Three Films Make A Post: When it rains it pours…BLOOD!

The Corruption of Chris Miller aka La corrupción de Chris Miller (1973): This Spanish giallo directed by Juan Antonio Bardem is about as close to Sergio Martino in his most erotic/sleazy mode as you can imagine, carrying the same sense of actual decadence. Bardem isn’t quite the stylist his Italian peer is, but then, late Franco era Spain isn’t exactly an easy place to do eroticised, violent glamour and glamourous violence in, and given the context, this is beautifully done.

Plus, Jean Seberg and Marisol are fantastic as the film’s core psychosexually messed up duo taking in a drifter who may very well be a serial killer but is most definitely a 70s kind of guy in all other ways.

Carnival of Sinners aka La main du diable (1943): Vichy era France wasn’t a great place to make films in that weren’t running with the Nazi party line – though quite a few French filmmakers managed – so there was a tendency to retreat into more fantastical material, as this tale of a talentless painter who buys a talisman in form of a hand – sometimes moving – that turns him very talented indeed. Of course, this also means he’s made a pact with the devil – here a small bureaucrat without a bit of Milton in him – and thus his talent doesn’t actually buy him the happiness he craves.

All of which isn’t exactly easy escapist material, and one can’t help but read rather obvious political points into Maurice Tourneur’s film. The film has its lengths – particularly in its middle part – but there’s the poetic power of dark legend in its scenes more often than not, typically intercut with surrealist imagery and a bit of humour.

Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl aka Kyûketsu Shôjo tai Shôjo Furanken (2009): Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu, this belongs to that school of often pleasantly insane, cheap, gore comedies a small group of Japanese directors tuned out in the early 2000s. These aren’t movies making promises they can’t keep, so the title is definitely program, the humour is broad, and blood – curiously digital and practical – is as copious as a sense of crazy, often very funny and grotesque body-shifting fun (personal favourite: Frankenstein Girl using her legs as a propeller to fly).

This does take some time to get going and tests the audience’s patience early on with what amount to not terribly funny comedy skits about high school subcultures, but the film’s second half is a series of increasingly bizarre and inspired bloody nonsense that’s bound to put a smile on the face of anyone watching a movie with this title on purpose.

Past Misdeeds: Maid-Droid (2009)

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In short: Rape Zombie: Lust of the Dead (2012)

When they work, Naoyuki Tomomatsu’s (of Stacy – Attack of the School Girl Zombies etc fame) films are like a certain kind of punk rock – cheap, a bit nasty, definitely tasteless but also imaginative and bizarre in a way only something can be that doesn’t have to give a shit about what people think of it. Rape Zombie (only authentic with a horribly catchy bad extreme metal title track I’m pretty sure is called “Rape Zombie Rape”) certainly is one of these, with hardly a minute going by that doesn’t make you cringe (sometimes in embarrassment), giggle madly, or mumble to yourself “what the hell am I watching here, exactly?”.

Where a few too many contemporary Japanese low to no budget splatter epics tend to be slow, ponderous affairs that can’t hide that there’s only money for about fifteen minutes of actual film available to the production, Tomomatsu gets around the problem by acts of sheer imagination and chutzpa. So what if he can only afford three action set pieces? He can sure as heck fill the space in between with stuff like a bizarre TV discussion between a crazy evolutionary biologist (as is tradition making pretty obvious why nobody takes scientists putting “evolutionary” before their actual discipline all that seriously), a radical feminist, a radical ecological protector (in a suit), and a doctor of medicine that becomes more absurd the longer it all goes on, which, now that I think about it, must actually be for more than a day for the characters involved.

Among the film’s other highlights are a North Korean nuclear attack (we all knew Japanese pop culture filth must be responsible for the rape-zombie-pocalypse, North Korea says), the glowing rape zombie messiah, cosplay that’s kinda-sorta plot point, random digressions into mythology and cultural philosophy which to a degree might actually be meant seriously (as is Tomomatsu’s wont), and everyone’s favourite Japanese contemporary low budget/pinku/v-cinema actress Asami demonstrating that she’s gotten rather good at the whole on-screen fighting thing (she’s even credited as involved in the action choreography).

