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Posts Tagged ‘Ghosts’

Mr Wrong

January 20th, 2012 | article by Denis Klotz | No Comments »
Tags: Gaylene Preston, Ghosts, haunted car, Horror, New Zealand

dir. Gaylene Preston
1986 / 83′
written by Geoff Murphy, Gaylene Preston and Graeme Telly
from a story by Elizabeth Jane Howard
cienmatography by Thomas Burstyn
original music by Jonathan Crayford
starring Heather Bolton, David Letch, Margaret Umbers, Gary Stalker and Danny Mulheron
Mr Wrong is available on OOP VHS under the American title of Dark of the Night

Meg (Heather Bolton perfectly embodying a mixture of inexperience/naivety and hidden strength) has left her country home for the big city (I’d insert a joke about what “big city” means in New Zealand here, but that would be oh so inappropriate seeing where I live), where she works in an antiquities store. To make it easier to visit her parents over the weekends – and probably as a symbol of her freshly won independence – the young woman buys a used Jaguar.

Her first long drive with the car does not go quite as well as Meg would have hoped for. When she stops by the side of the road to take a night nap, she’s awoken by hard and pretty unhealthy sounding breathing noises from the back seat of the car that start whenever she turns off the interior lights. Worse, or at least even more frightening to her, there’s nothing and nobody to see on the back seat.

After that experience, Meg becomes increasingly nervous and afraid of the car, a state of affairs that is certainly not improved by further peculiar happenings surrounding it. After Meg has had a nightmare centring on a long-haired woman, she sees the exact same woman standing by the side of the road trying to hitch a ride in her waking life. For whatever reason, Meg stops for her.

However, the woman isn’t alone. A man (David Letch) gets in together with her, but he doesn’t seem to actually be together with the woman as Meg assumes. In fact, he doesn’t seem to know about the woman’s presence at all, which becomes understandable but not exactly less peculiar when she suddenly just disappears from the car. The guy is more than just a bit creepy too, and Meg has a hard time getting rid of him.

This experience is nearly enough to convince Meg of getting rid of her car as soon as possible, and when she learns that its last owner was a young woman about her age who was murdered, and whose killer has never been caught, our heroine does try to sell it off.

That, however, is much easier said than done, for the car begins to sabotage Meg’s efforts in ways that could be explained away by bad luck, if it weren’t clear to the young woman her car was haunted.

While all this is going on, a mysterious someone begins to send Meg roses – surely, this won’t have anything to do with the rather more horrible things going on in her life right now?

I know little about the movie scene in New Zealand (with the exception of being quite intimate with the films of Peter Jackson and Jane Campion), so I can’t really say how typical Gaylene Preston’s Mr Wrong is for the cinematic output of the country in the mid-80s. What I can say is that it is a pretty fantastic little film in mode and mood of the clever – and quite weird – ghost story. Given that this is based on one of the handful of supernatural tales Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote, the “clever and weird” part isn’t too much of a surprise; it is, however, quite a positive surprise how well the Weirdness of Howard’s story and Preston’s naturalistic eye on the New Zealand of the 80s complement each other.

As frequent readers of my ramblings will know by now, I am an admirer of low budget films that make use of the cheapest of all special effects – local colour – to set the mood of their stories, and am even more of an admirer of films that are letting the very real of a specific place and time collide with the Weird and the peculiar, so I am predisposed to liking Mr Wrong, as it is a film whose whole modus operandi is very much based on these techniques. Even better, Preston really knows what she’s doing in this regard, showing herself to be equally at home with taking a – slightly sarcastic – look at her central character’s live and times (I wouldn’t be too surprised if there were a certain autobiographical element at work here, either) and with slowly showing the seams and cracks of Meg’s existence where the disquiet and the strange can enter through, cracks, the film seems to say, even the most unspectacular of lives has. Are, after all, Meg’s life and that of her unhappy predecessor in car ownership all that different from each other? Preston doesn’t overstretch the parallels between the woman and the haunt. In fact, if you don’t want to see this aspect of the movie – that is most probably there to demonstrate something about the way a woman still has to fight for her independence (in the sense of self-ownership) – you will probably never notice it at all. It’s always excellent when a director is subtle with the treatment of her film’s metaphorical level.

From time to time, Mr Wrong is a bit rough around the edges, but it’s the kind of roughness that comes with the territory of making movies for little money in a place where making a movie can’t have been all that easy to begin with, and is offset by a direction that can be creative and imaginative without feeling the need to show off. After all, it’s clear to see for everyone that the director really knows how to use the idiom of the ghost story and the thriller without any need for her to point it out to her audience like a bad Hollywood actor trying once in his life for actual acting. Instead, Preston’s film impresses through an unassuming intelligence.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan

January 17th, 2012 | article by Kevin Pyrtle | 1 Comment »
Tags: Ghosts, Horror, Murder, Revenge, Samurai, Shigeru Amachi, Shintoho

dir. Nobuo Nakagawa
1959 / Shintoho Co. / 76′
written by Masayoshi Onuki and Yoshihiro Ishikawa
from the play by Nanboku Tsuruya IV
director of phogoraphy Tadashi Nishimoto
music by Michiaki Watanabe
starring Shigeru Amachi, Noriko Kitazawa, Katsuko Wakasugi, Shuntaro Emi and Ryuzaburo Nakamura
Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan is available for online streaming through the Criterion Collection channel on Huluplus

Before he shocked audience sensibilities with the bizarre and inimitably grotesque Jigoku in 1960 veteran Japanese director Nobuo Nakagawa sent shivers down their spines with this stylish tale of ghostly revenge. Early on a director of everything from comedies to war-time documentaries, Nakagawa is most remembered for a number of supernatural horrors directed for Shintoho Co. in the latter half of the ’50s. Among those films 1959′s Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan may well be the best. Adapted from the famed (and oft-filmed) 19th century kabuki by playwright Nanboku Tsuruya IV, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan tells the classic story of innocence tormented, only to rise up from beyond the grave to grant evil its just deserts.

The first half of Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan operates as a catalogue of atrocities perpetuated against a woman and her family from without and within. Central to the drama is ronin Tamiya Iemon (Shigeru Amachi), a samurai of ill-repute whose intentions of marrying Iwa (Katsuko Wakasugi), daughter of the Yotsuya family, are thwarted by his would-be father-in-law Samon. One dreary evening, enraged by the elder’s insults, Iemon slaughters both Yotsuya Samon as well as the father of Sato Yomoshichi (Ryuzaburo Nakamura), a talented young swordsman betrothed to Iwa’s sister Sode (Noriko Kitazawa). Witnessed by ne’er-do-well Naosuke (Shintaro Emi), who is himself obsessed with Sode, Iemon finds himself in an alliance of convenience, and following a plan by Naosuke to blame the deaths of fathers Yotsuya and Sato on a local rough who had troubled the families in the past. Yomoshichi quickly joins up with the two schemers, believing that they wish to help avenge the families by hunting down those responsible, only to find himself at the edge of their swords as well.

