Ooe-yama Shuten-dôji

The Demon of Mt OE (1960) is a movie that I recently watched on a random streaming service. The storyline follows a village in the mountains plagued by a shape shifting demon that turns into various animals and creatures. A team of samurai work together to try and save the local villagers from the demon.

This movie is directed by Tokuzô Tanaka (Zatoichi the Fugitive) and stars Kazuo Hasegawa (Gate of Hell), Raizô Ichikawa (Ninja, a Bad of Assassins), Kôjirô Hongô (Satan's Sword), Ryûzô Shimada (The Tale of Zatoichi) and Jun Tazaki (Ran).

This is a fun Japanese samurai horror movie. The settings and samurai fights are excellent. The mountain backdrops are beautiful and the fight scenes have a nice array of swords, spears and axes choreography. The horror elements are dated and the papier-mâché animals/creatures made me laugh. The flying heads were awesome and Tanaka did a great job using lighting and shadows to create intensity. The storyline is pretty straightforward but the fight and action scenes are entertaining and carry the movie.

Overall, this is a fun Japanese samurai/horror mashup that's worth watching once. I'd score this a 6/10 and recommend it if you're looking for something different.

In his third film, reliable period film director Tanaka Tokuzo gets a budget to work with, granting him not only great color cinematography and competent visual effects, but also three major jidai-geki stars: Haseagawa, Ichikawa AND Katsu. The film is fairly confident that this alone is enough to win the audience to its side.

I recently watched Tanaka's later Kaidan yukijorô (The Snow Woman, 1968), which is the best film I have seen from him to date. Like The Snow Woman, The Demon of Mount Oe is a supernatural tale set in distant centuries. However, the narrative here is more broad and everything is massive. The supernatural elements of the story are interesting enough, but the story doesn't really develop a flow, making this film feel super slow and stand-still.

The narrative has Ichikawa and Katsu fighting against a shape-shifting demon, played by Hasegawa. Though there is romance, action and a bit of horror, this folk tale never chooses an overall tone, which again makes it feel more tedious. There is potential in the scenario just like in the visual effects and the all-star cast, but the film would have needed a more determined visionary to helm it. Paradoxically, it's unlikely that Daiei would have financed the film, had it featured a director capable of turning the material into a lasting masterpiece.

Forces loyal to the Mikado are under assault from an army assembled by a demon who lives atop Mount Oe. There is chaos in the streets of the capital, and loyal samurai Shintarô Katsu has been attacked by the demon and cut off its arm.... only for it to show up inthe guise of his aunt and take it back. Three women seem to be key to the demon's downfall: Katsu's sister, who insists on spying on the demon herself, a disgraced woman passed around like a bottle of wine, and the women who is the demon.

At first I thought this was going to be another fantasy with swordplay, special effects that called attention to themselves and suitable for children. Well, the special effects were there: the clumsy camera halts for teleportation or the transformation of giant spiders into dead men, and rolls of streamers to turn into webs. It certainly had those, but it also had a fairly complicated plot as good guys struggled to remain good despite the worst their allies could do, and some lovely camerawork under the supervision of cinematographer Hiroshi Imai. I was particularly taken with his graceful, panning group shots, even if the mountain sites seemed to be set in abandoned quarries, like DOCTOR WHO. While the cheap special effects may put off the high-browed, it's a well written, directed and shot samurai movie.

It's good to see Shintaro Katsu prior to starring as the inimitable Zatoichi. Unfortunately the characters in "The Demon Of Mount Oe" fall a little flat, like damp cardboard cutouts waiting to be folded up and stored away in a shed, never to be seen or heard from again. Nothing wrong with the acting though, the entire cast give solid perdormances and did the best they could with the perfuntorily sketched characters. The film itself is just ok, in my opinion. The story is fine but the sfx are quite dated and the sequencing feels a little ponderous. Like the editor just did minimal work as if in protest that he wasn't getting paid enough.

Good and entertaining samurai and demon movie. This is more based on a supernatural concept than samurai, so this may not be the treat for people that want a samurai movie. On the other hand you are not seeing so much to the demons either.

I liked it and it is fairly good acting and an okay story. But be aware it is not a full blown samurai or demon movie.