Tomomatsu Naoyuki’s Zombie Self-Defense Force (Zombi jietai) is one of the most ridiculous genre spoofs out there…and I mean ridiculous in a good way. A UFO crashes in a forest and releases radiation that can reanimate the dead. In close vicinity to the crash are a gang of yakuza and their chinpira lackeys, a photography crew on location to shoot a Japanese idol, and a few members of the Jietai (Japan Self-Defense Force) on a training mission. Pop idol Hitomi, Yuri (Watase Miyu) a female solider who is more than meets the eye, and a few others manage to survive the initial carnage. They band together and take cover in an isolated hotel. Zombie/alien/fetus/ghost/android madness ensues.
But, honestly, the actual plot is inconsequential. What the film lacks in budget and screenwriting it makes up for in some genuinely funny parodies.
Everyone who watches Japanese film knows about Versus. And for good reason, this is an awesome movie. I tend to shy away from movies that are excessively popular. This is because having never been popular myself, I harbor a deep subconscious resentment for all things that become popular. But, in this case, I will grudgingly accept that Versus has earned it’s popularity for good reason.
Written and directed by Kitamura Ryuhei, Versus stars Sakaguchi Tak and Sakaki Hideo in roles that garnered them huge cult status. Versus was so popular that it inspired the 2002 film Alive, starring the two actors in virtually identical roles and also directed by Kitamura.
After spending hours watching atrociously low-budget Japanese zombie films, Versus and the film’s amazingly choreographed action sequences look like works of art. This movie is a full throttle action movie. And, like any good action movie, the main characters are simply too cool for names.
The two main characters – Prisoner KSC2-303 (Sakaguchi Tak) and The Man (Sakaki Hideo) – are trapped in a karmic cycle where every century or two they must fight to the death over the entrance to the 444th Portal (the Japanese equivalent of 666), the power contained within it, and the life of a girl.
Directed by Tomomatsu Naoyuki and based on a novel by Otsuki Kenji, the 2001 film Stacy seems like a pretty good idea – what’s not to love about undead zombie schoolgirls? The film opens with the following narration:
The beginning of the 21st century. Young girls aged 15 to 17 began dying one after another, after all over the world. Even more surprising the dead girls began to reawaken as zombies. I don’t know who coined the term, but they began to call the zombies ‘Stacies.’
This tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the film – for some reason, girls start turning in zombies and it’s up to the fathers or boyfriends of the dearly departed to dismember them (in a oddly precise number of body parts, 165). Thanks to the crackpot research of the bespectacled Dr. Inugami, all the distraught population knows about the outbreak it that girls suffer from ‘Near Death Happiness’ (NDH) before dying and turning into ‘Stacies.’ These Stacies glow blue from a ‘Butterfly Twinkle Powder’ that they secrete when they are exposed to what we might as well call love.
Even living dead girls need to look good
Presumably set in Okinawa, Shiryo-gari (written and directed by Muroga Atsushi) is about an American military experiment on dead bodies that predictably results in a zombie outbreak. The hapless American soldiers enlist the help of Dr. Nakada (played by Kishimoto Yuji), a Japanese scientist who was involved in the original research, to help bring the situation under control. As luck would have it, a group of inept jewelry thieves, led by Jun (Asano Nobuyuki) and Saki (Shimamura Kaori) decide to use the isolated laboratory as a hide-out before the American soldiers can get there to clean up the mess.
Title frame, circa HITCHCOCK
Dead Girl Walking is one of six segments of a made-for-TV series called ‘Hino Theater of Horror,’ all adapted from the works of manga artist Hino Hideshi. Hino Hideshi dreams up pretty dark ideas for his manga and he ranks just below Junji Ito as one of the most important Japanese horror-gore manga artists. Yuri (Maeda Ayaka), a young student, suddenly dies from a heart attack…except she doesn’t die. Though clinically dead, she continues to think, act, and feel just like any other high school girl. She attempts to ‘live’ on, even as her body begins to rot. Her family, forced to live with an abomination and deal with her increasing stench, try a variety of ways to actually kill her. Unfortunately she is already dead, so their efforts are in vain. Despised by everyone, she runs away and becomes a homeless vagrant, her body slowly falling to pieces. Walking along the road, she gets picked up by a strange man and forced into some bizarre circus act, where she may or may not have been raped by a group of perverse business men. Ultimately her decomposition progresses so far that she can no longer move and her family douses her body in gasoline and burns her ‘alive.’ Then there is some sort of birth/death sequence and, finally truly dead, Yuri can rest in peace.
Tokyo Zombie
Imagine George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead fused with Simon Pegg’s Shaun of the Dead and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what this movie is about. However, based on the manga by Hanakuma Yusaku and written and directed by Sato Sakichi (the man responsible for the Ichi the Killer adaptation), Tokyo Zombie is inescapably Japanese.
My YouTube video on this review shall be posted in the upcoming days. For now, here is the essay.
危ない義理のできる男色
What a sexy forelock
Oshima Nagisa’s 1999 film Gohatto is about desire and suspicion within the ranks of the Shinsengumi during the bakumatsu period. The film can be interpreted as both an examination of the destructive effects of desire within the brotherhood of the militia and as an allegorical criticism of the way modern Japanese society forces individuals to repress their desires for the sake of the group. While the second interpretation is entirely subjective, it is not unlikely given the fact that the director, Oshima Nagisa, commonly uses historical settings to criticize and examine modern society within his films. Furthermore, his failure to accurately reconstruct the sentiments of Tokugawa samurai during the mid-19th century within the film implies that Oshima Nagisa was more interested in using the subject matter to criticize modern society than in accurately reproducing the mentality of the time. It is clear that historical accuracy was not the primary concern of the director. Though Gohatto accurately portrays the environment and the official attitude of Tokugawa lawmakers towards shūdō (male-male relationships), its characters view the subject with an attitude that is far too modern.