Some time later, all obstacles to their success seemingly overcome, Iemon and Naosuke each take up residence in Edo with their respective sister. While Sode refuses to marry Naosuke, demanding that her family be avenged before such can come to pass, Iemon settles uncomfortably into a married life with Iwa and has a son. It doesn’t take long for Iemon to grow tired of his pedestrian lifestyle, doing unsatisfying work to support his wife and child and losing most of his earnings to gambling. When a chance encounter finds him in the good graces of the wealthy Ito’s, and their beautiful daughter Ume, he sees a chance for escape. Soon Iemon, the Ito’s, Naosuke and even a local masseuse are scheming to absolve Iemon of his familial obligations, but when Iwa proves too devoted to her husband he takes drastic, irreversible action.

Convincing masseuse Takuetsu to seduce his wife so that he might have proper grounds to divorce her, Iemon secretly plots to kill the pair as adulterers – his right, by law. Knowing that Iwa will never willingly accept Takuetsu’s advances, Iemon instead guarantees her demise by feeding her a deadly, disfiguring poison. Iwa discovers too late her husband’s treachery, and the depth of his crimes against her family, but before throwing both herself and her child on a blade curses his name, vowing to avenge her misfortunes with nothing less than the eradication of the Tamiya family line. Takuetsu becomes collateral damage, killed to support the facade of adultery, and is dumped along with Iwa into a canal. Convinced that all obstacles have again been overcome Iemon commences with his marriage to Ume, blind to the possibility that his late wife’s spirit might seek revenge…

Adapted in a streamlined fashion by Masayoshi Onuki and Yoshihiro Ishikawa to fit the fiscal and temporal constraints of Shintoho Co.’s typically low-budget fare, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan nevertheless crams a lot of complex character-driven drama into its first few acts. Those unprepared for director Nakagawa’s brisk pacing may find themselves a bit lost in it all, as schemes build upon schemes and ever more outwardly upstanding citizens conspire against young Iwa. It can feel quite chaotic at times, though I dare say that was likely the point. As quickly as things develop it seems improbable, if not impossible, that Iwa could ever have understood the awful depth of human cruelty amassing against her until it was too late, something that makes her plight all the more sympathetic and her eventual revenge all the more satisfying. Katsuko Wakasugi (Ghost of the Girl Diver) lends the role a necessary frailty, seeming a truly helpless victim until the truth of things is revealed to her. From that moment her characterization changes into that of a driven monstrosity, the inhumanity pitted against her giving rise to a suitably inhuman instrument of vengeance.

The versatile and underrated Shigeru Amachi (Black Line, Jigoku), here appearing as the scheming Iemon, plays in pitch-perfect contrast to both iterations of the Iwa character. In the film’s early acts, when Iemon has the upper hand, Amachi is positively psychopathic, utterly remorseless in his actions and forever distant, cold, dangerous. In his day-to-day torments of Iwa he is wantonly despicable, but in his scheme to poison her, playing the dutiful and loving husband all the while, he disturbs, becoming nothing but a murderous beast masquerading as a man. Even the pretense of humanity is dropped once the tables ultimately turn, and the cornered Iemon reverts to a state of frightened, caged animalism. Only at death’s door does a glimmer of genuine humanity shine from within him, the damned Iemon praying too late for his slaughtered wife’s forgiveness.

Director Nobuo Nakagawa skillfully manages the film’s breezy but complex drama, complementing it with a variety of interesting visual motifs (like a recurrence of vertically striped imagery and a notable emphasis on the color red) and otherworldly compositions that often feel like paintings-in-motion. By contrast the latter half of Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan is positively alive with indelible fantasy imagery – a corpse carried across a field of yellow flowers, a body rising from a pool of murky red, Iemon lost on a sea of shutters, a man falling, slowly, onto the flooded floor of an impossible room-turned-marshland. At its height Nakagawa’s work here is absolutely haunting, glimpses of half-remembered nightmares obscured by shadow and punctuated with rich primary color. The style here is highly reflective of that seen in Jigoku and elsewhere throughout Nakagawa’s career, and this flair for the fantastic served the director well as he transitioned to the Toei Co. payroll following Shintoho Co.’s bankruptcy in 1961.

As could be said of so much of the great genre cinema, it would have been easy for Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan to be a mundane outing, another in a long line of adaptations of a story all too familiar, but a favorable confluence of just the right elements have conspired to make it something far greater than that. While Jigoku, with its abstract proclivities and abundant gore (a real rarity in 1960), remains the best known of his films in the West the more substantively accessible Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan may well be Nakagawa’s masterpiece, a classic tale retold in a manner that’s thrilling and unique and oh so spooky. This is vintage Japanese genre cinema at its absolute best, and a must-see for anyone keen on the same.

Though currently unavailable on domestic home video, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan is available for online streaming through the Criterion channel on Huluplus

Grave Encounters

January 6th, 2012 | article by Denis Klotz | No Comments »
Tags: found footage, Ghosts, Horror, the Vicious Brothers

dir. The Vicious Brothers
2011 / Twin Engine Films / 95′
written by The Vicious Brothers
cienmatography by Tony Mirza
original music by Quynne Craddock
starring Sean Rogerson, Ashley Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir, Mackenzie Gray, and Juan Riedinger
available on dvd through Amazon.com

(Don’t) stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The footage Grave Encounters consists of is purportedly edited down from footage shot by the team of the ghost hunting TV show “Grave Encounters” during the filming of their rather fatal sixth episode.

An appropriately smug and somewhat cynical team of five (Sean Rogerson, Ashleigh Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir, Mackenzie Gray and Juan Riedinger) sets out to spend a night locked in one of those creepy former asylums for the mentally ill that dot the US landscape (at least if I can believe what the horror movies – who clearly wouldn’t lie to me – tell me). The ghost hunters don’t go in expecting to actually find anything supernatural, obviously, but as long as they can pretend to be creeped out, it’ll be good, successful reality TV, right?

Fortunately for the movie’s audience, and very unfortunately for the film’s protagonists, they will encounter quite a bit more paranormal activity than they ever could have expected or wished for. And while the things the crew first encounters, like doors moving by themselves, may only be a little creepy, later developments have a much more dangerous and disturbing bend. Clearly, not everybody – if anybody – will make it out of the place alive.

By now, I think, there are enough found footage/fake documentary/POV horror movies about ghost hunting TV people around to make up their own little sub-sub-genre. Unlike the other films of this sort I had the dubious honour of watching, Grave Encounters is actually a pretty good film.

The film does of course have its share of flaws. I think the interview parts before the crew is locked in could have been cut down a little, to make the film’s start a little pacier. As it stands, the actual meat of the narrative begins about forty minutes into the film, just at the point when I was beginning to lose my patience with it a little.

I also could have gone without the overuse of the jerky zoom lens style in the interview sequences – it’s the sort of thing nobody holding a camera in a professional or semi-professional capacity actually does (not even the directors of photography of ghost hunting reality shows), and it threatens the poor helpless audience with seasickness. Once the interview segments are over, the zoom lens is fortunately retired forever, so I’m not even sure why it’s used this extensively early on at all.

Grave Encounter‘s biggest problem is probably the quality of its special effects. About half of the effects do actually look pretty decent to my eyes, but the other half (let me just say big-mouthed ghosts) looks too much like bad digital fakery and too little like terrible things from beyond. On the other hand, it is pretty clear that this is strictly a low budget affair, and even when the execution of the effects seems problematic, they’re usually trying to show something creepy or conceptually interesting. When in doubt, I take a badly realized but interesting thing over something that looks slick but is basically boring.

