Golden Queen’s Commando (Chu Yen-Ping, 1982)

Although I can’t find a way to shoehorn it into any of my existing blog categories, today I’m going to go off-piste to tell you all about ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’, a lackadaisical action spectacular from the depths of Taiwan’s b-movie netherworld which charmed and mystified me in equal measure as it unfolded before my sleepy, post-midnight eyes last weekend.

[Quick note: Where possible, I’ve tried to present both the Chinese and English names of cast members when crediting them, but given the extent of misinformation and general obscurity which surrounds the Taiwanese popular film industry, confusion is bound to ensue, so apologies in advance for any mistakes.]

On first glance, ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’ seems like a pretty fool-proof proposition: an all-female riff on ‘The Dirty Dozen’, set in war-torn Manchuria circa 1944. Pretty straightforward stuff, you may think, but just try telling that to director Chu Yen-Ping, a man best known in the West for bringing the world the unforgettable, allegedly Triad-financed all-star headfuck Fantasy Mission Force a year later.

Suffice to say, anyone familiar with that film will anticipate trouble brewin’ with this one, and indeed, the same delirious mixture of full-spectrum sloppiness, misplaced ambition, relentless forward momentum and sheer, unadulterated craziness is already in full effect in ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’, as Yen-Ping leaves any semblance of real world logic way back in the rear view mirror right from the outset.

As seems fairly sensible, the film begins with a series of short vignettes introducing us to each of our ‘commandos’, illustrating the circumstances which led to them being incarcerated together in what we’re forced to assume must be some kind of hellish, pan-Asian prison camp.

And, boy howdy, what a fantastic line-up of ladies we have to root for here! Much in the spirit of Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s ‘House’ (1977), each of our heroines has a simple, one-personality-trait identity, a distinctive costume, and an easy name to help us remember them.

There’s a tattooed lady wrestler from Inner Mongolia (‘Amazon’, played by Chun-Chun Hsu/Theresa Tsui), a master safecracker and cat burglar (‘Quicksilver’, Hsueh-Fen (Silvia) Peng), and ‘Sugar Plum’ (Joyce H. Cheng), who appears to be some kind of man-eating femme fatale / call girl with a cupid’s bow tattooed on her cheek.

 Even more memorable though is ‘Brandy’ (Hao-Yi (Hilda) Liu), an alcoholic swordswoman who we we initially see debasing herself terribly as she tries to scrounge a drink in a filthy, crowded bar. Once she’s managed to glug down a flask of wine however, it’s ‘Drunken Master’ time, as she is transformed into a fearsome fighter, slicing up her goon-ish tormenters in classic chanbara fashion! Wow!

A somewhat more aesthetically complex creation, ‘Black Cat’ (Hui-Shan Yang / Elsa Yeung) meanwhile boasts a spectacular, period-defying teased hair-do, new wave make-up and ray-bans, as well as wearing an oversized black cross around her neck.

Apparently some kind of Old West-styled outlaw / gambler / preacher(?), Black Cat makes up for the fact she was born forty years too early to audition to play bass in The Gun Club by bringing her own brand of rough, frontier justice to the saloons of old… Asia?

In one of several tributes to ‘For a Few Dollars More’ scattering through ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’, we initially see her calling out some no good varmint who’s unsuccessfully tried to stack a card game against her, blowing him away with a hidden pistol concealed inside a bible.

Eventually emerging as the movie’s Charles Bronson / second-in-command figure, Black Cat is undoubtedly pretty awesome, but when it comes to picking my favourite Golden Queen Commando, she narrowly loses out to ‘Dynamite’, played by Sally Yeh (who went on to star in Tsui Hark’s ‘Peking Opera Blues’ and John Woo’s ‘The Killer’ (both 1986)).

Swaggering across the Tibetan Plateau in hot-pants and a red bandana, Dynamite keeps a lit cigarette permanently dangling from her lips and specialises in – you guessed it – blowing stuff up, sometimes even using an oversized, cartoon-style detonator. (At one point later in the film, Dynamite further cements her infinite coolness by literally bringing a knife to a gunfight, and winning. Too much, man.)

As you can imagine, the various episodes required to introduce us to this mob of ass-kicking oddballs eat up so much screen-time that I was wondering whether there would actually be any time left for them to be assembled into a crack team of commandos and sent on a dangerous mission. Not that I’m complaining you understand - I could happily have watched a few dozen more of these action-packed vengeance vignettes, hit the end credits and headed off to slumberland feeling pretty satisfied.

