scenes taking place in video rental stores.

This is the video store version of Los Angeles Plays Itself, but where that classic of the overlong essay movie has complex ideas – some of whom I very much disagree with – it uses its clips to argue for, this is a strenuous clip show overlaid with an overwritten, pretentious monologue read by Maya Hawke that needs ages to explain the few, superficial ideas director/writer Alex Ross Perry actually has. The whole tone of the project mostly makes me happy video stores are practically dead, because if they made people this insufferable, they weren’t a good thing.

The Sheep Detective (2026): I wouldn’t have been surprised to also hate Kyle Balda’s high budget Amazon original about a bunch of sheep (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston and Patrick Stewart, among others) solving a murder in the most clichéd British murder village (possibly situated in the neighbourhood of Midsomer). However, this turns out to be utterly charming, working with and against golden age mystery tropes, making actually funny jokes and even nailing its emotional beats so well, I found myself tearing up at a movie about animated sheep.

The book this is based on is apparently considerably darker, but I found the film as it stands balancing quite wonderfully on the line between kitsch and goth.

Hi-Five (2025): Dear Internet, I’m still not suffering from that “super hero fatigue” I read so much about – how could I when superhero movies make up perhaps one percent of the movies I watch in a year? – and I’m not sorry about it, either.

So Kang Hyoung-chul’s South Korean superhero comedy about five very ordinary people and a Christian cult leader getting super powers, does have it kind of easy with me. But then, what’s not to like about a well-paced, genuinely fun film filled with just as fun characters, the proper not-Zach-Snyder-approved ideology for a superhero film, and a sense of playfulness and style?

The Adventures of Kosuke Kindaichi (1979)

Original title: Kindaichi Kosuke no boken

In the world of the film, famous detective Kosuke Kindaichi (Ikko Furuya) is also a famous mystery novel character, and a famous film character. For his newest case, he teams up with Inspector Todoroki (Kunie Tanaka). Todoroki is mostly interested in a series of art thefts committed by a gang of roller-skating young people who like mime and/or David Bowie make-up, whereas Kindaichi is waiting for a murder to happen, for there are always murders in his cases, as well as tainted blood, generational guilt, and complicated murder methods, because that sort of thing is at the core of the Japanese experience as he sees it.

Which is about as sensible as I can make the great Nobuhiko Obayashi’s mystery comedy’s plot sound. There is a properly Kindaichi-like murder mystery happening here, mind you, but it is nearly drowned out by Obayashi at his most exhaustingly unleashed: there’s not a single shot here without any sight gags going on in the background, hardly a line said that doesn’t hint at broader pop culture, Japanese golden age style mysteries, movies, books, music, or ads that have nothing to do with the supposed plot. Some of it is completely inexplicable from my distance of time, geography and language to its point of creation, some I could parse thanks to the amount of Japanese movies, books and manga I’ve consumed during the course of my life, some should be clear to everyone. In any case, it can all become a bit overwhelming, particularly combined with the breakneck speed with which Obayashi goes from scene to scene here.

Of course, this being an Obayashi movie, it also looks absolutely beautiful, and shifts from visual style to visual style with an off-handed surety that must have intimidate any lesser director; also of course, this does not make The Adventures any less overwhelming.

All of this reads like a commentary on the kind of art a Kosuke Kindaichi film must be to me, something referential to a torrent of other media in its own series, as well as the torrent of popular media surrounding it, as well as the torrent of different popular media that surrounded the other versions of the same character, a hall of mirrors that goes on and on until it becomes difficult to find the substance of whatever the adventures of Kosuke Kindaichi actually mean. Or once meant, or will mean, and so on and so forth, until one is overwhelmed enough by the whole thing one has to make Kindaichi himself the killer to return to any kind of sense at all.

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)

While Fox either didn’t manage to or didn’t want to secure the rights for further Holmes movies, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce deepened their footprints as the characters during a successful series of radio plays in the roles. So it makes a lot of sense that Universal studios, who eventually managed to make a deal with the Doyle estate, then went to that particular well and hired the men for their own cycle of Holmes movies.

These films weren’t given the full studio budget treatment of Fox’s Holmes films, however, but were strictly meant for the B slot of any given cinematic performance, leading to shorter and cheaper films made by the B-movie arm of Universal’s operation. On the plus side, Universal’s B arm did have better directors than the guys Fox put on their Holmes films.

As another, apparently still quite contentious in certain Holmes purist circles to this day, cost-cutting measure, the Universal films put Holmes into the present day, though a version of the present day that is drenched in shadows and fog more often than not. Because it was 1942, Universal also decided to start the films off as war propaganda. So this first outing finds Holmes thwarting a Lord Haw-Haw style Nazi radio propagandist who commands his spy minions to commit some rather spectacular (for the budget) acts of sabotage. Holmes ropes in the service of a thinly-coded prostitute (Evelyn Ankers) who convinces parts of the Underworld to do their patriotic duty with a really rather effective speech to counter the Nazi scum.

While the propagandist elements here can feel to be laid on rather thick (this certainly isn’t a Powell/Pressburger joint), I find myself rather taken with this aspect of the film. But then, if ever there was a reason for the people of Britain to be proudly patriotic, it was how they held out against Nazi Germany when the Americans here singing their praises were still twiddling their thumbs. And frankly, who else would you have Sherlock Holmes fight in 1942?

