Kyûketsu dokuro-sen

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.

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".

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.

Mostly of the reviewers posted here that movie was an inspiration to Carpenter's The Fog, I would go beyond including the picture Alvin Rakoff's Death Ship released in 1980 starring by George Kennedy and Richard Crenna, approaching the same premise as The Fog too, this one a low budge Japanese presentation with old fashionable special effects and ghost ship miniature clearly noticed.

The plot is about a Ship called Dragon King that carries a huge cargo of gold from Japan to China, but during the journey five crew members settle a mutiny killing the captain, cabin crew and the whole passengers, letting alive just a young girl, which his husband was a Ship's doctor, she was raped and killed by them afterwards as well, this girl actually is twin of a girl who lives under the protection of a priest on a catholic church in Japanese spot shore,

Three years later strangest things begin to happen, those five criminals that stolen the gold one by one are being killed by countless ways, always a female ghost appears on those place whereby the murders took place and whenever it happened the ghost ship suddenly appears on the fog nearby,

However just two members still alive weren't recognized the female ghost, the first one is owner of a nightclub and the unknown is uncovered by him, thus instead to wanting for the unavoidable death, they decide be back at dead ship to clarify the mystery.

Docked in fine black & white photography that underpins the creepy atmosphere to such an extent that further strengthens the picture, it explains how it stablished a patten to western filmmakers!!

Thanks for reading.

Resume: First watch: 2022 / Source: DVD / How many: 1 / Rating: 7.5.