But, ‘Dirty Dozen’ movie’s gotta do what a ‘Dirty Dozen’ movie’s got to do, and so eventually the aforementioned bad-ass dames find themselves incarcerated together in the aforementioned prison camp, being bossed around by soldiers who, in view of the historical setting, must presumably be Japanese, even though their uniforms and equipment appear to be German. Seriously though, let’s not even go there. They’re just baddies, ok?

Incredibly for a film of this vintage and general type however, the rote ‘Women In Prison’ segment which follows is entirely lacking in the kind of exploitative sadistic / sexual content one would usually expect of such material. In fact, the evil Asian Nazis don’t even so much as leer at any of the attractive women under their command, insofar as I recall. (There is a food fight instead though, if that’s any consolation.)

It’s almost as if Yen-Ping was setting out to make a family friendly movie or something. Albeit, one of those family friendly movies which involve hundreds of people being slaughtered, dismembered body parts flying across the screen and so forth - but still.

Anyway, it is whilst hanging around in this strangely non-threatening prison hell-camp that our heroines first encounter the formidable Brigitte Lin, heading up the cast list as our eye patch-sporting Lee Marvin surrogate, ‘Black Fox’.

“The Black Fox was really hot before the war – her two guns were enough to panic any mobster from Hong Kong to Chicago,” Black Cat helpfully explains. (Yes, there’s both a Black Cat and a Black Fox in this film, get used to it.)

[Hopefully Brigitte Lin will require no introduction for many of this blog’s readers, but given that I rarely cover Chinese-language cinema to any great extent, let’s just say – deep breath – ‘Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain’ (1983), ‘Police Story’ (1985), ‘Peking Opera Blues’ (1986), ‘Dragon Inn’ (1992), ‘The Bride With White Hair’ (1993), ‘Chungking Express’ (1994). You get the idea.]

Masquerading as a fellow inmate, Black Fox undertakes assorted chicanery in order to get our six heroines committed to the prison’s ‘black hole’ punishment room (basically it’s just an empty room with no lights where they hang around together, smoking cigarettes), from whence she orchestrates their escape.

Unfortunately however, the lengthy ‘prison break’ sequence that follows takes place at night, rendering the action largely incomprehensible on the badly degraded print of the film included on Golden Ninja Video’s recent Ninja Vortex compendium of IFD/Joseph Lai related films.

Presumably sourced from a Japanese VHS release if the burned in subs are anything to go by, this sadly seems to represent the only version of this film currently available in any format. Looking on the bright side though, at least it’s widescreen. Given that about 90% of the soundtrack consists of stolen Ennio Morricone music, I’m not really expecting a legit, remastered blu-ray edition to pop up any time soon either, so let’s just be thankful for what we’ve got.

A typically moody nocturnal action shot from the extant print of ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’.

So, as you’ll appreciate, I don’t really know how the ladies get out of prison. There seem to be a lot of soldiers being massacred, some jeeps zooming around and some buildings catching fire, but the whys and wherefores are all lost in the tape-sourced murk. Eventually though, they regroup in some kind of hideout which Black Fox has set out for them, where they are – finally! - briefed on the details of the mission they are supposed to carry out.

A spectacularly half-hearted attempt at exposition, this briefing lasts around thirty seconds, accompanied by a single chalkboard map, and basically consists of: “so there’s this underground enemy chemical lab, and some revolutionaries are threatening to unleash a chemical attack, so we get there first and blow it all up before them, any questions?”

Well, ok, how about - whose enemies? What revolutionaries? What the hell is going on here? I seem to recall there was also some reference made to a ‘queen’ at this point, which I suppose goes some way toward addressing this film’s grammatically awkward English title, but… which queen would that be then? I confess, the complex politics of war-time Taiwan and mainland China aren’t exactly my area of expertise, but… on reflection I should stop tormenting myself with these questions and just roll with it really, shouldn’t I?

I mean, I suspect I’ve already put more effort into trying to set the scene for this thing than Yen-Ping ever did, and even if he did deign to address his story’s historical background to some extent, you can be damn sure none of his efforts would have survived IFD’s typically horrendous English dubbing process (and make no mistake, this one is an absolute shocker in that regard).

Anyway, next thing we know, we’re in some dusty rural locale, and our heroines are all riding horses! They all seem to have reclaimed their preferred costumes and weapons from the pre-prison section of the movie, and Brigitte Lin has acquired a big, furry hat which she proceeds to wear through the remainder of the picture, even though the weather looks quite warm.

Meanwhile, someone in the editing room is absolutely caning their old copy of the ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ soundtrack LP, and ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’ seems determined to transform itself into a western. There are many bad men on the Commandos’ tail, which we know because we see atmospheric, low angle shots of the black-hatted riders thundering over the camera, wielding flaming torches. Cripes! 

