Kyûketsu dokuro-sen

The Living Skeleton (1968) is a Japanese horror film that I recently watched on a random streaming service. The storyline follows a young lady who moves to a town that is haunted. As she researches the events she discovers the tale of a ship that was sunk by local pirates.

This movie is directed by Hiroki Matsuno (Sword: Flower-Strewn Path of Courage) and stars Asao Koike (Throne of Blood), Nobuo Kaneko (Ikiru), Kô Nishimura (Yojimbo) and Kikko Matsuoka (Black Lizard).

Watching this there's a good chance John Carpenter got a lot of ideas for The Fog from this movie. This movie is made pretty clever with some fantastic cinematography and some fun underwater scenes, especially the skeletons. The skeletons looked like sugar skulls. The bats in this reminded me of a Vincent Price movie and the corpses are well created. Kikko Matsuoka delivers a strong performance as the main character and the last 15 is entertaining.

Overall this is a worthwhile addition to the horror genre and a fun watch for fans who enjoyed The Fog. I would score this a solid 6.5-7/10 and recommend seeing it once.

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.

Made a decade before Carpenter's "The Fog", this is clearly that film's inspiration, and what glorious pulp horror it is.

A scar-faced pirate and his cronies gun down a dozen men and several stunningly beautiful women. One woman grips the trouser leg of her killer as she dies, triggering a series of events that will see watery vengeance visited on the miscreants.

This has a mysterious fog surrounding a quiet coastal town, a haunted ship of the dead, a local priest who carries a terrible secret and a ghostly, beautiful woman whose appearances strike fear into the hearts of evil men.

It is made with incredible affection for its subject matter and total sincerity. Not once does it wink at its audience or betray its genre origins. No, it is proud to be a pulp horror film.

Some of the special effects are not exactly believable, but these are part of the key to the film's charm. There is some model work of a ship crossing the ocean shot through clouds that is both incredibly artificial and incredibly beautiful. The "living skeletons" themselves, though not expertly incorporated into the central narrative, are beautiful.

Highly recommended for true lovers of fantastique films.

This low-budget horror movie very much benefits from the typically excellent craftsmanship expended even on such low-end efforts by major studios in Japan at the time. I can't concur with others that it reminded me at all of "The Fog," apart from liekwise involving ghostly vengeance for death at sea. The script is a bit confused, particularly once we get towards the end, when in addition to the supernatural element it turns out there's a sort of mad-scientist thing going on--making for a narrative agenda rather sillier and more overloaded than this movie can pull off.

Still, that doesn't matter so much, because the atmospherics are very effective in their widescreen B&W handsomeness, despite the fairly cheap FX. (Particularly the kind of tank miniatures more familiar from Godzilla-type films, with "stormy seas" clearly not much more than bathtub splashing in slo-mo.) The performances are decent enough, and while the story isn't terribly scary, there's a nice mood of creeping dread--you can almost feel the ocean air permeating inland, bringing ghosts and violent death with it.

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.