The film, directed by John Rawlins, is a nice little piece of pulpy entertainment, making moody use of Universal’s standing sets, and a script that’s just on the right side of overstuffed, with some cheap but cheerful action set-pieces, rousing speeches – Anker in particular really gives her all there – and a well-developed sense of the shadow-drenched mood I tend to hope for in Holmes media whenever it leaves the drawing room. The cast is fine, the villains dastardly, and I even didn’t mind the idiot version of Watson too much this time.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

Following Fox’s first Holmes movie with the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce double act rather quickly, this second movie is already the end of the short Fox cycle featuring these two. The studio apparently had problems wrangling the rights for further movies out of the Doyle estate, and perhaps not as much interest in continuing the series anyway.

Probably making negotiations less important for the studio that this film was neither much loved by the studio bosses nor – apparently – audiences, so fighting Adrian Doyle might not have been worth it to them in any case.

The Adventures doesn’t attempt to adapt any particular Holmes tale, but spins a complicated yarn about a plot of Professor Moriarty (who is much more common in adaptations than in the canon, and here played by the typically fun George Zucco) to thwart and humiliate Holmes and get rich in the process.

Not being a studio boss or a 1939 audience, I prefer this second Fox Holmes to the Hound. The plot is more lively, Alfred L. Werker’s direction is workmanlike but at least effective and from time to time even atmospheric, and Rathbone and Bruce really have gotten a grip on the character they are never really going to lose for as long as they will continue to play these characters (as much as I loathe Watson as an idiot, but you know that already). Unlike in the first movie, there’s also at least one memorable part among the younger actors surrounding our heroes – Ida Lupino (early in her career here) imbues her theoretically typical heiress in distress with as much personality and backbone as she can get away with, which does wonders for much of the plot she is involved in.

This – like most of Hollywood Holmes – is very much Holmes in pulp mode, so expect as much action as ratiocination, and delightful moments like the scene in which Moriarty’s butler has forgotten to water the man’s beloved plants and faces the ensuing threats of death and doom with the most movie butlerish face ever encountered. It is all very good fun. Apart from the actual jokes, of course, but that’s par for the course.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

Victorian England. Consulting detective Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and his friend and partner Doctor Watson (Nigel Bruce) are asked to help ensure the safety of Sir Henry Baskerville (Richard Greene), who has come to England to take possession of his inheritance in the Great Grimpen Mire of Dartmoor. Rumours of a supernatural hound haunting his lineage abound, and many secrets are kept on the moors.

This first in its series of Sherlock Holmes movie produced by Fox , in this case directed by Sidney Lanfield, was a major hit in its time. Apart from the natural and perennial popularity of Holmes, this is certainly thanks to the casting of Basil Rathbone in the role, who has the accent, the profile, the energy and the acting chops to pull off an interesting Great Detective; he also has great chemistry with his Watson, real-life friend Nigel Bruce.

I’ve never liked the Bruce Watson much – he’s too stupid to be believable as a doctor, a military veteran that survived anything more dangerous than stepping over a puddle or as a friend to Holmes. In fact, in his worst moments – most of them to come in later films of the duo – this too stupid Watson tends to damage his Holmes, because this version of Holmes apparently needs to travel with the dumbest person alive to feel properly clever and is the kind of guy who drags around the learning disabled to berate them for being “bunglers”.

My tastes in Watsons aside, while The Hound is the most popular, and certainly the best, of the Holmes novels, it is a curious case to start a series with a particularly weak Watson with. For here, Watson is really meant to take the lead role in the investigation for at least half of the narrative, something Bruce’s character never believably manages in between comedy routines and empty bluster. He isn’t helped at all by being surrounded by the sort of extremely unmemorable actors Old Hollywood loved as their young romantic leads. Only Lionel Atwill provides some memorable moments.

The script pretty much makes a hash out of Doyle’s novel, changes everything that might be morally complex even more so than the Production Code would have necessitated, and just barely manages to get in some of the book’s set pieces. Those certainly are made very pretty by the use of some nice looking sets. Sidney Lanfield’s direction is generally unremarkable, and at its most effective whenever he just lets Rathbone or Atwill do their respective thing, which, unfortunately, isn’t all too often.

Murder on the Last Train (1955)

Original title: 終電車の死美人

A young women is found murdered on the last train to Mitaka, Tokyo. Tokyo’s Showa era murder squad springs into action.

The film follows the case’s investigation, the police slowly uncovering the victim’s identity, checking out witness statements and turning over every stone to uncover a rather messy situation.

Tsuneo Kobayashi’s film is usually treated as Japan’s first proper police procedural, and the film Toei’s successful and pretty long running Police Precinct series of films would model itself after, with an attempt to portray police procedure as it would be used in its time and place realistically. Of course, these are not films portraying or interested in the politics or ethics of policing, and they also don’t spend much time on the dozen or so coppers’ personalities. Today, you’d probably be tempted to call it copaganda, but given the temporal gap between the then and the now, you might also see this as a portrayal of how proper police work should be done by the standards of Showa era Japan.

