In short: Necronomicon (1993)

Every couple of years, I re-watch the Brian Yuzna-produced Necronomicon, asking myself – making a ridiculous and puzzled face, I suppose - why I don’t remember anything at all about it beyond the fact that Jeffrey Combs plays Lovecraft in the film’s wrap-around segments. Then, having watched the film, I realize I don’t remember anything about it because it’s far from a memorable movie, which in turn will of course lead to another round with it in five years time, unless I take a look at this useful post right here.

Because I’m a rather relaxed person when it comes to that sort of thing, I can’t even get angry about a film supposedly based on three Lovecraft tales generally having fuck all to do with the stories. I’m really rather more interested if the segments in themselves are any good. Alas…

Yuzna’s wrap-around tale is a good bit of fun, with Combs being Combs, Lovecraft being a rather two-fisted version of himself that is as much Indiana Jones as the old gent from Providence (pretend I’m now blathering on for ages about the man’s racism, because clearly that’s relevant and worthy of burning hatred when talking about a man who died in 1937), and the plot being silly, short, and with neat monster designs.

Christophe Gans’s highly gothic tale of a man (Bruce Payne) mourning the death of his wife, and nearly repeating the mistake of an ancestor (Richard Lynch), is probably the high point of the film. Sure, it has nothing whatsoever to do with The Rats in the Walls which it is supposedly based on, but the motives – if not its emotional base in love, one of Lovecraft’s least favourite emotions – it uses are very much Lovecraftian, and Gans is pretty great at building a mood that does resemble Corman’s Poe adaptations to a pleasant degree, until everything is wrapped up with fine monster designs and a shift towards nearly swashbuckling action that is the sort of thing the later director of Le Pacte des loups did already so very well at the time this was made.

I am a big admirer of Shusuke Kaneko’s 90s Gamera, perhaps the best kaiju eiga made after the original Gojira but his segment here is just a mess, finding neither a visual, nor a thematic nor even just a plot focus, with little happening in it that isn’t obvious, and nothing at all that’s interesting, unless you were always dreaming of watching David Warner in an awkward sex scene. On the more positive side, this segment does actually use plot elements of Lovecraft’s Cool Air, just not sensibly or to any effect.

Last but not least, we have Brian Yuzna’s segment, which is a very typical series of ever more grotesque effect scenes, the kind of thing I find entertaining enough as long as I’m in the process of watching it – particular with creature and, well, stuff design like it is here – but that not really makes for a satisfying climax when the grotesque isn’t in service of anything. Again, it’s no surprise I won’t remember any of this in a few years.

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God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand (2006)

Original title: Kami no hidarite akuma no migite

A little boy called Sou Yamabe (Tsubasa Kobayashi) has strange precognitive powers connected with his dreams. One night, while his older sister Izumi (Asuka Shibuya) is watching over him, he dreams of the cruel murder of a teenager (Saaya). Somehow, the boy's mental connection to the murder victim runs so deep that he even mirrors her deadly wounds, his throat tearing open and blood spattering in an early warning that the blood in this film will be very fake looking yet will also appear in copious amounts. Only the fast reaction of Izumi saves Sou's life, but he still ends up in hospital in a coma from which nobody seems to be sure when or if he will awake.

Sou had warned Izumi that something like this would happen to him, and made her promise to save him if she could. At the time, Izumi didn't take what her brother told her seriously, but now she is convinced she has to follow the vague hints he gave her to the killer he saw in his dream.

The audience has already made the killer's acquaintance. Kubota (Tomorowo Taguchi), as he is called, is a soft-spoken grocery store clerk who takes loving care of his little, paraplegic - yet for some peculiar reason wheelchair-less - daughter Momo (Momoku Shimizu). Of course, if you know what he's doing in his free time, some of Kubota's interactions with his daughter begin to take on quite disturbing features. He draws macabre little stories that end up in violent deaths of young women for Momo, which delight the girl to no end, it seems, but each of these stories is actually based on the true events of one of his murders. And Kubota has already told a lot of stories to his daughter.

So it's probably for the best that Izumi has a prophetic dream that leads her to a red cell phone with which she can get in contact with her comatose little brother, who in turn is able to point the girl to the town where Kubota and his daughter live. There, Izumi teams up with Yoshiko (Ai Maeda), the sister of poor, dead Ayu and follows a tiny handful of clues to Kubota.

I will always admire Shusuke Kaneko for his brilliant reimagining of Gamera and the whole kaiju genre in the 90s (and his pretty neat Godzilla film), but I have not been satisfied with any of the films he made outside the kaiju genre I have seen. Like Kaneko's Gamera films, all of these movies are trying very hard to do clever and unexpected things inside their respective genres, yet unlike the Gamera films, they never manage to achieve their goals completely.

This adaptation of a manga (that is of course not available in translation) by the great Kazuo Umezu (who has one of his inevitable - and inevitably charming - cameos giving Kubota positive reinforcement for his art) starts out well enough.

Kaneko seems to be quite on the right wavelength to work through some of Umezu's favourite themes. Early on, God's Left Hand makes much of the difference in the way children and adults see the world, with the serial killer ironically being closer to a child-like disposition than a sane grown-up could be, and shows very Umezu-like doubts in the correctness of seeing the world in a rational and grown-up way (Umezu does live in a striped house after all) when it is obvious that the world isn't a rational and grown-up place.