From hereon in, the narrative more or less degenerates into a series of unrelated set pieces with zero connective tissue linking them together. So, at one point, the Commandos enter a forested area, where they all ensnared by a variety of elaborate booby traps, one of which involves Black Fox getting clobbered by a bunch of human skeletons which swing down from the sky (or something).

Unfeasibly, the instigators of these traps turns up to just be a bunch of slobbish militia type dudes. Could they those ‘revolutionaries’ we were just hearing about? I’m not sure, but whoever they are, they’re a fairly good natured bunch, which leads us to our next set piece, wherein they promise our heroines their freedom, provided they can prove their mastery of various disciplines by defeating their captors in a series of challenges involving noodle-eating, beer-drinking, archery etc.

Sadly, whilst all of these hi-jinks are going on, there’s very little time for us to spend getting to know the individual Commandos, which is a shame, because they’re all such outstanding characters I could easily have watched a spin-off solo movie featuring any of them.

There is some rather minimal back-biting / in-fighting along the way, but the chief takeaway from this is simply the realisation that Quicksilver is by far the most annoying member of the group, prefiguring Winona Ryder’s angsty android character from ‘Alien Resurrection’ by several decades as she brings the action grinding to a halt on several occasions in order to start whining about the fact that she’s an orphan and had to make her own way in the world, and so on and so forth.

I mean, I’m sure each of these women has just as much of a hard luck story to tell, but do you see them tearing up and complaining about it every five minutes? Just look at poor Amazon – she’s been snatched away from her prize-fighting career in darkest Mongolia with nothing but an animal skin bikini to her name, and she barely even gets any screen-time. She’s just quietly takin’ care of business, trying to get this action movie / western / whatever thing done, as should you Quicksilver, you ungrateful cow. Just because you’re slightly less cool than the other characters, you think you’ve got a right to monopolise our attention. Go and crack a safe or something, why don’t you!

Sorry, where were we? Oh yes, the next big set piece finds the Commandos holing up in some sand dunes for a showdown with the army of baddies who have been following them – apparently led by the heretofore unmentioned “Flash Harry, the best tracker around”. (“But it can’t be him, he’s in Brazil,” Quicksilver exclaims, inexplicably.)

This sequence soon develops into a seemingly endless series of stylish, low angle shots of silhouetted stuntmen being thrown from their horses in slow mo, as multiple explosive charges set in advance by Dynamite explode around them.

Grabbing these extremely effective pyro / horse stunt shots was presumably a big deal for director Chu, and he seems determined to milk them for as much production value as he possibly can, throwing together what I imagine must have been every single piece of footage shot for these sequences and looping ‘The Ecstasy of Gold’ endlessly behind them, creating a slo-mo, cowboy blasting montage which goes on for so long it eventually blurs into complete abstraction, resembling some avant garde / psychedelic re-appropriation of violent western imagery – an impression only intensified by cutaways to close-ups of the warrior women, rocking their assorted early ‘80s fashion statements as they blast away at their attackers with rifles.

After all this, we’re left feeling thoroughly discombobulated as the surviving Commandos (yes, some of them have sadly copped it, but no spoilers here) finally reach their destination, which appears to be a system of caves. Here, after more close-quarters soldier slaughter and more weepy shit from Quicksilver as she finally serves her purpose by cracking the lock on the big, metal door, they infiltrate the “chemical plant”, where…. well… good grief. I think this is where I finally lost it.

Imagine if you will, a cornucopia of bubbling, mad scientist beakers and chemistry equipment, full of wildly coloured liquid, all lorded over by cackling, Nazi-uniformed Asian soldiers. Meanwhile, the room’s big, raised central panel spins around (a common motif in crazy, early’80s Taiwanese films, in my experience), revealing - for some goddamned reason - the guy who was in charge of the prison way back at the start of the movie!

He is enthroned, Blofeld-style, upon a red upholstered armchair, stroking a cat, and is attended by a hefty, Eunuch-like servant wearing a one-piece yellow bodysuit. (Those still determined to wring some real world context out of this nonsense may wish to note that there is kind of white-on-red crescent/bull horns motif going on here, whatever that might imply.)

“I beg of you please, you mustn’t destroy any of this, this is not evil, it is art and science, all those wonderful theories,” the Eunuch guy pleads with the Commandos. “With this, we can take man to a higher level of civilisation, where there is peace, no pain, a paradise beyond dreams,” adds the prison boss/warlord.