As far as flaws in independently produced horror go, these are rather minor ones, and they are overshadowed by the things Grave Encounters‘ directors – going under the somewhat silly moniker The Vicious Brothers – do right.

Prime among things that the film does right, is the way it treats its characters. Even though they are presented as slightly pompous and deeply dishonest towards their audience (I think this is what people call realism), the film still allows them more than enough sympathetic traits to make it easy enough for an audience (or at least me) to empathize with them. I’m not talking great character depth here – I doubt great character depth is anything POV horror can even achieve – but enough depth to make the characters human. The script certainly gets help here by actors who may be a little broad in their approach sometimes but are pretty good at switching from their early on-camera ghost hunting pomposity to people completely out of their depth and scared out of their wits.

Some of the things our not so intrepid protagonists have to face are pretty scary on a conceptual and on a concrete level, but even when they only encounter standard ghosts, these are standard ghosts doing ghostly things thematically appropriate for an empty asylum setting. These activities can’t help but add a historical dimension to the ghosts, making them not just disquieting or frightening for the things they do to others, but also the things that have been done to them; a victim turned into a monster by outside forces is often more effective than a mere monster.

Aside from ghosts, though, there are also a few things making the protagonists’ lives harder that come from the Weirder side of the tracks than mere dead people walking around being rude. The Vicious Brothers do some very effective things with temporal and spatial anomalies that suggest the influence of Daniel Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. It’s exactly elements like these nods to Danielewski what most films of the contemporary (post-crappy-Paranormal-Activity, in contrast to the post-Blair Witch one) POV horror genre are too often missing for my taste. Hauntings of this kind are visually cheap to realize and give a film an added dimension of the frighteningly strange and unreal that rubs nicely against the hyper-realism of the POV-form, but I’m afraid too many horror directors working right now are in love with the straightforwardly scary.

Consequently, I’m glad that Grave Encounters dares to be this decisive bit different from its brethren. Now, where did I leave that EMP-meter?

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

Prikosnoveniye

July 8th, 2011 | article by Denis Klotz | No Comments »
Tags: 1992, Ghosts, Horror, Russia, Suicide

a.k.a. (The) Contact
Year: 1992 Runtime: 92′ Director: Albert S. Mkrtchyan
Writer: Andrei Goryunov Cinematography: Boris Kocherev Music: Leonid Desyatnikov
Cast: Aleksandr Zuyev, Maryana Polteva, Vsevolod Abdulov, Igor Pushkaryov, Aleksandra Kharitonova

Olga Nikolayevna kills her little son Kolya and then herself. Andrey (Aleksandr Zuyev), the most laid-back and friendly cop in Russia, gets on the case. His investigation leads the policeman to Olga’s lover. At first, the man – who has an undefeatable alibi – tries to warn Andrey off from any further enquiries, but when the cop persists and waves off any danger, the man explains that he knows well why Olga and Kolya died: Olga’s father had convinced her that the afterlife needed her, life on Earth being no good anyhow, and after a long time, she agreed. The most troubling part of that story is the fact that Olga’s father has been dead for twelve years. Supposedly, the father’s shrouded ghost had been visiting his daughter regularly for years.

Shortly after their talk, Andrey’s witness hangs himself.

Whistle and I’ll Come to You

January 14th, 2011 | article by Denis Klotz | No Comments »
Tags: 2010, Ghosts, Horror, John Hurt, M.R. James, Suspense

Year: 2010 Runtime: 54′ Director: Andy DeEmmony
Writer: Neil Cross Music: Norwell & Green Cinematography: Rob Hardy
Cast: John Hurt, Gemma Jones, Lesley Sharp, Sophie Thompson

Retired astronomer James Parkin (John Hurt) has been taking care of his wife Alice (Gemma Jones), who is suffering from some form of senile dementia, for a few years now, but, because of his own age, has to put her into a nursing home.

In an attempt to distract himself from the resulting sadness, and his feeling of having already lost his wife and their love to the ravages of age while they are both still alive, Parkin goes on vacation in an old hotel somewhere on the coast. While going walking along the coastline (or “rambling”, as he prefers to call it), Parkin finds a ring with a Latin inscription translated as “Who is this who is coming?” buried in the sand. He takes the ring with him. From this moment on, Parkin is haunted by something that he might or might not have carried around with himself all along. On the beach, a fearful, shrouded shape that fills Parkin with inexplicable terror is following him; in his hotel, his sleep is disturbed by scratching noises and nightmares that soon enough turn into someone or something banging on his door. As a scientist, Parkin is sceptical of all supernatural explanations, but his fear tells him something different.

Don’t Look Up

September 10th, 2010 | article by Denis Klotz | No Comments »
Tags: 1996, Ghosts, Hideo Nakata, Horror, Japan

a.k.a. Joyu-rei
company: Bandai Visual Co.
year: 1996
runtime: 75′
director: Hideo Nakata
cast: Yurei Yanagi, Yasuyo Shirashima,
Kei Ishibashi, Dan Li,
Ren Ohsugi
writers: Hideo Nakata
and Hiroshi Takahashi
cinematography: Takeshi Hamada
music: Akifumi Kawamura
Not on home video in the USA

Director Toshio Murai (Yurei Yanagi) is shooting what looks like a stylish, old-fashioned melodrama on a very tight schedule, but doesn’t seem to have much of a problem coping with the latter.

Something about the dailies of the first day of shooting isn’t right, though. At one point, the face of the movie’s lead actress Hitomi (Yasuyo Shirashima) is suddenly superimposed with the face of another actress, then the whole film disappears and turns into an older movie, complete with a long-haired woman lurking in the background. Obviously, the film stock they are using are outtakes that were supposed to be thrown out, but somehow landed in the wrong place. Murai thinks he remembers the film from his childhood, but apart from asking someone working in the studio’s archive to take a look at it, he just shrugs and continues his work.

Night of Horror

July 30th, 2010 | article by Denis Klotz | No Comments »
Tags: Civil War, Ghosts, Horror, Supernatural, Tony Malanowski

company: Little Warsaw Productions
year: 1978
runtime: 73′
director: Tony Malanowksi
cast: Jeff Canfield, Gae Schmitt,
Rebecca Bach, Phil Davis,
Tony Malanowski, Steve Sandkuhler
writers: Tony Malanowski,
Rebecca Bach, Gae Schmitt
cinematography: Jeff Canfield
music: Jim Ball
OOP in the USA

When I was talking about Curse of the Cannibal Confederates some years ago I could hardly suspect that film to be its director’s Tony Malanowski’s more commercial (aka containing zombies) remake of his earth-shattering first movie, Night of Horror.

Fortunately, Stephen Thrower’s wonderful book “Nightmare USA” cured me of my ignorance, and now, finally, the time has come to for me to take a look at Malanowski’s debut.