Keeping this approach from becoming too abstract or clinical are three elements. First, there’s a script by Shin Morita that’s trying to be realistic towards the shoe leather aspects of policing but also knows what to cut – we aren’t shown the pointless witness interviews but only those that actually deliver some new facts or insights, and we are given to understand how much drudgery an investigation entails but don’t have to take part in it. When necessary, the film isn’t afraid to become dramatic either, so particularly once we move towards the climax, there are moments of tension here – this is still supposed to entertain an audience, after all.

Secondly, Kobayashi’s direction effortlessly moves between framing scenes in a semi-documentary style and expressionist flourishes that can turn even a simple witness interview dramatic and interesting to look at. While this idealized version of the police doesn’t do police brutality, the direction often suggests the threat of violence. Interviews with potential criminals are always shot with the cops crowding their victim and shot in angles that see them tower over it in a very Universal horror monster kind of manner.

Thirdly, while there’s no depth to the police roles, the ensemble – after the manner of Japanese studio cinema – do provide anchors of humanity that suggest people and not automatons, which is more than enough to make the material come to life.

And, if you’re like me, it’s genuinely interesting to witness an attempt at a realistic portrayal of Post-War Tokyo of the times made for a local audience. Murder presents a wealth of cultural details history books usually don’t provide, particularly because it focusses on the parts of society history books have historically ignored. It’s not a documentary, of course, but it’s of highest interest nonetheless.

Three Films Make A Post: Getting in is hard, getting out is hell.

Do Not Enter (2026): A group of YouTube Urban Explorers get in over their heads when they enter an old abandoned hotel where they’ll not only have to cope with a violent group of rivals led by an ex-colleague but also a mysterious murdering monster (Javier Botet doing his usual shtick).

Surprisingly enough, director Marc Klasfeld doesn’t stage this as a piece of POV horror – there’s only very little footage of the sort in here – but shoots it like a “proper movie”. Which seems like a curious decision, given the set-up, but then, this is not a film demonstrating too many sensible behind the camera decisions. All changes to the clockwork-tight David Morell novel this is based on are either superficial modernizations the movie then does nothing of use with, or feel made to slow things down and make them less interesting. The sets are pretty nice, and if you’re into heart-based gore, there’s something for your specific kink in here, but otherwise, this is such a generic piece of cinema, one might just as well not bother with it.

Kanto Street Peddlers aka Kantô Tekiya ikka (1969): At their height, even the more mediocre and generic outings of Japanese studios like this contemporary ninkyo eiga about battling street peddlers produced by Toei and directed by Norifumi Suzuki, were impossibly entertaining.

This does waver sometimes awkwardly between earnest, leftist, ninkyo and the kind of goofy nonsense comedy Suzuki loved so much to drag into every single one of his films, but also contains a bunch of Toei house actors – Bunta Sugwara is our hero, Minoru Oki is actually playing a good guy; Bin Amatsu at least is still evil – I can’t help but love to watch even in lesser material, and looks and feels so much of its time and place it is fascinating even when it isn’t exactly good and a bit slow. Plus, this ends on a fantastic climax that hits all the ninkyo clichés – our hero strutting manly through the rain to the final slaughter while he sings terribly on the soundtrack – which it presents with much verve, imagination – the POV shot start to the battle alone is worth the whole movie – and all the blood one could wish for.

Bored Hatamoto – The Mansion of Intrigue aka Riddle of the Snake Princess’ Mansion (1957): This is still the earliest (between the 22nd and the 25th, depending on source) in the long-running series of jidai-geki pulp detective films starring Utaemon Ichikawa as the titular hero with the moon-shaped scar you can find with English subtitles.

It’s not one of my particular favourites of the series – three comic relief characters plus a teen sidekick are a bit much for me even though we get a really good seppuku joke late in proceedings – but there’s still a lot to like here. Director Yasushi Sasaki stages some fine battles (we’re still in the bloodless and noiseless stage of screen fighting in Japan here), there are Japanese actors in whiteface pretending to be Dutch, and there’s a wonderful pulpy energy to proceedings, all dominated by Ichikawa’s commanding presence. Plus, as if this were a 70s Bollywood masala, our hero infiltrates the main villain’s lair by taking part in a sweet dance number.

Three Films Make A Post: Elvis Has Left the Building

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (2015): It wouldn’t have been difficult to tell this specific tale as an utter freakshow. It is, after all, the of story a horse breeder with musical ambition and a voice naturally a lot like that of Elvis Presley who got roped into the role of “Orion” – a masked singer heavily insinuated to be Elvis returned shortly after his death, somewhat bigger, buffer, and younger, and built to make Sun Records (the Nashville version, so no bad thoughts about Sam Phillips necessary) a whole lot of money, at least for a time.

Director Jeanie Finlay doesn’t at all, but instead creates a sympathetic portrayal of a guy who had a dream he finds fulfilled in a way that’s making him painfully unhappy, and the curious cultural impact of Elvis on the more peculiar parts of American culture. It’s a lovely thing, and that most pleasant of surprises – a documentary about a curiosity that turns out to be a film about people.

Bored Hatamoto: Island of No Return (1960): In this outing of the jidai geki pulp detective series, the Bored Hatamoto (as always embodied quite wonderfully by Utaemon Ichikawa) makes his way to the shadowed streets and the foreigners’ quarter of Nagasaki, where he finds a lot of moody filmmaking by Yasushi Sasaki, who makes much of the sets, those exotic foreigners (like the same two red-headed Western guys wandering through the background of many a scene, or the Japanese guys in blackface wearing turbans), yet another plan to dispose of the shogun (this time via the drug trade), musical numbers, running sword battles and my very favourite trope in this sort of movie – the Japanese actors very badly pretending to be dastardly (sigh) Chinese who turn out to indeed be meant to be Japanese villains pretending to be Japanese.