“That’s a load of horseshit if ever I heard any,” Black Cat immediately responds, before opening fire and machine-gunning everything to smithereens – which I for one couldn’t help thinking seemed at least a bit premature.

I mean, admittedly, the cackling Nazis and cat-stroking Bond villain are assuredly not good signs, but this man in the yellow seems fairly sincere, at least. And after all, we haven’t actually seen any proof that this outfit are up to no good, have we? Wouldn’t it make sense to wait around and ascertain whether or not they have actually made any discoveries vital to humanity’s future, before going for full-on obliteration?

Well, apparently not. Still determined to turn itself into a western by any means necessary, ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’ takes one last deep breath and goes for a kind of Bond movie-ish variation on the ‘Wild Bunch’ ending. Chaos! Blood! Screaming! Slaughter! Will anyone get out alive…?

To find out, you will simply have to commit ninety minutes to watching whatever ragged copy of ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’ the internet and/or grey market can provide you with. I’m confident you won’t regret it.

Resorting to a tired cooking metaphor (last refuge of the speechless movie reviewer), this film feels as if someone cleared out everything sweet or salty from the kitchen cupboard, mixed it all up in a bowl, and served it up raw for dinner. Crazy, indigestible and quite possibly dangerous to one’s continued well-being it may be… but it’s kind of irresistible too.

Filleting through errant genre tropes like an ADHD-afflicted kid trapped in a comic book archive, it finds Chu Yen-Ping dishing out happy, context free pulp adventure mayhem like the unhinged b-movie savant which for the moment I’m going to assume he is.

Justin Decloux, who compiled and annotated the aforementioned ‘Ninja Vortex’ set from which I sourced my copy of this film, informs us that ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’ is “…shockingly coherent for a Yen-Ping production”. Goddamn.

‘Pink Force Commandos’, with most of the same cast and crew, followed in ’83. Wish me luck, I’m going in.

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At the time of writing, a version of ‘Golden Queen’s Commando’ comparable to the one I watched (actually, I think it might be a bit more cropped around the edges, if yr feeling picky) can be enjoyed on Youtube here.

Annual Report: 2000AD / 1979AD (Part # 1)

Striking about for some relevant content to keep this most un-festive of blogs ticking over through the festive period, I found myself scanning the shelves for good scanning material, and was reminded that, back in the lead up to childhood Christmasses long-gone, there was little I enjoyed so much as an f-ing good annual.

Whilst I’m confident that the concept of an ‘annual’ will be familiar to those raised in the UK, I’m not really sure of the extent to which the tradition of such publications crossed over to other territories. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. I don’t know. But I don’t recall ever seeing an American annual, or a French one, or a Russian one, so as such, I will risk patronising a large section of my readership with a brief definition:

An annual is a magazine-sized hardback book, published in the last quarter of each year, containing a compendium of material related to a popular weekly comic, magazine, TV show or entertainment franchise, aimed specifically either at distant relatives seeking an affordable Christmas present for a child, or else a pre-Christmas sop for parents seeking to keep said children busy through the holidays. Due to their sturdy construction and fleeting cultural relevance, these volumes will inevitably spend the remainder of humanity’s tenure on earth periodically popping up in charity shops and provoking fits of nostalgia in those aforementioned children’s grown up selves – which is great.

As with the vast majority of content on this blog, I am too young to have appreciated the 1979 2000AD annual when it first appeared, and so, strictly speaking, I can’t term the feeling that overcame me when I received it as a gift from my darling wife last year as one of ‘nostalgia’, but nonetheless, the feeling of joy I experienced whilst flicking through its pages, observing this pivotal stage in the British comics revolution that I caught the tail end of a few years later, was palpable.

Unlike the concept of annuals, I’m sure that, for the vast majority of potential readers of this blog, 2000AD needs no introduction. (If it does, here’s a wiki link.)

2000AD was still finding its feet at this point, with the material herein presumably developed around eighteen months after the comic was launched in February ’77, and this annual finds the title at a pretty fascinating stage in its development, slowly transitioning from the more traditional ‘boys own’ war/adventure stuff from which it emerged toward the heady brew of dystopian, punk-spirited satire and pop-art infused risk-taking that would come to define in it through its ‘golden era’ in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.

If much of this annual’s content admittedly seems pretty shoddy and anachronistic in view of what came later, it at least goes about its business in a gutsy, intermittently imaginative, and, it must be said, extraordinarily violent fashion that clearly points the way toward the title’s ‘imperial’ phase. With (I suspect) an impressive cross-section of British comics talent working behind the scenes, even the most juvenile and old fashioned strips here convey a sense of vision and craftsmanship that leave the vast majority of their domestic competitors in the field of blood-thirsty ‘70s comics in the shade, making it easy to see why 2000AD so quickly came to dominate this particular corner of the market.