So, there’s this guy, sitting with his back to the camera in the bar of his hobby cellar until another guy arrives, who will sometimes turn his face far enough in the direction of the camera that we will be able to see it in profile. They begin to mumble to each other, half of their dialogue impenetrable, the other half unfortunately not – there’s something about guy one being in a band. Or something. We are allowed to experience the dullness and emptiness of their lives for quite a while, until guy number one begins to tell his friend a true story (which a block o’ text appearing before the movie promised to be entertaining; you can never trust those darn lying text blocks). Some months ago, following the death of his dad (stepdad?), guy number one packed his half-brother and two girls into a caravan, drove around in it and drove around in it and drove around in it until he fell in love with one of the girls – named Colleen – for the terrible things she did to a Poe poem. Then they drove around some more. Days and days of real-time driving later, Colleen saw the ghost of a dead confederate soldier.

The Living Skeleton (Kyuketsu Dokuro Sen)

June 12th, 2010 | article by Kevin Pyrtle | No Comments »
Tags: 1968, Ghosts, Horror, Shochiku

Reminiscent of those for Toho’s 1958 sci-fi / crime / horror opus The H-Man, the moody opening credits to Shochiku’s tale of ghostly revenge sets the tone perfectly for the strange film to follow. The score, in ways suspiciously evocative of John Barry’s work on the James Bond series, is by Noboru Nishiyama, who seems to have worked on little else. A full review of the film can be found here.

The Living Skeleton

May 9th, 2010 | article by Kevin Pyrtle | 3 Comments »
Tags: Bats, Cannibalism, Ghosts, Horror, Kikko Matsuoka, Ko Nishimura, Living Dead, Revenge, Shochiku, Skeletons

rating:
a.k.a. Kyuketsu dokuro sen
(lit. Vampire Skeleton Ship)
company: Shochiku Films
year: 1968
runtime: 80′
director: Hiroshi Matsuno
cast: Kikko Matsuoka, Masumi Okada,
Yasunori Irikawa, Ko Nishimura,
Nobuo Kaneko, Norihiko Yamamoto
writers: Kyuzo Kobayashi
and Kikuma Shimoiizaki
cinematography: Masayuki Kato
music: Noboru Nishiyama
not on home video in the USA
order this title from Amazon.co.jp

This 1968 horror effort from Shochiku may not be the most obscure of pre-70s Japanese genre stuffs, but it’ll do in a pinch. Released day and date with the same company’s oft overlooked Genocide – War of the Insects, this tale of ghostly vengeance emanating from a mysterious fog-bound ship received little in the way of attention in the United States or elsewhere upon release, and doesn’t appear to had any kind of wide distribution anywhere outside Japan. Though far form rare (Shochiku released the film on VHS, laserdisc, and DVD – the latter of which has seen no fewer than three budget priced re-releases in the past few years), The Living Skeleton still rates as ‘unknown’ for all but the most ardent of genre cinephiles – a sad fact well deserving of change.

Effectively the last of the short run of genre efforts Shochiku produced in 1967 and 1968, The Living Skeleton looks to have also been the most tightly budgeted, not that this hampers it in the least. Minimalist design and a utilization of real locations coupled with an intelligent application of black and white ‘Scope photography help lend much-needed effectiveness to the film’s bizarre series of events.
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Haunted Universities

April 9th, 2010 | article by Denis Klotz | No Comments »
Tags: anthology, Ghosts, Horror, Thailand, Thriller

original title: Mahalai Sayongkwan
company: Sahamongkol Film International
year: 2009
runtime: 101′
country: Thailand
directors: Bunjong Sinthanamongkolkul,
Sutthiporn Tubtim
cast: Panward Hemmanee,
Anna Reese, Ashiraya Peerapatkunchaya
writers: Bunjong Sinthanamongkolkul,
Sutthiporn Tubtim
cinematography: Pramet Chankrasae
not on home video in the USA

Haunted Universities is an anthology movie made up by four stories which are mainly connected through the presence of the same volunteer rescue team, as well as a few other details.

The first episode, called “The Toilet” starts out with two gangsters messing up a student and his girlfriend. It looks like the young man is trying his hands at being a junior drug dealer, but is unsuccessful enough to make the gangsters’ boss so angry that he wants his drugs back (plus compensation for his troubles, of course). The genius kid pusher has stored his stash in his locker at university, so the quartet makes its way there. After the drugs are safely recovered, one of the gangsters, Cherd, gets awfully interested in the ghost story about the haunting of the toilet on the building’s fifth floor the students tell him.

There’s certainly nothing problematic at taking a look there, right? And I’m sure the nobody will meet one or more very enthusiastic ghosts on the fifth floor, especially not on the toilet.

The second segment, “The Elevator”, is told to Muay (Panward Hemmanee), the youngest and only female member of the rescue crew seen in every episode of the movie, by a student named Nok Noi (Ashiraya Peerapatkunchaya). Nok Noi is the daughter of a general responsible for the shooting of several pro-democratic students during the 70s. One of the older students, whose family has lost some members during the occurrences, doesn’t take too kindly to her family connections or her rather unrepentant take on her family’s guilt, so the girl has to partake in a very special hazing ritual. Being pushed into the elevator where the students were shot, she has some rather disturbing supernatural experiences. But her troubles don’t stop there. Now one of the student ghosts follows her wherever she goes. She becomes convinced that it is her responsibility to reunite “her” ghost with the ghost of his dead girlfriend, but this is not something that can be done as easily as it sounds.

As it turns out, Muay’s help will be quite indispensable.

The third story, “Morgue” is the mandatory comedy segment about a student of dentistry (Pangsit Piseesotgan) with a terrible fear of the dead having to survive one working night in a hospital morgue. You know what will happen.

The last segment, “The Stairway”, is a flashback into Muay’s past that explains why she has the special ability which enabled her to help Nok Noi solve her problem.

Her roommate Sa (Anna Reese) meets a rather excitable young man on an Internet chat. It’s all fun and games until he threatens to kill her, but who is afraid of random weirdoes on the ‘net? Instead of getting nervous, Sa decides to go and buy dinner for herself and Muay. While Sa is out, Muay learns that the “random weirdo” is in fact their neighbour. Still, he seems more nerdy than dangerous and is easily dissuaded from whatever he was planning. Alas, while Muay talks with him, Sa has met a more suave example of the psycho species.

It turns out that Sa’s new acquaintance is a friend of their neighbour, whom he has also met on the Internet – in a chat room for budding serial killers. Obviously, he, Internet weirdo and Sa will have to encounter each other in the dark.

The girl would have been tough enough to cope with one psycho, but two are a bit much for her, at least as long as she is still alive.

Haunted Universities’ existence is certainly a by-product of the commercial success of the Thai anthology movie Phobia. Both films feature four tales of supernatural horror that seem inspired by the crosspollination between traditional Thai ghost stories and urban myth, but they still feel different enough that there’s no reason to call Haunted Universities a mere rip-off. Frankly, it is also just too effective a film for that.

Instead of having four directors, Haunted Universities makes do with only two of them – Bunjong Sinthanamongkolkul and Sutthiporn Tubtim. It’s not clear how the directing duties were divided between them, but I would not be surprised to hear that both were working together for the whole film. Of course, I have been known to be wrong quite frequently.

Be that as it may, the men’s direction is what truly makes Haunted Universities work. The plots of the single segments (the highly peculiar last one excepted) are not exactly original, one could even call them rather thin, and the connections between the segments are not much to get excited about either, but Sinthanamongkolkul and Tubtim show a great sense for the proper timing of horror effects that just makes the stories work.