This is particularly rollicking good fun, with everyone involved in top form. There’s really something to be said for industrialized studio filmmaking, at least when it comes to Toei films from this era (and the next two).

Crimson Bat, the Blind Swordswoman (1969): Apparently, every studio in Japan wanted a slice of the blind swordsperson cake after the success of the Zatoichi films. Shochiku gave us this comparatively short-lived – four entries are next to nothing for a Japanese movie series – entry in the canon, following the adventures of blind swordswoman Oichi (Yoko Matsuyama), in this first film directed by veteran director Sadatsugu Matsuda.

The film’s pacing suffers a bit from too much flashback backstory, but whenever the pretty delightful Yoko Matsuyama stops crying (about her run-away mum, having been blinded by lightning, and years later a murdered gramps) and goes to business with her red sword cane, Matsuda does direct like a young man instead of one right at the end of his career, with some pretty fancy choreography, excellent bad guys (among them eternal villain Bin Amatsu as a gent named “Devil” Denzo), and frame compositions to die (be killed by blind swordswoman?) for.

Case of a Young Lord 1 & 2 (1956)

Original titles: 若さま侍捕物手帖 地獄の皿屋敷 & 若さま侍捕物手帖 べらんめえ活人剣

These two one hour films directed by Kinnosuke Fukada (about whose body of work I otherwise know very little) are really one two-part movie, so I’m treating them as such here.

Edo era Japan. The somewhat excitable city is struck by a curious series of break-ins into the warehouses of a recently deceased pawnbroker during which nothing is stolen. These break-ins are perhaps committed by a mysterious samurai wearing a female oni mask. Because violence appears to be imminent, and indeed soon a murder occurs, the police ask for the help of a young man who’ll only ever be called the Young Lord (Hashizo Okawa) during the course of the series.

He’s apparently a rich loafer from a somewhat important family (one might argue he’s the most important young loafer in the whole of the shogunate), spending his youth on sake, a geisha with a huge crush on him and occasional song, but he’s also a brilliant amateur detective. The Young Lord soon figures out some connections between the break-ins and a plate once bestowed upon the family of a hatamoto by an earlier shogun, the noble marriage market, and other things of interest.

Apart from that mysterious masked samurai, there are others with an interest in the whole affair. Some of them of the kind of murderous disposition (and a bunch of henchmen) that makes it a happy coincidence the Young Lord is also a brilliant swordsman.

For a sick day morning of light entertainment, there’s little that’s better than this sort of jidai geki/chanbara mystery Toei were so adept at at the time. This series – two thirds of which are available with decent English subtitles if one knows where to look – is based on a newspaper series by Masayuki Jo, and adds a lot of pulpy fun to the nicely plotted mystery business, including not just that delights like that samurai in the wonderful mask (whose identity reveal is even more delightful in a “were they even allowed to do that in 1956?” sort of way), running battles with hordes of assassin mooks, and an honest to the godhood of your choice mechanical death-trap.

This joyful pulp goodness is filmed by Fukada with a sense of verve and the usual high technical skill of Japanese studio filmmaking of the era. The night sword fights are particularly well staged, even though this still belongs to the “waving swords around” era of sword fighting choreography, and doesn’t feature the blood or cutting noises that would come to be so stylistically important to all sorts of Japanese genre cinema in the coming decade.

Ozawa makes for a pleasant lead, and shows a particularly effective ability of shifting from lightness to grimness and earnestness, so we the audience have no problem believing that his pretty young man is also very dangerous indeed when ne needs to be.

Three Films Make A Post: Their thoughts can kill!

Scanners (1981): This is sometimes treated as one of the lesser movies in David Cronenberg’s incredible run as a director from 1977 to 1996, but there’s so much to love in this version of the 70s conspiracy thriller as seen through the eyes of Philip K. Dick. Performances that are spot on or so weird they actually are spot on exactly because of their weirdness (Stephen Lack), a plot that starts in the realm of semi-plausible spy-fi but drifts further and further into the realm of the outright surreal, and a direction whose by now proverbial cool eye is all that stands between the material and utter, screaming lunacy. Plus, exploding heads are inherently cool (unless it’s your own head exploding).

Closed Circuit aka Circuito chiuso (1978): This Italian TV movie by Giuliano Montaldo does overstay its welcome a little, so that its turn from the locked room murder mystery to the outright fantastical doesn’t hit quite as hard as it could in a more concentrated form, but there’s much to recommend it: a clear love for the cinema experience of the time grounded in an ability to actually show the way cinemas at this time and place worked procedurally, a cast that has fun with the range of characters (all with secrets that have nothing to do with the case, of course) on offer, and the joy of seeing that most mock-rational of genres (as much as I have grown to enjoy golden age style murder mysteries, their ideas about logic and reason are utter nonsense) break down into the realm of the kind of fantasy that admits it is one.