The way Kaneko treats the supernatural here fits into the same mould. Izumi, who as a teenager is much closer to being an adult herself and not prone to magical thinking anymore, is at first sceptical when it comes to her brother's prophecies, but as soon as she has witnessed him nearly dying, she accepts all the weird coincidences, prophetic dreams and bizarre occurrences the film is throwing at her with the matter-of-factness of a much younger child, following the trail before her like the fairy tale character she is.

It is important not to misjudge the film as one of those horror movies that try to be realistic or logical, or even believable in the usual sense. This is a dark fairy tale with a bad wolf who pretends to be a loving father, a little princess in peril, a courageous girl on a quest and a forest of subtextual meaning that just happens to take place in contemporary Japan.

And for the first forty or fifty minutes, Kaneko's film is a pretty impressive fairy tale at that, proficiently balancing on the line that divides non-naturalistic filmmaking from silly camp, managing to squeeze a dream-like mood out of mundane locations.

But then, suddenly, the film begins to falter, right at the scene I won't spoil for anyone by calling it the Great Cake and Axe Massacre, in which what should feel grotesque and just plain weird turns into a kitschy mess of cake frosting, rubber heads and idol cameos. It's a scene that ripped me right out of the mood Kaneko had built up so carefully before, and for the rest of the film's running time I wasn't able to find a way back into it anymore.

Unfortunately, much of what follows that scene isn't really worth trying to get into again. Although there are still some utterly fantastic moments (and a wonderfully bizarre happy end) to follow, much of the rest of the film is further disrupted by increasingly bad acting. I could forgive the child actors (and possibly even the idols) for not being able to get through the more emotionally draining later scenes, but Tomorowo Taguchi has been in more than enough films to really know better. His performance starts out quiet and underplayed and therefore disquieting, but all too soon turns into an eye-rolling piece of overacting that would be too much in a Tim Burton movie, and just sucks every bit of menace and subtlety from this particular film.

But it is not only the acting that is at fault here, the script and Kaneko's direction falter as much, with everything that was subtle and ambiguous in the beginning turning into the obvious and overly familiar, until the finale finds the film turning into a full-blown celebration of cinematic weirdness. Alas, at that point, it is already far too late to matter anymore.

So, like all of Kaneko's films not featuring guys in rubber suits, I can't whole-heartedly recommend God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand. I don't think, however, that this is a movie to avoid completely. It's just a question of coping with the crushing disappointment that Kaneko, who should by rights be one of the leading Japanese directors of intelligent commercial films working today, has again not lived up to his directorial potential.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,shusuke kaneko,kazuo umezu,reviews,horror

Pyrokinesis (2000)

Junko Aoki (Akiko Yada) works in the postal department of a Toho office (yes, she works for the studio that's producing the film you are watching - feel the meta), trying to keep her head down and stay as uninvolved with others as possible. The woman has some emotional problems you see. Ever since she was a child, she has had the ability to project and ignite fire, but also trouble controlling her powers once she has started using them. Also, strong feelings let her give off an immense heat, enough that she needs to run to next body of water to lose a little steam.

A person can't stay completely alone forever. She has developed a crush on her colleague Tada (Hideaki Ito). The slow starting romance between the two is unfortunately soon disrupted when a bunch of hooligans who are already responsible for a small string of murders, kills Tada's younger sister.

The police arrests Kogure (Hidenori Tokuyama), the ringleader of the bastards, but with the help of his ex-D.A. father and a phony accusation of police brutality, he's not even going on trial - his tendency to tell just about anyone of his guilt stretching my suspension of disbelief here really to the limit.

Tada wants to kill Kogure, but Junko prevents him ruining his life. She makes him the offer to kill "punish" Kogure and his gang for their murders with the help of her powers. That way, nobody will find out about the motive for the killings. At first, Tada agrees, yet when the moment comes he intervenes, overcome with the thought of the senselessness of revenge.

In the ensuing argument, he accuses Junko of not really wanting to help him, but just looking for an excuse for using her powers. She runs away, and that very consequently; she leaves her job and apartment behind and goes on the run.

Junko's flight turns out to be not that bad of an idea - two cops, the experienced female Ishizu (Kaori Momoi, quite excellent as policewoman with brain and heart - which gives her two organs on her colleagues) and the younger Makihara (Ryuuji Harada) who knows Junko from her childhood are on the case, and not as skeptical as one would expect.

It's at this point that the film slowly loses in quality when it introduces more young people with ESP powers and the conspiracy of a shadowy organization of evil vigilantes, turning an intimate piece into something that can end in an explosion.

Not that director Shusuke Kaneko wouldn't know what to do with explosions - we are talking about the man who made the three brilliant Gamera films of the 90s here - but I don't think Pyrokinesis is completely successful in its marriage of the intimate and the loud.

Part of the problem lies in the film's characters. While Junko and Ishizu are complex and complicated enough to be interesting as persons, the baddies of the film lack in even the slightest bit of complexity. There's no discernible motive for their actions besides them being movie villains, letting the film's tone shift the more into the realm of the shonen manga the longer they are on screen.

Another difficulty Kaneko can't overcome is a budgetary one. Although special effects and locations look as good (and in case of the effects: gruesome) as a low budget can possible allow, most of the acting is rather bland. Idol Akiko Yada does a surprisingly good job as Junko and Kaori Momoi's Ishizu is delightful (I don't think she's capable of doing a bad acting job), but the rest of the acting just isn't there to pick up some of the script's slack.

Still, Pyrokinesis is worth two hours of your time, at least for the subtle moments of its first hour and Kaneko's ambition to be complex and complicated, even if the film can't completely keep up with his ambitions.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,reviews,sf,shusuke kaneko,kaori momoi