Kyôfu kikei ningen: Edogawa Rampo zenshû (1969)

User Rating:

6.7/10   

Director:

Teruo Ishii

Writers:

Teruo Ishii (screenplay) &
Masahiro Kakefuda (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

31 October 1969 (Japan)

Genre:

Mystery | Horror

Plot Keywords:

Identity Swap | Surgeon | Island | Banned Film | Knife

Cast

Teruo Yoshida	...	Hirosuke Hitomi / Genzaburô Komoda
Yukie Kagawa	...	Shizuko
Teruko Yumi	...	Hideko / Hatsuyo
Mitsuko Aoi	...	Toki Komoda
Michiko Kobata	...	Chiyoko Komoda
Yumiko Katayama	...	Female Patient A
Kei Kiyama	...	Kei
Reiko Mikasa	...	Mad Woman
Miki Obana	...	Slashed Woman
Michi Tanaka	...	Kin
Kinko Kato	...	Masseur (as Kinko Katô)
Asano Kanamori	...	Female Patient B
Yôko Koyama	...	Miki
Chiyo Okada	...	Clerk
Mie Hanabusa	...	Mie

Also Known As:

Horror of a Deformed Man (International: English title)
Horrors of Malformed Men (USA) (DVD title)
Kyofu kikei ningen (Japan) (short title)

Runtime:

99 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Japan:R-18 (re-rating) | Japan:(Banned)

Company:

Toei Company

Bizarre attempt to mix horror with Butoh dance

Postwar Japan gave birth to probably one of the most consistently weird dance forms, Butoh. It rather hard to describe except that the processions of anguished clay caked naked bodies and rag covered transvestites makes me think of a nuclear holocaust. Since Japan is the only country with any experience with the horrors of a nuclear holocaust, it isn't surprising.

We open with a dazed man in the middle of a cage of naked crazy women in a mental institution. We soon learn that he's an inmate as well. He is haunted by an odd children's lullaby. That night a strange bald man tries to kill him but instead our hero kills the bald man and escapes. Our hero hears the unusual lullaby and finds a circus performer who seems to come from the same remote place on the coast. He makes his way to the coast and finds out that a rich man who looks exactly like him has just died. He digs up the body and switches clothing becoming the dead man mistakenly buried too soon. Our hero then attempts to discover the strange secrets of the dead man's family while trying to imitate the deceased.

After watching this production I am very interested in why this film has been banned in Japan for so long. There are plenty of films that are WAY MORE DISTURBING, disgusting or horrifying from Japan, some made the same year! The most likely part is the second half of the film when the Butoh dancers are given plenty of screen time but much of it is mystifying to me rather then disturbing. The couple of torture scenes are rough but not worse then anything I've seen from any pinku film.

Anyway the film is quite good for the first half and starts to fall apart during the second half. It seems the the director and his camera person really didn't know what to do with the Butoh dancers. We get a number of very striking Butoh scenarios, poorly filmed (compared to the excellent filming in the rest of the film), that go by with the main characters just gazing on in disbelief. No real connection to the plot.

An interesting experiment.