There’s some rather exciting use of colour on display too, a very pleasant surprise after too many contemporary films insisting on looking all desaturated all the time, as if the only colours visible to the human eye were grey, black and a sickly yellow. Being a horror film, Haunted Universities takes much of its colour schemes from the less exciting parts of the spectrum too, but the directors get a lot of moody (and quite Bava) mileage out of techniques like contrasting strong green and red tones during the intrusion of the supernatural with warm yellows that suggest safety for the characters.

The more-than-real colouring in conjunction with the simple stories give the film a bit of a comic book feel. This is not a realist take on the horror anthology format, and does instead seem to stand firmly on the “pop” side of popular culture, which is a very fine place for a film to stand when it knows what to do there. And most of the episodes do know.

Of course, every anthology movie has to have a weaker segment, and it is more often than not the supposedly comical one that saps all energy and fun out of the film it appears in. As in the world of Amicus, so in the Haunted Universities. “Morgue” really isn’t all that bad, it just isn’t very funny (hint to directors: people being afraid of ghosts just isn’t funny in a horror film where they have good reason to be afraid of them). Unfortunately, it is also the slowest segment of the bunch and drags the tempo of the whole film down a little. It’s nothing proper use of the fast forward button couldn’t cure, though.

Luckily, after they have bored us for twenty minutes, the directors are sending us out with the best and most odd episode. Where the first three segments deliver about what one expects of them, the fourth one is quite peculiar in its plot and its delivery, culminating in the promise of a confrontation between everyone’s favourite monsters: female long-haired ghost and serial killer. Despite its theme, “The Stairway” is no less comedic than the film’s third segment, its humour is however of a decidedly blacker type. I always had the feeling that the story would turn on me and get nasty just after the next grim joke, and in the end, it got even nastier than I expected before the film ended in a very ironic sort of happy end.

Now, if a nice Western DVD label would take it upon it to publish a subtitled DVD of Haunted Universities, friends of Thai cinema like me would happily drop some money in its lap. I’d highly recommend it.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

The Oracle

March 19th, 2010 | article by Denis Klotz | 3 Comments »
Tags: Cult, Ghosts, Horror, Independent, Roberta Findlay

company: Reeltime Corporation
year: 1985
runtime: 94′
country: USA
director: Roberta Findlay
cast: Caroline Capers Powers,
Roger Neil, Pam La Testa,
Victoria Dryden, Chris Maria De Koron
writer: R. Allen Leider
cinematography: Roberta Findlay

Poor Jennifer (Caroline Capers Powers)! It’s not enough that she has to be married to super-moustached jerk Ray (Roger Neil), no, she also has to find a planchette that belonged to the old woman who lived in Jennifer’s and Ray’s new apartment before them, accidentally awakening her own mediumistic powers with it.

At first, it’s all fun and games and a ghost (or is it a demon?) scrawling “help me” on a piece of paper during a Christmas party, but all too soon our bedraggled heroine has nightmares and visions of the most disturbing kind. The ghost seems to have become quite obsessed with her and is enthusiastically trying his hand as an interior decorator (preferred style: destruction and Bava-green lighting). Ray, like every husband or boyfriend in every Findlay film, isn’t getting less jerky, either, and aggressively berates Jennifer, like you do with the woman you love when you fear she is losing her mind.

After some time, the ghost makes itself a little clearer. It looks as if he belongs to a certain Mr. Graham and is in dire need of Jen’s help in taking revenge on the people who murdered him. Ghostly Graham manages to send Jen a dream in which she can see the faces of his murderers quite well. Not surprisingly, attempts at informing Graham’s wife (Victoria Dryden) of the truth about her husband’s supposed suicide only bring the young woman’s own life in danger. Evil Lesbian hobby & professional killer Farkas (Pam La Testa; somewhere between the worst evil Lesbian clichés and utter perfection) ain’t someone to mess with.

And these are still not enough problems for Jennifer. Additionally, the ghost is growing a bit too protective of her and kills everyone trying to get between him and Jennifer in ridiculous and gory ways. I won’t blame anyone – ghost or not – for killing off Ray, though. Jennifer will certainly be better off without that guy.

Roberta Findlay, you’re my hero! The Oracle is the first film the great lady made in the final (horror) phase of her career, after she left the world of pornography – although not the porno facial hair – behind for something only slightly more reputable, and it is glorious.

There is only a small amount of Findlay’s patented semi-documentary shots of the scummier parts of New York – which would go on to take more and more room in her horror films - on display here. The Oracle places a much greater emphasis on rubber monsters, rubbery gore and Farkas and her artificially deepened voice (don’t ask why – it’s a Findlay film), yet I can’t rightly complain about the relative absence of dirty streets when the film shows us this stuff instead.

Findlay did learn the fine art of cheap but effective photography when she was working as (not always billed) camera operator/director of photography on the sexploitation films she made with her then-husband Michael (whom I suspect to be the source for the jerky husbands and boyfriends in her horror movies) in the 60s, so her films are usually much nicer to look at than their budget would suggest. (Although I have seen her films called “amateurishly photographed” in more than one review; obviously, there’s no accounting for taste).

What might be a problem to some viewers is the utter inability of anyone on screen to “act” in the more conventional sense of the word. Fortunately, there’s more important things to acting in cheap little numbers like this one, and most everyone on screen has that special something to endear her or him to me for evermore. The men have their porno moustaches, Farkas a silly potty-mouth and the charming butchness of terror, and Caroline Capers Powers is intensely good at going into full body hysterics like it is seldom displayed outside of Italian genre cinema.

Powers performance in the last thirty minutes alone would be more than enough to recommend The Oracle, yet there’s still more and more to love about it. How about lots and lots of multi-coloured goo? Bonus moustaches? A plot that starts out slow and boring yet gets as hysterical and jumpy as the main actress? A sex scene that is nearly as wooden and disturbing as the one in Don Dohler’sNightbeast? More (hysterical) running around than in a whole season of Rupert Davies-penned Doctor Who? Random classy-looking shots and moody lighting between the moments of shoddy insanity and bad effects? Some wonderful moments of serenity in a exceedingly badly secured New Yorker mental institution? A soundtrack that was composed by a monkey randomly pushing buttons and keys on a synthesizer? And best of all, a scene in which Ray’s head is ripped off by the hands of an angry ghost? The Oracle truly has it all, possibly even more.

I know that I’m usually putting a certain emphasis on the importance of filmmakers caring about the films they make, or at least not hating their audience with a burning passion. Roberta Findlay however is one of the great exceptions to this rule. The woman utterly loathed the horror genre and everything it stands for, and didn’t have especially warm feelings for the genre’s fans either, yet she still managed to make a handful of lovely films in it. I think her horror films are the products of someone trying to make films for the least respectable and least intelligent audience she could imagine, and just throwing everything that could possibly be of interest to that audience on screen (much like a monkey does with poo), in the hope that some of it would stick, even if none of it made any sense whatsoever.