At this stage, the comic’s writers and artists remained anonymous, and so in general I’m not going to go out on a limb trying to identify anyone as we go through the following scans. I have my suspicions here and there, and I’m sure that more dedicated Brit-comics aficionados than I will be able to pick out many of the contributors in seconds, but to avoid potential mistakes and embarrassment, I’m going to keep quiet on the subject. If you happen to be one of those aforementioned aficionados, further info is welcomed in the comments below.

Anyway, after somewhat alarming contents spread featuring what appears to be a live action Tharg the Mighty, the first number here is a one-off, ‘The Biggest Game of All’ which runs through a particularly thuggish variation on the old ‘time travellers return to prehistory, change stuff, inadvertently erase humanity’ yarn, all concisely wrapped up in five pages.

Next up, the M.A.C.H. #1 strip, as featured from prog # 1 onwards but dropped at some point shortly after this I believe, is a thinly veiled rip off of the Six Million Dollar Man, with the titular protagonist here putting paid to a dirty commie attempt to infiltrate the world of ice hockey! (He’s ‘Man Activated by Compu-puncture Hyperpower’ by the way, in case you were wondering).

One of this annual’s best stand alone sci-fi shorts, ‘Food!’, is such a great example of quintessentially cynical 2000AD fun, I thought it best to scan it for you in its four page entirety. (Thanks to a signature sneaked in on the final frame, we can credit Brett Ewins for the artwork on this one.)

One of the more imaginative takes on standard action-adventure tropes in 2000AD’s ongoing series at this point came from war/time travel yarn ‘The Phantom Patrol’, as represented here via a weirdly compelling photo-realistic yet almost entirely background-less art style. Interestingly, the strip’s concept bears more than a passing resemblance to the wildly entertaining Sonny Chiba movie G.I. Samurai, which coincidentally was also released in 1979.

Believe it or not, we’re currently less than a third of the way through this annual (say what you like about Tharg’s editorial boasting, it’s hard to deny this thing is indeed a shoe-in for “the most hyper-powered annual [I’ve] ever seen”), so our trawl through the wonders within will hopefully continue in a few days, once I’ve had a chance to spend some more quality time sweating over the scanner.

In the meantime, we’ll finish with a couple of examples of the space-filling ‘factual’ features that inevitably serve to further bulk out any good annual.

In partiucular, I’d seek to draw your attention to the spectacularly sensationalist feature on the exploits of the Victorian clairvoyant Daniel Dunglas Home, in which a 2000AD staff writer’s attempts to tie historical events in with their own fictional universe are pretty audacious and actually very cool indeed if you ask me, in a sending-young-minds-off-on-an-inspiring-flight-of-fancy sort of way.

Nippon Horrors: The Great Yokai War / ‘Spook Warfare’ (Yoshiyuki Kuroda, 1968)

It would be interesting, I think, to know precisely when Japan’s legion of Yokai Monsters ceased to be a genuinely frightening presence in the nation’s mythology – boogeyman-esque nasties conjured up by parents to keep their children in line, or to put the wind up them on cold nights sitting around the kotatsu heater – and began to take on the slightly more… whimsical aspect generally assigned to them in post-war popular culture.

A definite turning point in this regard would seem to be emergence of legendary manga artist Shigeru Mizuki in the early 1960s, and in particular, the phenomenal popularity of his character Kitaro. A shaggy-haired, one-eyed ‘monster boy’ whose independently mobile second eye is, rather bizarrely, inhabited by the spirit of his late father, Kitaro represents an ambivalent but generally benevolent supernatural presence – a friend of the Yokai who often acts as a kind of intermediary between humanity and the monsters, using his powers either to punish human greed and egotism, or, more frequently, to combat more malevolent ‘outsider’ monsters who are feeding off the defenceless humans on his patch.

Earlier in his career, Mizuki had been advised by his editors that his interest in folkloric monsters was too ‘dark’ to be incorporated into a mainstream comic strip, and perhaps this is the reason why, with Kitaro, the artist took a more light-hearted approach to the material, tempering the macabre weirdness of his often extraordinary imaginings with a tone of gentle black humour, somewhat reminiscent of ‘The Addams Family’, presenting Kitaro’s Yokai pals as goofy, somewhat likeable creatures, and making sure that their adventures were always neatly wrapped up with minimal harm done to innocent human by-standers.

