Unholy Women is a nice little horror anthology movie consisting of three stories by different directors in wildly varying style and tone, connected through that hoary old chestnut, the Ebil Woe-man. I wouldn't be much surprised if the movie had something to do with one of the many Japanese supernatural TV shows we in the West usually don't get to see. Two of its directors did at least some work in that direction.
TV shows and misogynist undertones aside, the film is well worth watching, if one isn't completely averse to Japanese horror.
It starts out with Rattle by Keita Amemiya, who is probably better known as the director of a few Kamen Rider films. It's the story of a young woman's terrible night. She is going to marry her boyfriend soon - after the divorce from his present wife is through, that is. Until then, she'll just have to survive the attention of a weird, knife-wielding woman dressed in red. At first, said woman seems to be her future husband's future ex-wife, then, after some more obvious supernatural occurrences have taken place, her future husband's future ex-wife's ghost, later one of those passerby ghosts who just happen to pounce on random people. Our heroine's night of screaming and running around finally leads her to the truth of the matter, in one of the more non-sensical and just plain silly twist endings of my movie watching career (with !bonus time travel without a cause). Well, nobody would have expected that explanation.
It is quite a shame about the ending - up to a point, Rattle is an unoriginal but solid genre piece, in the beginning nicely paced, with a few moments of rather clever sound design and an equally clever use of colour, held back from being something more by the terrible scenery chewing performance of the mad ghost woman's actress and the complete lack of motivation for her actions. The latter often works out nicely in Asian horror, but feels mostly incoherent here.
Fortunately, Rattle is the worst of the three stories.
The second one, Steel, tells of a young, painfully shy mechanic. One day (and very suddenly at that) his boss talks him into going out with his sister. Having never met the woman outside of a photograph (which turns out to leave out some important details), our hero is rather surprised when he meets the girl. She is wearing a brownish sack over her whole upper body, with no face or arms or much of her body above her mini-skirt visible. Even stranger is the way his boss is acting - he doesn't seem to think his sister's interesting fashion sense in the least strange or noteworthy; and hero boy is, of course, much too shy to just ask.
But, if you put two young people together, they are bound to fall in love or at least in lust, sack or no sack. After some abortive attempts at sex, which are made slightly problematic by her love of the old ultra-violence, the things she hides under her sack, and his tendency to either run away from her or try to kill her, the two outsiders slowly learn to love and trust each other...No, wait, it actually ends in a sack-themed variation on the vagina dentata. But it is still a happy ending.
Steel is a story that is bound to anger or irritate some viewers. It would be difficult not to find the story a little distasteful and the vagina dentata/woman in a sack business at least problematic, but I was won over very fast by director Takuji Suzuki's dry tone in the presentation of the utterly weird and wacky. The whole thing has some wonderfully funny moments derived from the kind of very Japanese humor that just takes something extremely weird and treats it with shrugging matter of factness, very much like our hero's boss.
In The Inheritance, the third and final episode, a freshly divorced woman and her young son return to her family home in the country. Her mother is still alive, but has not been in the most stable state of mind ever since her young son one night suddenly disappeared. Soon the grandmother isn't the only one in the house acting weird anymore. Something that she discover's in the old shed in the yard seems to break something inside the boy's mother and she's starting to act as erratically as her own mother. Then there's also the ghost of the boy's uncle and his connection to the shed for the child to cope with.
This last episode was directed by Keisuke Toyoshima, and "supervised" (whatever that may mean) by house-favourite Takashi Shimizu. The plot doesn't have a lot of surprises in store, but Toyoshima shows a very fine sense for mood and is able to present the kind of small gestures that are much more effective for me than things like spring-loaded cats. I was also quite taken by the unflinching way the film looks at child abuse - not so detailed as to be sensationalist, but with a well developed sense for the dreadfulness of the whole thing, the kind of dreadfulness that's a lot more difficult to take than ghosts.
So, even if the first story ends in a most irritating way, the other two episodes make Unholy Women well worth watching, unless you are one those people who just can't take looking at Asian people. You know, the kind of person all those American remakes of Asian films are made for (see also: things which are worse than death).
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