THE INVASIAN: A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse (1975)

Yukino (Naomi Tani) is stuck working in a bathhouse (AKA brothel) because of her utterly worthless and downright evil husband Toriyama (Kôji Fujiyama). Things only get worse when her younger sister Mayumi (Misa Ohara) shows up to live with the couple and even worser than that, Yukino reveals to her dirtbag hubbie that she is pregnant. Toriyama decides that it’s easier to just kill his wife and wall her up in the cellar than it is to not be a garbage person. Now that he’s free to run the bathhouse, he thinks he’s got it made. Luckily, Yukino’s ghost comes back and wrecks shit.

Leave it to Toei Company to make a film that is as fun to watch as it is miserable to sit through. Their knack at combining a hyper-stylized feast for the eyes with depressing subject matter into the same film is actually pretty amazing. The eye-popping supernatural (and very bloody) shenanigans and bawdy comedy are welcome breaks from the rape and torture Yukino and Mayumi go through. They dare to dream beyond a life of sex work and the shitty male-dominated society they find themselves in bends over backwards to keep them in their place. Ugh, I need a drink.

While he’s normally credited as a producer, Hiroshi Babauchi composed some wild music for this film with some crazy synthesizer freakouts paired with jazzy drums. So yeah, my eyes and ears are happy, but my mind is not. A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse (1975) is a rough beauty. Sort of, kind of recommended, I guess. While the fiery finale of this film gave me some Suspiria (1977) vibes, I still prefer director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi’s less rapey trash classic Wolf Guy, released the same year.

The INVASIAN: The Gambling Ghost (1991)

Down on his luck gambling addict, Fatty (Sammo Kam-Bo Hung), gets entangled in a dangerous web of gangsters and thieves when the ghost of his grandfather asks him to get revenge against the descendant of his murderer. The Gambling Ghost has lots of laughs and plenty of action. My favorite scene is when Fatty pretends to be a ghost to skip out of paying cab fare. Hoi Mang of Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) is excellent as Fatty's sidekick.

Sadly, everything falls apart for me during one of the big climactic fight scenes when a megaton racist bomb goes off. While fighting Robert Samuels, Sammo Hung's character makes some hideous comment about his hair and his skin, and it really made my heart sink. It's a shame too because this movie is a lot of fun, but I just feel bad for Samuels who put up with it and I'm ashamed at the filmmakers who thought it was a good idea. So yeah, fuck this movie.

THE INVASIAN: Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007)

 

The urban legend of a murderous ghost woman with a huge, horrible slash across her mouth and who wields a comedically large pair of scissors turns out to be true! This terrifying monster has been kidnapping children, but what is her motivation? If I’m going to be a villain in a horror movie, then I want a freakin’ earthquake to announce my presence to my victims like this lady. And that face! Who doesn’t love that face that gets burned into your mind when they finally show it?

Director and Jack-of-all-trades Kôji Shiraishi has been consistently churning out horror movies for years with Noroi: The Curse (2005) being his best work that I’ve seen. I love how he and screenwriter Naoyuki Yokota added depth to an already frightening, but one note urban legend. Even if the film’s plot elements of child abuse and child endangerment are difficult pills (or pairs of scissors) to swallow, they feel like they’re coming from a real place. While The Slit-Mouthed Woman is very unsettling, it’s more grim and depressing than scary. It’s definitely worth a watch, but be prepared to be bummed out afterwards.

THE INVASIAN: A Time Slip of 10000 Years: Prime Rose (1983)

  

Two huge pieces of land just disappear from both the United States and Japan. An alien who looks like Spock has transported the people living there 10,000 years into the future and is forcing them into slave labor. Now it’s up to the sword-swingin’ Emiya to rescue them! Is she up to this task? Not quite, but don’t worry. Once she gets her rigorous training from a master swordsman, she’s good to go. Also, there’s a dragon. I think.

Even though I just watched this, I really had to struggle just now to remember what it was about. Fan service, relentless plot silliness, lots of action, and an annoying sidekick make Prime Rose kinda fun. This film overstays its welcome for about 10 minutes or so, but it gives me that wistful false memory nostalgia I crave. If I had seen this back in the 90s when all that was available was bottom of the barrel crap at Blockbuster Video, I would most certainly have had a very warm space in my heart for it.

