Kyûketsu dokuro-sen

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 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.

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.