As such, there is always a certain conflict between humour and genuine nastiness running through Mizuki’s work, but regardless, he apparently worked this balance well enough to make ‘Kitaro’ a massive hit, pretty much single-handedly reigniting public interest in the culture surrounding the Yokai, and defining their subsequent presentation to such a degree that many Japanese still have trouble differentiating monsters with roots in folklore from those which Mizuki invented from scratch.

With the popularity of Mizuki’s Yokai tales increasing through the 1960s, happily coinciding with the post-Godzilla/Ultraman boom in Japanese monster action, it was perhaps only a matter of time before the spooks got their shot at live action, big screen glory, and thus we come to Daiei’s 1968 production ‘The Great Yokai War’ (released in the USA under the wonderful title ‘Spook Warfare’). Whilst the film is in no way a direct adaptation of Mizuki’s manga, the spirit of his work is very much in evidence in Yoshiyuki Kuroda’s extremely strange motion picture.

For foreign viewers coming to it cold, I can only imagine that ‘The Great Yokai War’ must seem like a colossal WTF from start to finish, and even to those familiar with the ways of the Yokai, it proves a pretty peculiar business. For one thing, you certainly know you’re in for something a bit different when a Japanese movie – a product of surely one of the most inward-looking and culturally specific film industries in the world - opens with a prologue set amid the ruins of ancient Babylon, where a pair of Islamic-looking treasure-hunters are busy defiling the sanctity of some sand-blasted tomb or other.

In doing so, a solemn voiceover informs us, they are about to unleash the spirit of the all-powerful demon who was single-handedly responsible for the downfall of Babylonian civilisation. And indeed, the voiceover doesn’t lie. Lightning blasts! Earthquake! Whirlwind! And as our unfortunate nomads are buried beneath falling debris, a singularly gnarly, winged reptilian man-in-suit monster takes flight! Good grief.

Next, we cut to a narratively pointless but absolutely delightful Ray Harryhausen-esque sequence in which the winged demon descends upon a sailing ship making its way across a storm-tossed sea – a mixture of nautical model shots, back-projected monster-suit action and screaming, piratical crew member close-ups that serves both to demonstrate the kind of ambition this film intends to throw into its special effects, and also to bring a tear of joy to the eye of anyone with even the slightest love of ‘60s monster movies.

We are never given any explanation as to why this being of pure evil should head straight for Japan after being awakened in the middle of the Mesopotamian desert, but nonetheless, that is what he does, hitting shore in a remote coastal district where a respected local magistrate and his daughter are enjoying a quiet fishing trip. (Oh, and this all takes place during the Edo period by the way, so it’s top-knots and kimonos all round - you’d have to wait for Takashi Miike’s 2005 remake of this film to see your favourite Yokai running amok in contemporary Tokyo.)

The demon’s primary MO is soon revealed to be a kind of vampiric body snatching / mind control type operation, as he corners the magistrate in a spooky, cobweb-enshrouded rural shack, disarming him using a mixture of smoke, lightning and magical laser blasts, and bloodily consumes his soul, taking on his likeness and setting out to further extend his hidden influence within the man’s household. Not that our Babylonian antagonist really does a great deal to hide his presence, as the previously mild-mannered patriarch returns home and immediately begins yelling unreasonable commands at his family and servants, slaying the pet dog and violently smashing and burning the assorted shrines and religious icons dotted around his homestead.

Watching the ensuing chaos from a pond in the house’s courtyard is a curious Kappa – one of Japan’s reptilian river monsters, here represented as a kind of lovable, proto-Howard the Duck sort of fellow. As a supernatural creature, the Kappa is able to see the demon in his ‘real’ form, and, suitably startled, bravely sets out to take this scary intruder down with some Kappa kung-fu, getting his ass kicked in short order.

 

Tail between his legs, the Kappa retreats to an eerie, abandoned cemetery - a wonderful set, looking like it could have been taken straight from one of Mizuki’s drawings, with cluttered, ruinous mise en scene, overgrown weeds and voluminous quantities of gel-lit, multi-coloured Yokai Smoke - and reports his experiences to the local assembly of Yokai.

Everybody’s favourites are represented here, from the stretchy-necked woman Rockuro-kubi to the weird, one-eyed bouncing umbrella creature Karakasa-kozō, and Futa-kuchi-onna, the self-explanatory ‘two-mouthed woman’. Their leader and spokesman is the big-headed, staff-wielding Abura-sumashi, his oversized cranium presumably acting as movie code for “big brains”.(1)

Whilst the Yokai are largely ambivalent about the fate of the local human populace, they are a pretty patriotic bunch it seems, and on hearing the Kappa’s tale, they express concern that the preeminent reputation of Japanese spooks will be tarnished if they let this foreign interloper rampage around unchecked, taking over people’s minds and tearing down the sacred symbols of national tradition. (Do you detect a metaphor in there somewhere, readers? If so, I’m just going to whistle and look the other way.)

