Kyûketsu dokuro-sen

In "Living Skeleton"'s surprisingly brutal opening scenes, we see a group of modern-day pirates indiscriminately massacring a bunch of passengers with machine gun fire - among them a beautiful, Western-looking Japanese woman.

Then a title tells us we've jumped ahead a few years, and that woman's identical twin is now spending time among a shadowy Catholic priest.

Some people go scuba diving where they find, in one of the movie's more memorable moments, skeletons chained to the ocean floor, presumably of the people who died in the beginning of the movie.

The boat the pirates commandeered apparently sunk, but nevertheless seems to return to the shore, and the twin boards it, and some other stuff happens involving unconvincing flying bats.

With the film's beginning, its moody black and white cinematography, and the glowering, impassive actors, I thought the stage was set for a disturbing arthouse Japanese flick like "Sword of Doom" or "Woman in the Dunes".

However, by the end, which involves a mad scientist in a laboratory with lots of opportunities for gruesome deaths, some of which of course involve acid which burns people up quicker than lava might, I began thinking it's more in line with a Jess Franco flick from about the same time. Kikko Matsuoka, who plays the main character, does look a bit like Soledad Miranda.

Problem with this movie was, I had no idea how it got from moody impressionism to full on camp blood-bath. It's pretty confusing, which wouldn't matter so much if the tone was even. It wasn't.

A gang of pirates commandeer a ship and kill everyone on board. Three years later in a seaside village, a Catholic priest (Masumi Okada) has offered shelter to Saeko (Kikko Matsuoka) as her twin sister, Yoriko (also Matsuoka) has disappeared with her new husband at sea.

Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon referred to the Criterion Collection's eclipse set, calling the film "the most accomplished and sophisticated of the quartet in terms of its visual structure and narrative" and along with 'Genocide', "easily the most interesting entries".

Indeed, the use of shadows and tints reminds me of some of Jacques Tourneur's best work, and accompanied by the music which seems quite atypical of Japanese film, this stands out as quite a one-of-a-kind film. Definitely a must-see, and it was wise of Criterion to single it out for wider inspection.

This is not a bad ghost story, though some better editing and a couple of transitional scenes would have helped the viewer a bit. A group of vicious modern pirates board a ship carrying millions of dollars in gold. They aren't satisfied just pillaging; they kill everyone on board in a cold-blooded slaughter. We now go forward three years to a young woman whose twin sister was on that ship. She has that weird connection that twins sometimes do, feeling the terror her sister felt. One night she sees the ship (even though it had been sunk) and boards it. She sees the ghost of her sister and learns the story of the massacre. She is no bent on destroying the guys who were responsible. The rest of the movie involves her gaining revenge. She lives with a priest who took her in when her parents died. Anyway, it is kind of satisfying. There are some elements at the end that just don't work very well, involving a horrible acid that was invented by the doctor on the ship. It's an interesting effort, better than most of its ilk.

Being the only film directed by Hiroshi Matsuno, The Living Skeleton has often been described as the love child of David Lynch's Twin Peaks and John Carpenter's The Fog. An atmospheric tale of revenge from beyond the watery grave, mixing elements of ghost stories, doppelgänger thrillers and mad-scientist flicks, married only by its unconventional direction, editing and beautiful black-and-white photography. From Matsuno's direction to Noburo Nishiyama's Morricone-esque music, it's an engagingly haunting, wild and eerie work, interspersed with bouts of violence and grim murder, all led by Kikko Matsuoka's incredible performance. Representing the peak of Shochiku's dalliance with horror convention, The Living Skeleton is a chilling and genuinely unnerving black-and-white update of the bygone Kaidan tradition.

The title of "The Living Skeleton" is actually misleading,because there isn't living skeleton in the film.However the underwater sequence of meeting skeletons is truly unforgettable.The film opens with bang:there is a massacre on board of a ship which predates recent US hit "Ghost Ship".There are striking similarities between Hiroshi Matsuno's film and John Carpenter's famous horror hit "The Fog":a quiet coastal village surrounded by the fog,a local priest with a creepy secret and a ghostly ship with bleached skeletons on board,which haunts villagers on the land.There is also a bit of subtle necrophilia thrown in and a female ghost with long black hair."The Living Skeleton" written by Kyuzo Kobayashi of "Goke Bodysnatcher from Hell" fame surely is delirious experience.It's a crying shame that it's currently out of print.If you liked it be sure to check out obscure Austrian horror film "Dark Echo" from 1977,which may also inspired "The Fog".