The Kingdom of Jirocho aka Jirocho sangokushi (1963): This is the first film in the second cycle of films Masahiro Makino made about yakuza boss Shimizu Jirocho (Koji Tsuruta) – a real historical figure that had turned into something of a folk hero, and the embodiment of that most ridiculous of ideas, the good yakuza, honourably helping solve problems wherever he goes. This is really all set-up, showing the first meetings between Jirocho and the core members of his clan, but it does its business in such a light-handed and fun way, I hardly missed the presence of an actual plot.

Makino, apparently well-known for being a quick worker, clearly isn’t a sloppy one. Rather, there’s a lot of camera and character movement here, so much so, you’re never surprised when the protagonists break into song, as they regularly (though not quite regularly enough to call this a musical) do. There’s a joyous quality to the whole thing, unexpected from a film that finds a director repeating a greatest hit.

For fans of 60s/70s Toei ninkyo eiga – as I certainly am – there’s the additional joy of encountering a lot of the usual character and side actors, as well as a very very young Junk Fuji as a flirtatious bar maid (and alas not the female lead).

Three Films Make A Post: Toei Triple Threat

Kingdom of Jirocho 2 (1963): For large swathes of its running time, this second of Masahiro Makino’s remakes of his own material leaves behind honourable yakuza Jirocho (still Koji Tsuruta) in favour of the misadventures of “comedic” stuttering yakuza Ishi, and really strained my patience there. Apart from how badly stuttering-based humour has aged – it’s about as funny as US 30s films’ “cowardly black people” humour, so very much not at all – there’s a meandering quality to these scenes, very much leaving one with the feeling that half of this film is filler. Which is particularly disappointing because the other half is perfectly entertaining light ninkyo eiga business with one hell of a cast.

Kingdom of Jirocho 3 (1964): That last bit is also what makes the entertaining part of this third film. While there’s decidedly less – but still too much - of Ishi going around the third film mostly suffers from a lack of focus. There are perfectly cromulent subplots and even a bit of actual dramatic tension in the main plot, but there’s also a lot of side business that mostly feels unimportant and typically not terribly interesting.

Consequently, instead of an actual climax – what would be the climax in less woozy movie comes about an hour into the ninety minute film – we get another to be continued ending. Sure, part of the reason for this is the TV show like format in which these movies were produced, but it often feels as if the scripts were written while shooting on the film was already on the way.

Case of Umon: Red Lizard (1962): The Umon films, with Ryutaro Otomo in the title role, were one of several shogunate era samurai detective series. I have more experience with the somewhat darker Bored Hatamoto films, but my first foray into the adventures of this less pretend-lazy detective – in a film directed by Sadatsugu Matsuda who directed his first feature in 1928 and his last one in 1969 – is certainly promising. There’s some of the moody, near-gothic staging you get in many a Japanese mystery on screen, pulpy ideas like Edgar Wallace on speed (a killer known as the Red Lizard who is accompanied by a raven is certainly keeping in the spirit), some decent swordplay, and an actually pretty interesting mystery. Even better, the final sequence during which our detective explains what has been going on takes place during a stage play he has had a playwright write for the occasion.

To Kill a Mastermind (1979)

One of those huge cults of martial arts assassins that tend to plague the martial world in wuxia films has grown to become a huge threat for peace and stability throughout the whole of China. The cult is controlled by a mastermind so secretive, none of his underlings have ever seen him. He only communicates with his the eight chiefs stationed in his headquarters via a curious mechanical contraption, commanding them to do the most important dirty deeds.

Things have grown so bad, the emperor has ordered a group of men to find and kill the mastermind at all costs. Apart from the villains’ secrecy, there’s the little problem that the cult’s leaders are not to be beaten through a simple frontal assault, so the emperor's men work with the tools of espionage, subterfuge, and suicide attacks – all in an attempt to turn the leaders against one another.

In fact, the good guys, such as they are, appear to have managed to place an agent inside of the highest ranks of the cult. Their identity, however, is so secret, even the audience will only learn it during the final battle, when hopefully the mastermind’s identity will be revealed as well.

Wuxia films, particularly once Chor Yuen got into the genre at the Shaw Brothers, often have a particular closeness to the mystery genre (unless Jimmy Wang Yu, stars, of course), and the search for a mysterious mastermind certainly was a pretty standard genre trope at least during the 70s.

However, the approach Sun Chung (working from a script by Ni Kuang, who wrote about a million wuxia scripts, and novels) takes here is markedly different from the more typical tale of Ti Lung walking around the martial world, asking questions and getting into fights until the final showdown, and seems to take many of its cues from procedural spy material, while subtracting charismatic figures like George Smiley or Harry Palmer from the equation.

Instead, this is a film that spends a third of its time with nameless, thankless officials giving their lives for a goal that seems perpetual out of reach, and two thirds with eight – and then increasingly fewer – paranoid killers losing patience with one another.

It’s an interesting and uncommon way to go about it, but also one that leaves the film at hand without any visible centre. There is no clear protagonist, and because the mastermind stays hidden throughout, there’s no central antagonist here either. The film emphasises this even more by eschewing any of the great – or even mid-level – Shaw stars. Everybody here is a somewhat nameless character actor – all very capable when asked, all great in the fight scenes – so there’s nobody for an audience member to project themselves onto.

This turns To Kill a Mastermind into a somewhat alienating experience, as if you’d watch a film from a place where a genre you know quite well worked under somewhat different rules you as a viewer can’t quite comprehend, and are not sure you want to.