So, reccy missions to the magistrate’s house are attempted and plans are hatched, whilst, inevitably, a parallel ‘human’ storyline also emerges, wherein the noble fiancée of the magistrate’s daughter figures out that there is some demonic business going on and sets out to consult his uncle, a venerable Buddhist monk of an evil-fighting persuasion, leading to a couple of rather intense sequences of Asian-style folk magic business that play out like a far less icky version of one of those ‘Black Magic’ type Shaw Bros horror movies.

As neither human nor supernatural counter-attacks appear to have much of an immediate impact on the growing power of the Babylonian interloper though, the Yokai start to put the word out to their brother and sister spooks around the country, gradually assembling a full scale spectral army, as preparations for the Great War of the title start to get underway, building up to one whopper of a mind-bending, monster-bashing climax.

Director Yoshiyuki Kuroda didn’t have a great deal of directorial experience when he went to work on this film, and prior to this assignment I think he was primarily known as an effects guy – a background which certainly makes sense when viewing ‘The Great Yokai War’, in which a rather uncertain tone and underdeveloped narrative is livened up through the application of great art direction and lashings and lashings of outlandish special effects.(2)

In writing about films like this one, I always feel the need to preemptively defend their visual effects against hordes of hypothetical naysayers, pointing out that, sure, ‘The Great Yokai War’s creature designs are neither high-tech nor very convincing… but if you’re watching a movie as crazy as this and expect it to be ‘convincing’, then god knows, I can’t help you. What the effects ARE here is simple, imaginative, a lot of fun to look at and basically just really weird-looking, which I think is basically all you can ask of a barmy ‘60s monster movie.

Although I casually mentioned Harryhausen earlier in this review, that comparison is of course highly misleading. In keeping with the majority of Japanese fantasy cinema from the ‘60s, stop-motion and other ‘in-camera’ means of realising monsters are almost entirely avoided here, with all of the creatures instead created ‘live-on-stage’ style, with full-head masks, life-size suits and the like predominating. As such, it’s clear that Yuroda’s budget and expertise in no way allowed him to replicate the kind of rubbery fantasias exploited by Toho and Tsuburaya in the same period, but watching this film’s crew strive to create extraordinary results from their obviously limited means certainly makes for an enjoyable and – there’s that word again - delightful experience.

Several of the most prominent characters for instance are lumbered with fixed-expression head masks that allow for little facial movement, which immediately gives a bit of a goofy, childish feel to proceedings, but if you honestly find yourself taking offence at the Kappa’s boggle-eyes or the Babylonian demon’s leery fixed-grin, you have a harder heart than I, especially given the kind of exuberant physical acting that both performers employ to make up for such shortcomings.

Beyond his high-school-art-class level mask, the Kappa is basically just a guy in green body-paint and what looks like a few bits of an old ‘jungle lad’/barbarian outfit, but it is the actor’s spirited and strangely elegant capering that really sells the character. A similar approach is taken with Abura-Sumashi, who is presumably just played by a child wearing a giant papier-mâché head, but again, the results are so pleasing that you’d be hard-pressed to find fault with such an arrangement.

Daimon – as the Babylonian demon is referred to in the subtitles and cast list – also has a *very* cool costume, immobile head aside, looking not dissimilar to the kind of creature that might have turned up in one of Daiei’s ‘Diamajin’ films (see footnote 2). Scaly and bony with a thick carapace, curly back-spikes, a belt of skulls and, strangely, feathered wings, he certainly makes for a formidable and scary bad guy.

The Karakasa-kozō meanwhile is represented by a life-size puppet bouncing around on strings – an utterly bizarre addition to any film – whilst Rockru-kubi’s stretchy necked attack is realised by means of a wild assemblage of flailing, flesh-coloured hosepipe, and the use of a lot of conveniently placed foreground objects for the actress to poke her head around. Nonetheless, she is a wonderfully sinister presence, and her one-on-one fight with Daimon is definitely one the film’s highlights, perhaps the overall peak of its “I can’t believe what I’m seeing here” awesomeness.