Bushido: The Soul of Fanaticism
Hara-kiri’s Juxtaposition of Sensationalism and Reality
Anyone vaguely familiar with Japan has no doubt heard of samurai, the fiercely disciplined and loyal warriors who ruled over Japan for centuries. In the West, we like to believe that every samurai lived according to the philosophy of bushido, the Way of the Samurai. According to Japanese works, such as Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure and Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism, this belief is quite accurate. However, what many fail to realize is that these works are a misrepresentation of the samurai beliefs common during the Edo period (roughly 1600-1868) and exaggerate the historical and social significance of bushido. In reality, bushido is an artificial philosophy, written and followed by a fanatic minority who wished to cling to a bloody, militant past and was never accepted or followed by the majority of the samurai class. In Death, Honor, and Loyalty: The Bushido Ideal, G. Cameron Hurst states, “The few Tokugawa works which explicitly use the term bushido turn out, in fact, to be a very narrow stream of thought essentially out of touch with the broader spectrum of Neo-Confucian ideas to which most of the samurai class adhered” (515). However, the principles of bushido – and samurai philosophy in general – are unclear and poorly defined because they were never codified into a written ethical code. For the sake of clarity, this essay will concentrate on the interpretation of bushido found in Masaki Kobayashi’s 1963 film Hara-kiri, which artfully juxtaposes the fanatic bushido followed by the Iyi clan and the more moderate and rational actions of the ronin Tsugumo Hanshiro. While Tsugumo’s actions seem to conflict with the principles of samurai ethics according to bushido, they are actually a more realistic representation of the principles upheld by the samurai of that time. The ‘philosophy’ of bushido misinterprets these values in several ways; it completely disregards compassion as the key element in the virtues of honor, loyalty, and duty, has a rabid philosophy of ‘pure action,’ and has perverted an ‘acceptance of death’ into an obsessive cult of ritual mutilation and suicide.
This installment discusses Shimizu Takashi’s 2000 hit JU-ON.
J-Horror Classics – Shimizu Takashi’s JU-ON: THE GRUDGE
Despite the popularity of the 1998 RING, by 2000 it seemed like the Japanese horror boom had ended. At least, no films had been released that really could rival Nakata’s smash hit. In February, Shimizu Takashi released a straight-to-video film called JU-ON: THE CURSE. The production company expected it to a quick cash-in on the horror genre, nothing more. But Ju-On quickly became an underground hit much like The Ring had before it. The straight-to-video production of Ju-On had been made for the diehard purists, the kind of horror fans who line up to see movies on opening nights and whatnot. Realizing they could make a lot more on Ju-On, the studio funded a theatrical remake of the Ju-On which was released in theaters in January 2003 (This has been released in America as JU-ON: THE GRUDGE to distinguish itself from its predessor). The theatrical remake doesn’t offer too many changes to the original Ju-On story and has preserved the non-linear storyline that is a staple within the series. The only real change was the creation of the main character Nishina Rika, played by Okina Megumi. In fact, the roots of Ju-On can be traced all the way back to 1998.
I was recently contacted by Tinker-san, who informed me that he has mentioned my review of Yotsuya Kaidan on his website ホラーSHOX / HORROR SHOX! This is a great website and an amazing resource for all kinds of horror films. I am very flattered by his description of my review =^_^=
If you are interested in reading the original Japanese, please follow this link to his page:
curse.jp/japan-horror/20090613222134.html
I have also included a translation of what the article says (if you cannot read Japanese and are interested in reading it).
TRANSLATION:
I found a YouTube video about Yotsuya Kaidan made by a foreigner. A beautiful blonde girl appeared, reviewing Yotsuya Kaidan. This person is amazing! “Yotsuya Kaidan is based on an old kabuki play. Because it is a very famous Japanese horror story, there are many versions of this movie. My favorites are definitely the one directed by Nakagawa and the Nakadai Tatsuya version. Nakadai Tatsuya is a big star, as big as Mifune.” Like that, she talks about the story very passionately. I wonder if she thinks that Japanese people are watching her YouTube video because she is speaking in very easy-to-listen-to English. So you should check it out. I bet that Japanese horror boys will be her fan.
She begins with an introduction of the basic story of Yotsuya Kaidan, then a summary of the historical background and gives her opinion about Japanese horror. Here is a rough translation of what she says:
“Black haired female ghosts set on revenge, water, trouble within families, and love relationships: these are all classic elements of Japanese horror. In my personal opinion, Nakagawa Nobuo’s version from 1959 has really good camera work. I like this one because it has a kabuki-like atmosphere. On the other hand, in the 1966 version Nakadai Tatsuya’s acting was very good. His acting with his big eyes creates a very nice haunted feeling…Women who are socially weak become ghosts with supernatural power and can seek revenge – I think storylines like these are the origins of Japanese horror. And there is a clear logic to it. In short, this means that if you do something bad, something bad will happen to you. Iyemon is in this exact situation. I think that this is a very traditional Japanese horror story, but there is a big difference when compared to modern Japanese horror stories. In modern Japanese horror, this logic is violated and, regardless of who you are, you are cursed. Many people die, just like in The Grudge. Some people say that modern Japanese horror has been influenced by the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack, but I’m not sure if this is really the case. It may just be a bad omen of modern society.”
When I see a foreigner who knows so much about Japan, I don’t why but I feel very proud and happy. I feel as if I am the one who is being praised, even though it’s not me who made the movie.
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