O Esqueleto Vivo

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 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.

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.

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.

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.