Adam Baran

Synapse DVD recently reissued two strange Japanese horror classics from the sixties, both of which appear to have attained a kind of cult status over the years since their original release. Last week I watched Nobuo Nakagawa’s Snake Woman’s Curse, from 1968, and this week I watched Testuo Ishii’s Horrors of Malformed Men released the following year in 1969 to almost no attention.

Snake Woman’s Curse is probably the weaker of the two. It tells a very standard vengeful ghost story. A wealthy landlord works a poor old tenant farmer to death, and his wife and adult daughter are forced to move in with the landlord’s cruel family, who essentially cause their deaths. The landlord’s gang are then driven mad by ghostly appearances of snakes and visions of spouses turned into snakes. It’s extremely old-fashioned in a good way, more reliant on mood and atmosphere, pleasant and fun to watch. But the film doesn’t really scare in the typical sense. It’s more like an old Hammer Film - lush colors, studio sets, and creaky acting. The story is too tame thematically, and the idea that it’s only psychological horror that destroys the landlord’s family is a bit too reserved for my tastes. The landlord and his family are so cruel that you really want to see them get their just desserts, which never really happens with the kind of relish that would make the ending really satisfying.

Horrors of Malformed Men’s ending is sort of dissapointing, but also so fucking bonkers that you can’t help but be like “WTF?” (in a good way, yet again). The film’s a really spooky Poe-esque tale, in fact it’s based on a script which mashes up several stories of the Japanese horror writer Edogawa Rampo (the Japanese pen name created by phonetically saying the syllables of Edgar Allen Poe - try it - it’s fun). It’s about a man named Hirosuke, who wakes up in an insane asylum, kills a strange bald man who’s giving him the evil eye, and escapes on a journey to a mysterious island to try and understand the reoccuring dream he keeps having, which goes something like this:

The man in the dream (and who eventually appears in the narrative, natch) is Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the Japanese dance movement known as Butoh. After Hirosuke arrives on the outskirts of the island, he finds that a man who looks exactly like him has just died. He then pretends to be this man resurrected, and starts living with the man’s family, trying to find out clues to who he is. Eventually he’s drawn to the island, run by a mad Dr. Moreau-character who’s been creating malformed men for some creepy reason. It’s great how many popular Poe tropes are thrown together - part of the fun is taking the film apart piece by piece. There’s the doppelganger thing, the reoccuring dream, the mysterious murders, the madman hanging out in the attic. Then the film goes nuts - imagine a Japanese version of a Jodorowsky world with strange women covered in silver body paint stuck in cages, while others ride around on leashes held by even creepier deformed men. It’s crazy, but great. Check out the trailer, the subtitles are hilarious.

They’re billing it as the most controversial Asian horror film ever, I guess because it was pretty much surpressed by the government censors for years - although there’s nothing too too shocking in there. Maybe it’s just that there’s a counter-cultural spirit in the scenes on the island that are so disturbing not because they’re scary but because they’re so strange and performance arty. The ending is equal parts Agatha Christie and Scooby Doo, with an incestuous twist. Park Chan-Wook has to have seen this film - I’m theorizing that it’s a major influence for Oldboy, though I will probably be corrected. It’s hard to really say it’s a great ending, because it’s really too campy and silly, and tries perhaps to explain the crazy nature of the story for a Japanese audience who must have needed the kind of closure the explosive finale provides. But it’s also totally admirable for the bizzare balls that Tetsuo Ishii must have had to put it to film. I’m glad to see in the DVD extras that people acknowledge it’s dual nature as being totally great, and yet totally over the top and laughable.

Either way, it’s definitely recommended, for a pleasant Shocktober evening.