Well, prior to the conclusion, anyway. Here, as Daimon splits himself into a number of clones then grows to full scale kaiju proportions, the Yokai army close in to attack him, and the filmmakers decide to make best possible use of their twenty or so functional monster suits through extensive application of super-imposition, building up layer upon layer of shiny, transparent Yokai legions by the simple means of slapping loads of different shots on top of each other, to sublimely freakish, psychedelic effect. This ‘March of the Yokai’, shot in slow motion, with the spectral hordes traversing rivers, clouds and mountains, and their ensuing epic battle with Daimon, is one of the most extensive spectacles of mindbending fantastic cinema I’ve seen for many a month. (And as an aside, I like how many of the Yokai seem to tie handkerchiefs around their heads when they go to ‘war’, making them look a bit like desperate, battled-scarred fighters from a Kurosawa movie or something.)

As you may have gathered from some of the descriptions above, ‘The Great Yokai War’ features comical character designs and gentle slapstick humour that could have come straight from kid’s adventure movie, but frequently mixes them up with moments of unnervingly gruesome horror, leading to a tonal discrepancy that is never quite resolved. In addition to the demon’s gory neck-chomping antics and a few other bloody, gaping wounds, the atmosphere of the film is persistently ominous, and Shigeru Ikeno’s dissonant, Ifukube-esque music is often terrifying.

One sequence in particular, in which a pair of young children are forced to flee their home and take refuge in the ghost-infested cemetery as their parents are slaughtered by demon-possessed samurai, seems purpose-built to send unsuspecting little ones straight into a screaming vortex of no-sleep-for-a-month trauma, but apparently none of this stopped ‘The Great Yokai War’ from finding a home as a frequent holiday TV fixture in Japan, so who knows, maybe kids in the Far East are just made of sterner stuff?

With this mixture of kiddie-friendly creatures and genuine threat, ‘The Great Yokai War’ could perhaps be seen as a precursor to something like Joe Dante’s ‘Gremlins’. But whereas that film managed to merge the two impulses very smoothly, Kuroda is less successful, with the resulting stylistic confusion perhaps serving to make things a bit too weird and alienating for casual viewers. Whilst the appearance of the Yokai is clearly quite cutesy, with the exception of the Kappa they are never really anthromorphised very much, nor allowed to develop their own personalities. And whilst their refusal to really give much of a fuck about the fate of the humans in the film is pretty refreshing for those of us with an ingrained hatred of Disney/Hollywood schmaltz, the spooks’ failure to become “relatable” also leads to something of a character-vacuum at the centre of the movie, especially given the rather dry and unengaging nature of the accompanying human drama.

Really though, such confusion is probably to be expected when you realise that Kuroda and his collaborators were basically going way off the map here, with no established set of genre conventions to guide them: in addition to horror and kid’s fantasy, there’s a hefty dose of kaiju eiga DNA in the mix, to say nothing of some distant hints at kaidan ghost stories, and even a fair amount of chambara-style period drama. With all these generic tropes flying around but never quite coalescing into a coherent whole, it is probably best to view ‘The Great Yokai War’ as a complete one-off, and one whose drawbacks are very much the result of its untested and somewhat unique style.

And, more importantly of course, those drawbacks never even come close to outweighing the sheer pleasure that the film’s wildly ambitious visuals, macabre atmosphere and unhinged creature designs have to offer to anyone with a fondness for unusual international fantasy cinema. In fact, if your tastes veer more toward the exceptionally weird, lower budget and culturally specific end of the scale, you can peg this one up as a ‘must see’ for sure... but then if you've read this far, you probably don't need me to tell you that.

As with just about every character or concept that emerged from Japanese popular cinema during the ‘60s, it seems that one film just wasn’t enough for Daiei’s Yokai, and they soon returned for ‘One Hundred Yokai Stories’ (1968) and ‘Journey with Ghosts Along Tokaido Road’ (1969). I’d imagine my quest to find both of those in watchable, sub-titled form might be worthy of a series of films in its own right, but nonetheless, I hope I’ll be able to share my thoughts on them with you sooner or later.

For now though, let's all wave goodbye to these spectral defenders of Japan's supernatural sovereignty, as they dance eerily back across the misty mountains. They may be apt to scare the shit out of us in nocturnal graveyards from time to time, but they're a good bunch really... well, provided you've got your visa papers in order and aren't planning to eat anyone or make with the mind control, at least.

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(1)Many thanks to the indispensable Yokai.com for helping me get all those names straight – a wonderful resource, and a great way to waste a few idle hours at work.

(2) Kuroda’s main claim to fame prior to this film was as effects supervisor on Daiei’s series of ‘Daimajin’ movies, of which three were made in 1966. A similarly off-beat kind of period kaiju / Shinto mythological(?) type creation that perhaps represents the nearest relative to what we see in ‘The Great Yokai War’ and its sequels, you can learn more about ‘Daimajin’ via this informative post at Cool Ass Cinema.