It is this hateful and ignorant attitude to its own audience – and possibly filmmaking itself – that makes The Oracle such a fascinating experience for me. This movie is what happens when someone just doesn’t give a shit about what she is doing one way or the other, yet is still too talented not to produce something interesting. And this, dear readers, is what I call “movie magic”.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

The Real Pocong

February 26th, 2010 | article by Denis Klotz | No Comments »
Tags: Fantasy, Ghosts, Horror, Indonesia

company: Sinemart Pictures
year: 2009
runtime: 97′
country: Indonesia
director: Hanny R. Saputra
cast: Sakinah Dava Erawan, Nabila Syakieb,
Ashraf Sinclair, Kinaryosih
writer: Aramantono
cinematography: Khatulistiwa
not on home video in the USA

As is somewhat traditional in films, a small, young family consisting of mother Rin(i) (Nabila Syakieb), father (I)Van (Ashraf Sinclair) and little daughter Laura (Sakinah Dava Erawan) moves into a new home in the country, although as a non-Indonesian I’d call it “the jungle” or at least “the deep dark woods”.

Rini and Van are enthusiastic about their new house. It was cheap, and there are none of the dangers of the city threatening their daughter now. One would think that the country air could also be good for Laura’s asthma. There’s a certain lack of neighbours, though, with the only person living nearby the young physician Dr. Nila (Kinaryosih). At least she’s friendly and could probably be of help when little Laura has one of her attacks.

Less friendly are other inhabitants of the area. Right on the family’s first day in the new house, Laura follows a strange, unsmiling girl of about her own age deeper into the woods, until she comes to a weather-beaten old shack beside a well. There, the other girl seems to disappear into thin air. Instead, something dressed in white funeral shrouds jumps Laura.

When Rini finds her deeply disturbed daughter, she can’t get a word out of the girl, and puts her strange behaviour on an understandable reaction to the new environment. In truth, a pocong (female Indonesian ghost dressed in white shrouds that often seems to have religious connotations I won’t pretend to understand) has taken an interest in the girl. At first, it seems relatively benign, turning into a kitten and sneaking into Laura’s room, or singing her lullabies, but just too soon the ghost again lures the girl to the shack.

Only this time, Laura doesn’t return.

The police (who are never actually shown by the film) find not a trace of the child, nor any explanation of what happened, so the desperate Rini seeks the help of a medium, very much against Van’s will. The medium diagnoses the place to be haunted and declares a pocong to be the child snatcher, but seems unwilling to act on her findings. Only when Van calls her out in a fit of aggressive scepticism she deigns to do something, and I can’t say that I find giving the sceptic an amulet that is supposed to help him cross over to the spirit world and then drive away never to return to be a very responsible action.

Surprisingly enough, Van actually uses the amulet to cross over (through a gate of pine trees, no less), and manages to bring Laura back. Of course, this is not the end of the family’s troubles.

The more films of the (as it seems still merrily continuing) Indonesian horror film boom I see, the more impressed I am with it. Of course, quite a few of the films are terribly generic, or marred by the sort of comic relief that is neither comical, nor any kind of relief, but you can say that of every country’s genre film output at the best of times. The important thing is the good films, and the good horror films made in Indonesia in the last five years or so tend to be very good, and quietly ambitious in exploring the possibilities of their genre.

The Real Pocong definitely is one of those good films. Directed by Hanny R. Saputra (whose other films I unfortunately know next to nothing about), it is a film that treats its horror story as a fairy tale. One just needs to have a look at the plot structure - like the way the film uses repetition - or the elements (the deep dark wood, the road into the other world, the child-snatching supernatural creature etc) of the plot to realize this.

The characters are more archetypes than psychologically “realistic” people. As such, they don’t always act as rational or logical as some viewers might want them to – especially Rini’s inability to completely understand what is happening around her in the final third of the film could be very problematic to some – but I’m not too sure I would find people learning that their little daughter has been kidnapped by a ghost and then acting rationally and logically that much more believable. Thankfully, the handful of actors is good enough to provide performances which do not confuse the archetypal with the inhuman.

I was especially impressed by Sakinah Dava Erawan. Child actors are often terrible, and I find it somewhat unfair to blame them for it, seeing that they just don’t have much life experience they could draw from, but I didn’t find it difficult at all to sympathize with this little girl. Cleverly, the first part of The Real Pocong lets the film’s audience share Laura’s perspective, her mixture of terror and wonder and the naturalness with which she treats the stranger occurrences around her; as a child, she doesn’t have the grip on what should be reality and what not a grown-up possesses, and because we share her view of the world, we don’t get to have that grip either.

As any good fairy tale would, the movie does well addressing anxieties people typically don’t want to be confronted with quite directly. The Laura-centric half of the film embodies many childhood anxieties. It’s not only the more banal ones like “the thing in the cupboard” or “the thing under the bed”, but the fear of not being understood by one’s parents, and the more painful fear of not being able to trust them.

The second half of the film puts the same (slightly painful) spotlight on the big parental fear of the loss of one’s child without going down either the road of Spielbergian kitsch, nor that of exploitative melodrama.

Apart from that, The Real Pocong also manages to be quite creepy (again, as a good fairy tale should be). While some of the special effects look a bit ropey, the production design and photography are excellent. This is one of the few horror films whose actions take place nearly entirely by daylight, and it proves that a director who knows what he’s doing doesn’t need darkness to build a mood of dread.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

The Screen at Kamchanod

December 18th, 2009 | article by Denis Klotz | No Comments »
Tags: Cursed Film, Ghosts, Hauntings, Horror, Thailand

a.k.a Pee chang nang
year: 2007
runtime: 94′
country: Thailand
director: Songsak Mongkolthong
cast: Achita Pramoj Na Ayudhya,
Pakkaramai Potranan, Namo Tongkumnerd
writer: Songsak Mongkolthong
cinematographer: Chitti Urnorakankij
not on home video in the USA
order the Region 3 PAL disc from Hkflix.com

In 1987, two movie projectionists running one of the mobile movie screens typical of rural Thailand of the time were hired to screen a film in an empty field lying right in the middle of the jungle.

At first, there didn’t seem to be an audience, but sometime in the middle of the film, people suddenly appeared in the field only to disappear again without a trace a little later. The projectionists returned to Bangkok and have themselves seemingly disappeared.

Now, twenty years later, the physician Dr. Yuth (Achita Pramoj Na Ayudhya) has become obsessed with the story. Yuth is convinced that the occurences at Kamchanod are the proof for the existence of the paranormal, namely ghosts, and that if he could only repeat the screening of the same film in the same place, he could gather this proof for all the world to see and admire him.

With the help of a former journalist and his wife the Doctor manages to discover the whereabouts of the missing projectionists – one of them is now a mentally disturbed old man deathly afraid of something an amulet he holds onto for dear life is supposed to protect him from, spending his life seemingly permanently chained to a hospital bed. The other died shortly after the original screening in a fire in his own Bangkok cinema.

Nonetheless, the mysterious film has somehow survived the fire. Yuth decides that a pre-screening is in order and watches the film together with his bruised and battered girlfriend Orn (Pakkaramai Potranan), his research assistant and his wife and the young homeless junkie Roj (Namo Tongkumnerd) who has been quite helpful in the search for the film with his knack for opening locks. The film itself isn’t in the best of states and doesn’t make much sense anyhow, but watching it seems to open a door.