If this is the film’s great success or its great flaw is probably more a question of personal taste than anything else. At the very least, it is certainly interesting to see so many standard tropes of the wuxia without the thing – people, it turns out! – that usually anchors them, floating in a strange sort of limbo of great fight sequences, its director’s sense for striking use of colour, and some of the prettier locations to be found in the Shaw corpus.

It’s certainly an interesting experience, and even if I more appreciate To Kill a Mastermind than love it, and am rather glad most wuxia have central characters, I am just as glad its peculiar kind of abstraction exists.

Three Films Make A Post: Contribute to this page

Twilight aka Szürkület (1990): I found György Fehér’s adaptation of a much-adapted Dürrenmatt novel to be a rather frustrating experience. There are moments here, many moments even, where its Hungarian slow cinema style, the long shots of foggy, murky landscape accompanied by an ominous score create an incredible mood of dread, a feeling of wrongness highly appropriate to its plot about child murder and a retired policeman obsessing over the case.

But whenever characters start to speak, that very sinister spell was broken and I felt thrown into what I could only read as a parody of the same Hungarian slow cinema style, dialogue scenes that go on and on and on (and on and on) because characters pause for endless seconds after every second or third word in a sentence, as if the actors had painful trouble remembering every single word in every damn line they say. Call me a barbarian, but that ain’t art.

Seedpeople (1992): Probably not art either is this Full Moon Production film directed by the typically entertaining Peter Manoogian. Instead, it’s a seed-based version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, but with more gloopy rubber monsters. It’s rather good fun in its very undemanding low budget movie manner, and while the acting is nothing to write home about, and the script doesn’t really add much (and subtracts a lot of subtext) from its, ahem, inspiration, you can’t argue with gloopy rubber monsters, or at least I’m not going to.

Mostly because they use mind control, and/or turn you into a plant person.

Get Away (2024): Speaking of things that are undemanding but good fun, this horror comedy by Stefan Haars about a British family coming to a remote Swedish (shot in Finland) island to witness a curious play and stumble into a plot of folk horror and perversity isn’t terribly deep either. You’ll either notice its big plot twist early on, or get distracted by those wacky, creepy Swedes (portrayed by Finns), and you’ll enjoy the very, very bloody climax, or you won’t.

If this sounds as if I’m going for the classic “you’ll like this sort of thing if you like this sort of thing” move here, indeed I am, because there’s little else to say about the movie apart from that. Well, it’s always great to see Nick Frost.

Three Films Make A Post: This murder is set on repeat.

Time Cut (2024): You can’t convince me this thing wasn’t written by ChatGPT following a prompt like “write a script to a nostalgic time travel slasher”. That’s the only explanation to characters quite this generically lifeless, dialogue quite this empty and bland, and a plot this shamelessly cobbled together from other, generally better or at least more interesting films.

This is the sort of thing that gives Netflix originals a bad name, but there’s really nothing in the Netflix approach that explicitly forbids a filmmaker to make a good movie or at least one that shows an occasional sign of life – many manage, after all.

He Sees You When You’re Sleeping (2024): I am a bit disappointed that this Christmas thriller/murder mystery pretending to be a Christmas slasher is by far my least favourite of the films directed by indefatigable British low budget indie horror director Charlie Steeds.

On the other hand, given the man’s output (this is film number three or four this year, depending on who is counting), they can’t all be winners. This one suffers from a somewhat limp script (by lead and frequent Steeds collaborator David Lenik) that clearly wants to be sharp and snarky and clever, but can’t quite hit the right notes – certainly not in the dialogue, which isn’t helped by a cast that often simply isn’t quite up to it.

Appointment with Death (1988): On the other hand, I still enjoyed this lesser Steeds quite a bit more than this limp Peter Ustinov Poirot directed by Michael Winner for Cannon films.

You’d think Winner would have sleazed up the material a bit – something I rather like to see done to the works of Christie (but then, I’ve never been a fan) – but instead, this is a mix of about forty percent tourist footage of Israel and sixty percent draggy, unrhythmic dialogue, snoozed through by an on paper fantastic cast. Even Peter Ustinov – a man typically not letting go of any scenery coming his way – seems bored and disengaged, and if you manage to make Ustinov look bored, you’re doing something very wrong indeed.

The Beast Must Die (1974)

Self-made millionaire and all-around prick Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart) fancies himself the ultimate hunter. Ultimate hunters need the ultimate prey, and Tom has decided the most dangerous game isn’t humans like other rich movie pricks believe. Nope, it’s werewolves.

Consequently, he has invited a handful of people of dubious character – as well as sometimes potentially suggestive hairiness – onto his isolated island home – there’s a pianist and potential full moon based serial killer (Charles Gray), a potential murderess (Ciaran Madden) who is also friend of Tom’s girlfriend Caroline (Marlene Clark), and a hairy one-time cannibal (Tom Chadbon). Also invited is werewolf expert and enthusiast Dr Lundgren (Peter Cushing), typically dressed nattily in black with red applications, come to spout some very peculiar werewolf lore and be Peter Cushing with a dubious Swedish accent.

Tom, being a modern kind of rich asshole, has wired most of the island and the mansion (apart from the bathrooms, which will become a problem) with cameras and microphones, secretly controlled by his very own Man in a Chair (Anton Diffring).