Saying it all comes together to something that’s often quite more charming, less unpleasant, much funnier, and decidedly more entertaining than the film’s title promises does rather sound like damning it with faint praise; so let’s just say that Rape Zombie is actually pretty fantastic for a film only held together by spit, the cheapest digital effects, cardboard and sheer wilful imagination, and leave it at that.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,in short,wtf,horror,zombies,comedy,naoyuki tomomatsu,rina aikawa,yui aikawa,asami,alice ozawa

Ero Kowai Kaidan Vol. 2 - Poltergeist (2010)

College student Maiko (Shelley Fujii) is run over by a car while crossing the street, which seems to be the sort of thing that happens when one is more interested in one's cellphone than in one's surroundings. She doesn't seem too badly hurt, but once she is released from hospital, the young woman begins to have the mandatory strange experiences.

The rather nice kick in the head has given Maiko the ability to see the ghosts spooking all around her. After a bit of panicking, our heroine has a little talk with the woman who paints her "past life picture", and is therefore an expert on all things spiritual. The woman's recommendation is for Maiko to just ignore the ghosts and continue living as before, but the spirited young woman decides to ignore such a boring proposition and help the ghosts solve their various problems. Just like on TV.

At first, things go well: a college friend is healed from his ghost-induced backaches and the killer of a family of three is apprehended with Maiko's help. Alas, things get a bit out of control once our heroine makes contact with a poltergeist who has been hanging around her all the time. The deader shows itself to be prone to sexual assaults and other highly unpleasant activities. After a little research, this behaviour fits perfectly to the ghost's back story, for he turns out to be a mass rapist and murderer who was lynched by angry villagers after a night of carnage. The ghost also happens to be what Maiko's psychic painter friend paints as the girl's earlier incarnation.

Now, it seems as if it were high time for an exorcism, but there are still two twist endings to come.

It might sound a bit strange given the usual cheapness and ugliness of many of his films, but to me, Poltergeist's director Naoyuki Tomomatsu is one of the true auteurs working in the gravitational fields of pinku, violent exploitation and the weird in Japan today.

Though Tomomatsu's films nearly always struggle visibly with the restrictions of their budgets, they also show a director obsessed with pondering his favourite philosophical questions in his movies, questions like the nature of free will and human identity, not caring that he's producing cheap filler material for low-level DVD labels.

Poltergeist clearly isn't one of Tomomatsu's more successful efforts, in part because the director doesn't really manage to unite the erotic (which, in this case, means "containing a bit more nudity than strictly necessary and having a very silly rough ghost sex scene") ghost story the series he's working in wants him to tell with the weird and slightly annoying double twist ending and his own philosophical concerns.

Instead, Tomomatsu has produced a film that jumps from cheap scares, to the shower, to POV-scenes of the heroine holding monologues of skewed philosophy into her cellphone, to squirt-y ghost sex scenes with the random abandon of a rather peculiar dream, until it tries to explain all its weird flaws away by actually explaining everything that happened as the dreams of a woman who has been lying in a coma for three years. Which certainly is something, though neither what Tomomatsu is going for, nor very good exploitation cinema.

The other reason - beside it not being all that much of a movie - why Poltergeist stays interesting but also unsatisfying is the abhorrent quality of the film's actors. There's a frightening awkwardness surrounding every single performance here (even the ghost actors share that trait), with nobody able to even emote the straightest feelings the least bit convincingly, and obviously even less able to cope with Tomomatsu's discussions of the construction of identity and the ghost hunter fame of Thomas Edison.

It's a bit of a shame, really, because I could see myself being a bit more excited about Poltergeist despite its flaws if it had been acted professionally.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,naoyuki tomomatsu,horror,exploitation,shelley fujii,reviews

On WTF: Maid-Droid (2009)

From time to time, we all have to go back to the well of true Japanese smut.

This one, apart from being smut and of a (debatably) misogynist bend, is also an ambitious piece of SF. I'll try to explain in my review on WTF.

 

Technorati-Tags: sf,pinku,naoyuki tomomatsu,reviews,comedy,other places