The small group finds itself no longer alone in the cinema. They are beleagered by apparitions always keeping just outside of view, until something seems to break through the ceiling, and everyone finds themselves in their beds, without a clue of what truly happened to them or how they even left the cinema.

After that experience, things quickly deteriorate. Everyone in the small group is again and again frightened and attacked by ghosts, until people crack and begin to die. The only hope for survival and sanity seems to be the repeat screening at Komchanod.

The supernatural however, isn’t the largest problem the characters have to cope with. There is something terribly wrong in the relationship between Yuth and Orn, so wrong that the young woman tries to seek Roj’s help – with less than pleasant results for her.

The Screen at Komchanod is only the directorial debut of Songsak Mongkolthong, but it is quite an achievement. For the first part of its runtime, the film disguises itself as pure, scare-oriented horror cinema without much interest in commenting on the human condition (or the weather). I certainly wouldn’t have held it against the film if it had stayed that way, because Mongkolthong is very adept at timing the scary ghost stuff just right, and this type of horror is mostly about the timing. Also on the plus side when it comes to the scares is Mongkolthong’s scarce use of the dreaded jump and whoosh cuts. There are some of them in the film, but not enough to get annoying.

The ghosts themselves are very well done too, keeping well inside the traditions of Thai horror cinema, but tending to the more grotesque side of that tradition, granting the film more than one moment of finely disturbing visuals. It is certainly interesting to add that Mongkolthong isn’t shy at all about showing us a lot of the ghosts, often even in good light, something that could have gone terribly wrong with cheap or unintentionally ridiculous looking creatures. Fortunately, the special effects crew is more than up to the task and delivers some very memorable creatures (personal favorites: the ghost with the hand problem and the fat white guy).

During the course of the film, it turns out that just scaring and disturbing his viewer isn’t all Mongkolthong is interested in – the farther the plot comes along, the more emphasis is put on the complete emotional and moral brokenness of its characters who are all abusers and abused of one type or the other, with special interest on the thinness of the line that can divide the abused from the abuser.

This theme isn’t exactly uncommon in Thai horror cinema, but the other genre films interested in it I have seen believe in things like hope and redemption. The Screen isn’t that optimistic - the only character who can be called innocent dies after going through an even more terrible ordeal than the rest of them, while the plot’s only survivor certainly doesn’t deserve his survival in the sense that he has learned something from what has happened to him or tries to better himself, but only survives to perpetuate the supernatural cycle anyway.

The Screen at Kamchanod‘s take on horror as a combination of ghosts, the grotesque and subtle misanthropy is one I’d like to see more of from Thai cinema in the future, although the disquieting effect this style of film can have is certainly not for everyone.

Right now, I feel a strong need to watch something fluffy, with unicorns.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

Hantu Jeruk Purut

November 27th, 2009 | article by Denis Klotz | No Comments »
Tags: Ghosts, Horror, Indonesia, Koya Pagayo

company: Indika Entertainment
year: 2006
runtime: 87′
country: Indonesia
director: Koya Pagayo
cast: Angie Virgin, Samuel Z. Heckenbucker,
Sheila Marcia
writer: Ery Sofid
not on home video in the USA

Three friends are visiting an old cemetary by night. It is said that if an odd number of people circles the cemetary seven times, they will see the beheaded ghost of a priest who is supposed to haunt this place.

The legend turns out to be true. For some reason, it has missed the part about the ghost then slaughtering the odd number of people in a Final Destination-like semi-accident.

Romance writer Anna is trying to branch out by writing a non-fiction book about the supernatural. Unfortunately, she has decided on the same cursed cemetary as base for her book. After a short visit there of her own, the ghost starts to follow her around threateningly, or rather, the ghosts do - apart from the beheaded guy pittoresquely carrying his head in his hand, there is also a rotting and pale female ghost and a ghostly dog. Most active of them is the woman. She warns Anna that she’d better stop writing lies about them, but doesn’t give her much time to reconsider her writing or bothers to explain what exactly she is talking about.

Instead, the headless kills Anna in another strange semi-accident. While she’s bleeding to death (or is already dead – the film is never making this clear), Anna calls the student Rin (Angie Virgin), an acquaintance and aspiring writer herself, to beg her to finish the book for her.

Even after discovering the corpse of her idol, Rin decides to respect the dead woman’s wish. It’s not as if she hadn’t enough problems of her own, living with a mother who has become clinically depressed after divorce and Valen, the assholish boyfriend of her best friend Nadine trying to creep himself into her heart. The new writing project however grabs the girl at her ambition.

Together with Nadine and Valen, Rin visits the cemetary, does her seven rounds and is from then on haunted by the ghosts herself. The girl isn’t dissuaded from her course by spooky visions, though, and soon the ghosts put their energy into harassing her friends and her mother whose fragile state of mind seems to make her quite attractive to unfriendly spooks.

Koya Pagayo’s Hantu Jeruk Purut is an extremely competent effort in the seemingly neverending struggle of a handful of Indonesian production houses to mix the more international version of the still popular Japanese ghost horror genre no reasonable person will call “J-horror” with typical teen horror and Indonesian ghosts and spooks. Describing it as “Final Destination meets Ju-On” wouldn’t be too wrong, but is also meaner than the film deserves.

My first impression on watching the film was one of craftsmanship and competence. I don’t know if this is typical of the films of Koya Pagayo, or if this one is an island of competence in the cheap mire that seems to make up about half of contemporary Indonesian horror (which is of course still a much better quota than we get from US horror), or if he is always this confident a director, but I am bound to find out sooner rather than later.

As is typical for films I praise with the less than enthusiastic word “competent”, Hantu Jeruk Purut impresses mostly through the avoidance of certain mistakes which too many other films seem to be seeking out with a true enthusiasm for wrong artistic choices.

Here, you won’t see supposedly ultra-hip young characters, nor experience the special kind of annoyance that comes with supposedly scary sequences only based on jump scares, nor will you have trouble parsing what happens on screen because the camera shakes as if held by an epileptic in the throes of a fit.

The young protagonists may be prettier than is realistic (not that I’m complaining, mind you) and have to deal with some soap operatic problems, but the film does not seem interested in glamour – something which usually is a bad fit for horror – and times its moments of melodrama quite well, never falling in the “too much boyfriend and not enough ghosts” trap. It does of course help that the actors playing them aren’t half bad.

When it comes to the scares, Pagayo prefers the long shot of a ghost behind or floating over one of his protagonists to shouting “boo!” into his viewers’ faces, at first trying to build a mood before escalating the horror. This isn’t to say that there are no jump scares at all here, but rather that Pagayo uses other techniques in the horror book as well, which makes the few jump scares a bit more unexpected again. It’s also nice to have a relatively good look at the rather neat looking ghosts.

I really liked the way the film at first jumps into the horror action, but then decelartes for a slow build up and slow escalation to its plot until the loud and fast finale in a hospital. It’s an old-fashioned yet satisfying sort of structure.

Also worth mentioning, especially for people who know and dread the often clunky and ill-fitting way Indonesian horror uses comic relief, is that the film eschews humor completely apart from a moment in the introduction and one in the outro, which aren’t even all that painful.