Now Tom only needs to keep his guests on the island and wait for the full moon. However, it does turn out that this werewolf would really rather play And Then There Were None instead of The Most Dangerous Game, and Tom may or may not be a great hunter, but he certainly isn’t even a minor detective.

Because sometimes the gods provide us wonderful gifts, Paul Annett’s The Beast Must Die isn’t just a werewolf murder mystery, but a werewolf murder mystery with a gimmick right out of the William Castle playbook. You see, before the climax, the film stops for a “Werewolf Break”™, during which we, the audience, are meant to come up with the identity of the werewolf – with headshots of the surviving suspects for the very weak of memory. Of course, this isn’t actually much of a fair play kind of mystery, so the whole thing is only ever a gimmick.

Ignoring the gimmick (though who’d want to do such a thing?), The Beast is good, straightforward 70s style fun, with a bunch of highly unsympathetic characters – the nominal hero of the piece being the worst of them even though he isn’t a murderous werewolf - getting on each others’ nerves or murdered, respectively, broken up with Tom’s incompetent attempts at bagging himself the werewolf.

That werewolf is a bit if a problem, alas, because for some reason, the production doesn’t involve werewolf make-up, as was tradition in the werewolf game at that point, but rather goes for putting a shaggy full-body hairpiece on an actual dog – with exactly the disappointing results one expects from that approach. Annett’s direction doesn’t suggest he realizes that this kind of werewolf is best kept out of frame and in the dark and provides us with many a good look at it.

But then, the direction doesn’t exactly suggest much thought having been put into anything – it’s a very straightforward point and shoot affair that does include some of the fashions of its time not because of any interest in style but because everybody was doing them.

Yet still, this neutral directorial effort can’t drag the fun out of the thing, at least not too badly: too irresistible is the idea of the werewolf murder mystery, too wonderfully of its time and place are its ideas, and too great is the lure of the Werewolf Break™. We all should have one.

Horrors of Malformed Men (1969)

Original title: Kyôfu kikei ningen: Edogawa Rampo zenshû

Japan, 1925. Being thrown into a mental institution for no good reason is not terribly great, but when a bald co-patient attempts to strangle Hirosuke Hitomi (Teruo Yoshido) and does not survive Hirosuke’s self-defence, the young man uses this as an opportunity to flee. He follows a female voice singing a folk song that reminds him of something in his past he can’t quite grasp.

The singer of the song is a young woman (Teruko Yumi). Turns out this is a tune common to a specific island off the Japanese coast where she grew up before she became a circus performer in the big city. There’s clearly more to say, but before she can tell our protagonist more, she is killed by a thrown knife, which of course leads to various witnesses running after Hirosuke as the murderer.

Having escaped that problem, Hirosuke decides to travel to the island the girl told him about, to perhaps learn more about himself – it’s never quite clear if he has some form of amnesia, or is just easily mystified. On the train to the island, Hirosuke, sees the photo of the head of the main family dwelling there, one Genzaburo Komoda. Strangely enough, Genzaburo looks exactly like Hirosuke; even stranger, he’s dead, so any theories Hirosuke might actually be Genzaburo go right out of the window.

So Hirosuke does the logical thing: once on the island, he steals the dead Genzaburo’s shroud to stage a pretty bizarre resurrection. The Komoda family buys this peculiar production, and soon Hirosuke finds himself not only coping with the results of his own ruse, but also the various mysteries and strangenesses of the Komoda household, as well as the sexual advances of Genzaburo’s wife and of his lover. What follows is a bit of sex, more perversion and a murder or two.

Eventually, our protagonist will end up on yet another island, where Genzaburo’s father (Tatsumi Hijikata) is attempting to create his very own tribe of surgically malformed and psychologically tortured men meant to mirror and triple down on his own physical and mental problems. Very much making Doctor Moreau look perfectly reasonable in comparison.

Using Edogawa Rampo’s “The Strange Tale of Panorama Island” as plot scaffolding, Teruo Ishii’s Horrors of Malformed Men adds bits and pieces of other stories by Rampo to the proceedings, clearly aiming to adapt the spirit of the man’s body of work even when fudging plot details. Given the sense of the unreal and the perverse in what I’ve read of Rampo’s stories, emphasising the feel of his work seems a reasonable approach. This might very well be the only thing in the film I’d describe as “reasonable”, for what Ishii makes of this is an increasingly, heatedly deranged series of set pieces that play out like the fever dreams of a perverted pulp writer. On paper, this is by far not the most extreme thing I’ve seen in Japanese cinema – there’s more sex, more violence, more sexualised violence elsewhere – but its mood is so fantastically and specifically erotically grotesque, the film feels dangerous, exciting, strange, and brutal as anything you’d encounter.

Ishii, a veteran of Japanese genre cinema whose films became ever more strange and idiosyncratic, is at his best here, marrying the technical chops typical of studio directors of the time and place with a gleeful sense of transgression as well as a visible understanding of the beauty of the grotesque you won’t find in many horror films. There’s a restless sense of creativity to Ishii’s methods in realizing this beauty – the decision to have the malformed people as well as Genzaburo’s father be played by butoh performers, for example, pays off in a brand of poetic strangeness found right at the other side of ugliness that’s perfect for Rampo and gifts the viewer with quite a few sights never seen before or after.

