Starting in the late 1950s the horror genre exploded into a bold new world of color. Japan's answer to Fisher, Bava and Corman was Nobuo Nakagawa, who brought an oft-filmed 1825 kabuki play to livid life at the end of the decade. It's a simple story of greed and its supernatural comeuppance that wouldn't be entirely out of place in an American EC comic of the time. An ambitious ronin, Iemon (Shigeru Amachi) wants to marry Oiwa (Katsuko Wakasugi) won't take no for an answer when her dad. apparently a good judge of character, turns him down. Encouraged by his mephistophelean minion Naosuke (Shuntaro Emi), Iemon kills the old man, and a few others, covering his trail so Oiwa is none the wiser. Married life proves less comfortable than Iemon hoped for, as he's quickly reduced to walking the streets as the Japanese equivalent of those guys who wore sandwich boards in old American movies, advertising that wonder remedy, "Dutch medicine." When an opportunity arises to marry into more wealth, Iemon decides that it's time to move on and leave no loose ends behind. Resourceful Naosuke provides him with some European poison to mix into Oiwa's face cream to ensure a painful, disfiguring demise, but Iemon's taking no chances. He recruits the hapless Takuetsu (Jun Otomo) to seduce Oiwa so the aggrieved hubby can rush in, in a cruel variant on the old badger game, and exercise his conjugal prerogative by killing his adulterous wife. Takuetsu quickly loses his enthusiasm for the project when Oiwa applies the face cream and is, as planned, painfully disfigured. Deranged by pain, she tries to kill Takuetsu but ends up impaling herself on a knife. Not to worry: Iemon promptly arrives to make sure Takuetsu doesn't tell the truth. We learn that Iemon's prerogative extends to nailing the "adulterers" to shingles and cutting them in half, but he's content to dump their bodies in a swamp.
The problem for quickly-remarried Iemon is that Oiwa died cursing him, and in Tokugawa Japan you can't write that stuff off as mere delirium. She and Takuetsu have a bad habit of turning up on intimate occasions, while Iemon has the worse habit of trying to kill ghosts with a sword. Worse still, his aim is pretty accurate, but there usually are living people -- temporarily living people, that is -- standing where he sees the ghosts. In short, Iemon goes
Sword of Doom on his new family. Meanwhile, his old family isn't done with him. Oiwa's brother, whom he and Naosuke had thrown down a waterfall earlier in the picture, reappears as a living, angry avenger. He teams up with both a live sister and, indirectly, a dead sister to mete out samurai justice to the villain. In many respects
Yotsuya is basically a samurai film or the cynical, debunking variety with supernatural trappings, but some of the spooky stuff is quite effective, particularly the surprise reveal of Oiwa's ghost crawling on Iemon's ceiling. The best scene from the horror standpoint is Iemon's out-of-control rampage, which has you fearing helplessly for innocent people once you realize that whenever he starts waving his sword at a ghost, somebody real is going to die. Tadashi Nishimoto's cinematography strikes a stylish balance between natural locations and expressionistic set lighting, but overall Nakagawa's work in color here is a dry run for his real calling-card effort in
Jigoku the following year.
Yotsuya is still a nicely done film in its own right that did much, in retrospect, to put Japan on the global horror film map.
No comments:
Post a Comment