The film’s big weakness and the point that could very well make you enjoy the film a lot less than I did is that it is not original at all in the elements it contains. We all have seen these kind of ghosts, these sorts of deaths and these characters a hundred times before in other films, screaming, running, dying and making creepy noises while crawling around on the floor. However, I can’t say that I mind much, or rather, I like many of the elements that make up the genre called “horror” and am watching horror films not necessarily for completely new experiences (although I’m fine with those), but for the way any given film mixes and matches the familiar elements, sometimes giving them unexpected twists, sometimes just repeating them in hopefully satisfying ways.

“Satisfying” is a good word for the way Hantu Jerak Purut turned out for me, and while it isn’t as brilliant as Rizal Mantovani’s Kuntilanak trilogy, it is a more than worthy part of the Indonesian horror boom.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

Seance

November 18th, 2009 | article by Kevin Pyrtle | 2 Comments »
Tags: Drama, Ghosts, Horror, Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Koji Yakusho

a.k.a. Korei
companies: Twins Japan
and Kansai Telecasting Corp.,
Daiei Co. Ltd for theatrical
year: 2000
runtime: 97′
country: Japan
director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
writers: Tetsuya Onishi
and Kiyoshi Kurosawa
cast: Koji Yakusho, Jun Fukubi,
Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, Kitarou,
Ittoku Kishibe, Sho Aikawa
dvd company: Home Vision Entertainment
release date: May 17, 2005
retail price: $24.95
disc details: Region 1 / single layer
order this film from Amazon.com

Plot: Sato (Koji Yakusho), a television sound designer, supports his wife Junko (Jun Fukubi), whose psychic abilities prevent her from keeping a steady job. One day a young kidnapped girl accidentally lands in their care. Rather than reporting her discovery immediately to the authorities, Junko decides to keep the child in their home for a few days while feeding the police clues purportedly gained by her psychically. But things take a turn for the worse when the child accidentally dies in Junko and Sato’s care . . .

Based on the novel Seance on a Wet Afternoon by Mark McShane, which was previously (and more directly) adapted into a 1964 film starring Richard Attenborough and directed by Bryan Forbes, SEANCE is another fine genre-defying turn for Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Originally produced on 16mm for Japanese television, the film (like SERPENT’S PATH and EYES OF THE SPIDER before it) was bumped to 35mm and given a theatrical release there in 2001 before making its way to home video in North American in 2005.

Those expecting a straight horror film should check those expectations at the door, as SEANCE is a drama before it’s anything else. Unlike in the novel on which it is based, the crime that provides the impetus for the story is not initially committed by the family at its center. The convergence of the two, a kidnapping for ransom perpetrated by a man unknown and the middle-aged married life of an imperfect but generally happy couple, is purely accidental. Junko is shown to be a person with genuine ability as a medium but little notoriety and no ambition – she spends her days attending to infrequent customers wishing to resolve their issues with the dead. Her only claim to fame is her participation in the graduate research of a psychology student at the local university.

It is through this graduate student that Junko is first contacted about the kidnapping case, the police hoping that a medium might help them find the girl, or at least give the investigation a direction. She accepts out of an honest desire to help, having no idea that the kidnapped girl she’s helping to find had made her way into one of her husband’s equipment trunks while he was doing live sound recording a few days earlier.

The discovery of the kidnapped girl in her own home changes Junko completely, and she suddenly sees her involvement in the case a giant step towards fame – a way to financially better both herself and the husband she’s depended upon so much in the past. Sato is resistant to her scheme at first, desiring only to phone either the hospital so that the girl can get the care she needs, but is suckered into it all the same, agreeing to go along with it even after the girl sees his face. Everything goes well for the first few days, and Junko is nearly ready to reveal the girl’s location (where she and Sato plan to take her) when the unimaginable happens . . .

The cause of the girl’s death is left open-ended by Kurosawa, who hints that it may be a result of a lack of emergency care while likewise suggesting that Sato may have killed her himself (we last see her alive in his arms, being muffled so that a polieceman visiting with Junko downstairs won’t hear her). Whichever the case may be, the death throws a gigantic wrench into Junko’s plan. She begins pondering on how to go about luring detectives to the girl’s buried body while the ghost of the child lingers over Sato and herself like a guilty conscience.

While Kurosawa provides glimpses of the supernatural early on (a seance, strange voices on an effects recording, and even an apparition seen by Junko in a restaurant where she works briefly), it is only in the last half hour that the ghostly element of the story begins to play into the plot more directly. The ghost of the girl takes to haunting the couple, with them for every moment of their waking lives as a reminder of the death they had allowed to happen. Things take occasional sidesteps into the bizarre, as when Sato sets fire to the doppelganger he finds sitting in his backyard (a scene scored, in strange appropriateness, with bagpipes), but always pertain to the narrative at hand. By the time Junko calls the detectives for a final seance it is already clear that neither she nor her husband will escape retribution, be it supernatural or more earthly in origin.

No one handles space quite like Kurosawa, and his use of it (and uncanny monaural sound mixing) to evoke distinct atmosphere and emotion is in top form here. One scene has Sato’s boss sharing a recording on which he’s sure he’s heard voices. It ends in a single uninterrupted shot: The boss tries to shake his uneasy feelings by wandering away from the tape deck and the camera follows Sato, who begins walking away to take care of other business. At the last moment the camera crash pans, settling on a closeup of the disturbed face of Sato’s boss, his hands clenching a headset tightly to his ears. Kurosawa wears his influences on his sleeve, and they lie at least as much with Kubrick as the exploitation of the ’60s and ’70s – late in the film Sato is seen alone with the trunk in which he’s buried the dead girl in a scene that evokes that director in a very 2001 kind of way.

The need to update Mark McShane’s novel in both time and place offered Kurosawa and co-writer Tetsuya Onishi numerous opportunities to explore philosophical ground left untouched in the source in the ambiguous style typical of the director. Exemplative of such is Sato’s hiring of a Shinto priest (Sho Aikawa in a brief but memorable role) to exorcise his house. Sato asks the priest if hell exists, and is told that it does if you believe in it and doesn’t if you don’t. Sato follows with another quetsion: “Which do you?” The priest answers, “I don’t know.” The writing process also allowed Kurosawa to interject his growing fascination with the idea of doppelgangers, a fascination that would result in his much underrated comedy DOPPELGANGER three years later.

Home Vision Entertainment has distributed the bulk of the few Kiyoshi Kurosawa films available in America and released both SEANCE and the truly bizarre CHARISMA to domestic DVD in 2005. Their disc of SEANCE is typical of the company’s high standards. The progressive transfer is presented in the originally intended flat full screen ratio and does a fine, if imperfect, job of representing the 16mm photography. Detail is limited and the image can look a bit soft overall, but damage is minimal and I suspect the film looks as it did when first aired in 2000. The monaural audio is quiet, restrained, and very reprasentative of the original mix, and comes augmented with optional and exceptional English subtitles. Supplements include a 10 minute interview with the director (in Japanese with optional English subtitles), trailers for SEANCE, CURE, and CHARISMA and 2 pages of liner notes by Gabe Klinger.

This is one of the simplest of Kurosawa’s films and one of the easiest to recommend to general audiences. There’s nothing at all wrong with the Home Vision Entertainment DVD, and it can be had for considerably below retail through some of Amazon.com’s third party sellers. Both come highly recommended from this reviewer.