The Phantom Killer (1981)

Original title: 粉骷髏

Siu Fong (Wai Pak) is a bit of a local hero in a Chinese town ever since he fought off the bandits once lording it over the place. Because he’s also as pretty as he is boring, every single one of the town’s single ladies is swooning after him. Siu, however, has only eyes for the equally boring Sin Sin (Lee Yuen-Wa).

While Siu Fong’s gallivanting around the country probably doing something heroic, boringly, a series of murders of young women strikes our town. Curiously enough, all the victims were particular fans of Siu Fong; even more curiously, once he is back in town, the victims seem to be killed shortly after having cornered him to flirt with him.

At first, the chief of the local guard, Captain Chiu (Eddy Ko Hung), suspects Siu Fong. But various plot developments soon dissuade him from that theory. Why, perhaps the killer might be a woman trying to get rid of her rivals for that perfect man’s attentions, perhaps even a crazed Sin Sin?

I do have a place in my heart for films that mix wuxia and tales of detection, even more so when they, as Stanley Fung Sui-Fan’s The Phantom Killer does, add pleasant flourishes of the macabre to proceedings. The titular killer dresses up like a skeletal monk to commit their crimes – and their true nature is even more beautifully improbable – and there’s a whole line of inquiry about a corpse deposited in a statue, a worker in clay who sleeps in a coffin, and other elements of that nature.

Unfortunately, the macabre elements, as well as the mystery plot, suffer from the same syndrome as the film’s protagonist – they sound a lot more interesting than they turn out to be in practice.

Siu Fong’s just too bland to be interesting, and while he’s certainly physically attractive, Wai Pak projects all the personality of a freshly whitened wall. This even continues on into his kung fu style, that’s also technically flawless yet also – in a bizarre turn of events for one of the Venoms (Brother Snake) – lacking in any personality.

The macabre elements aren’t quite as struck with mediocrity as the protagonist – you can only make a skeletal monk piloted by a SPOILER so uninteresting – but director Fung certainly doesn’t use them as well as they deserve. Again, there’s nothing actively bad about the direction – it just lacks personality to a nearly improbable degree.

All of this does not mean The Phantom Killer is unwatchable, it’s just wasting some great ideas on boring competence.

The Five Venoms (1978)

aka The Five Deadly Venoms

aka 5 Deadly Venoms

The dying master (Dick Wei) of a kung fu clan known as the House of Venoms regrets the rather dark and dubious deeds he and many of his students have committed over the years. His final wish made to his last student, Yang De (Chiang Sheng), is for the young man to find his other surviving students, observe their virtue, and dispatch them if necessary. There are two problems here: even though his master has taught Yang De a smattering of all the techniques of the House – namely the styles of the Gecko, the Toad, the Centipede, the Snake and the Scorpion - the other students have all specialized, and he’ll not be able to stand against them in single combat. Making matters more difficult is the fact that most of the students have never actually met one another, so finding the people whose virtue Yang De is supposed to evaluate could turn out to be rather difficult. One suspects the master of the House of Venoms never had the time to learn of the power of the style of Drawing.

However, there’s another surviving member of the House of Venoms who has retired to a small town in the country. He has stolen and hidden away the clan’s treasure, and the master is convinced the other Venoms are bound to look for him and it. So Yang De really only needs to travel there and keep his eyes open, beat the villains he can’t beat without teaming up with a virtuous venom who may or may not exist, find the treasure himself, and give it to charity. Simple.

As it turns out, the Venoms are indeed all in town looking for the treasure – some committing increasingly horrible deeds of violence and betrayal while others do try to act noble.

Chang Cheh’s The Five Venoms is often overshadowed by the later films featuring its five leads. They were soon to be known as the “Five Venoms”, and consisted, besides Chiang, of Philip Kwok Chun-Fung, Sun Chien, Lu Feng, Lo Meng and Wai Pak. These five were great screen martial artists when working more in the background or alone, as they more often than not before this, but absolute magic when brought together. Later films do indeed provide even more opportunity to showcase their particular artistry.

However, one of the strengths of Five Venoms as a movie is that it is particularly willing to put its martial arts – though there’s still a lot of it, all of it great and often highly imaginative – aside for a bit to mirror Chang’s generally dark, pessimistic and woman-less – one can’t help but suspect a connection there - world view not only in rather dark ideas about the nature of many people but also a mood of the Chinese gothic. The use of torture and cruel, non-martial killing methods used by the evil Venoms does slot into Chang’s taste for a bit of on-screen cruelty, but combined with some choice shadows draped over some well-known Shaw sets and camera work that suggests more than a passing acquaintance with Italian Gothic horror (or similar ideas about how to suggest dread and decay visually), it does sometimes suggest that this particular version of ancient China is situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of Witchfinder General, if not locally, then spiritually.

Because two genres aren’t enough for Chang and the writer of more movies than many people have seen in their lives, Ni Kuang - who is of course on script duty here - this is also a bit of a classic murder mystery concerning at first an investigation by observation into the moral nature of the Venoms and then one about the identity of the elusive final Venom, Brother Scorpion, a cruel, sociopathic manipulator of the highest order, complete with red herrings.

It’s a combination I find irresistible, particularly when it is held together as well as it is here – philosophically, on a plot level, and aesthetically.