“Crud! Is this the end?”

In my continuing efforts to dig deep and mine more and more 1980s anime, I stumbled upon this minor gem -okay, gem might be too strong of a word- that I had never heard of. Prime Rose comes from Satoshi Dezaki, director of Grey Digital Target (1986) and a couple of the Urusei Yatsura feature films. This one was adapted from manga legend Osamu Tezuka’s 1982 story. The animation was handled by Magic Bus anime studio which has too many credits to even get into. Let’s just say you’ve very likely seen some of their work at some point.

THE INVASIAN: Limited Express (Has Gone?) - The Sound of Silence

One of my favorite bands to ever come out of Japan is Limited Express (Has Gone?). Since 1998, they have been churning out consistently great stuff. In December of 2020, they quietly put out their new mini-album called The Sound of Silence. Okay, it wasn’t done quietly at all. They released a brilliant 25-minute live concert event where they played the entire EP in a tricked-out art gallery while a cameraman ran around trying to keep up with the action. You can tell the band put A LOT of work into rehearsing for this performance and I find it impossible not to get swept up in the show. But wait, what the heck does this band even sound like? Well, I suppose the music they play is punk rock but the songs are just so spastic and odd that I don’t quite know how to describe it. There’s lot of screaming, a blaring saxophone, brilliant guitar playing, and a pummeling rhythm section that rarely lets up. Limited Express (Has Gone?) are just the right amount of relentless energy and quirky originality that I crave.

THE INVASIAN: Wolf Guy (1975)

 

Who is Akira Inugami (Sonny Chiba)? Is he a private detective? Is he a deadly coin-thrower? Is he the last descendant of a race of vaguely wolf-like people? The answer to these questions is yes, definitely mostly kind of yes. Akira gets dragged into a bizarre case where men are being slashed to bits by an invisible assailant. His only lead is Miki (Etsuko Nami), a nightclub singer who was raped by a gang of dudes who gave her syphilis. One by one, her rapists are being mangled to death by what can only be described as a psychic tiger. This case leads Akira down a dangerous path when a group of scientists capture him and Miki, looking to exploit them for their unusual gifts. He escapes -How does he do it? Let’s just say that it takes guts!- and flees to the countryside to visit what’s left of his village. But where Wolf Guy goes, trouble always follows.

Where the hell did this come from? Oh duh! Wolf Guy is straight from the heady miasma of Toei’s disturbingly prolific production output of the mid-1970s. Sonny Chiba made 6 films and a TV series in 1975 and I’ll be damned if this isn’t the strangest. He’s absolutely not wasted here and he dominates the screen -as usual- while bringing this unusual character to life. Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi certainly knew how to get the most out of his star especially since they collaborated several times before and after Wolf Guy. Etsuko Nami manages to wrangle some well-deserved screentime away from Chiba with her hypnotic performance as Miki, a woman whose life was destroyed by sexual violence and who is now spiraling out of control.

What really stands out in Wolf Guy is the score by composer- well, I don’t have a clue who did this gorgeous combination of fuzz guitar-laden funk and atmospheric synthesizer. According to IMDB, cinematographer Yoshio Nakajima shot 36 films in 14 years and certainly gives the viewers of Wolf Guy a lot of vibrant colors and kinetic madness to drool over. I have to wonder if screenwriter Kazumasa Hirai -and creator of the character Akira Kazumasa- was happy with the final product onscreen here. Toei producer Toru Yoshida hints in an interview in this release that he was not. But screw that! Wolf Guy is a howling good time!

While I’ve never read the source material, Wolf Guy captures the wild, anything goes spirit of manga itself and is a helluva good watch for Japanese cult film aficionados. This forgotten oddity will certainly be a title I reach for when I want to confuse guests on a Saturday night. The really extreme exploitation elements, a very brief rape sequence and some real surgery footage, are never cranked up to levels that make for uncomfortable viewing. And the superb pacing of this film is such that I didn’t want the film to be over once the credits started rolling. I can’t wait to watch Wolf Guy again!