Blood Island Journal # 1: Terror is a Man (Gerardo de Leon & Eddie Romero, 1959)

 One of the ideas that has long been on my list of “things to do” on this blog is to start a series writing about what I tend to mentally categorise as “East Meets West” genre cinema. By this, I mean the seemingly endless number of movies that resulted from filmmakers with an eye toward the American (or occasionally European) grindhouse/drive-in circuit suddenly deciding to take advantage of the possibilities offered by East Asian culture, shooting locations or personnel – with wildly varied results, needless to say, although these productions can usually be loosely united by the fact that they’re almost always uproariously entertaining.

Naturally, the vast majority of this globe-trotting activity took place in the aftermath of Bruce Lee’s breakout success in the early 1970s and the subsequent explosion of interest in martial arts, but the foundations of the trend were actually in place long before that, and Ground Zero, of course, was The Philippines.

Now, I’m not sufficiently schooled in the history to Filipino cinema to really go into any detail about how the nation’s nascent commercial film industry was kick-started by the influx of American culture and equipment that followed in the wake of the Korean War in (and, subsequently, by the Marcos regime’s enthusiastic encouragement of international co-productions), but I DO know that the earliest film I’ve seen that fits this “East Meets West” category is ‘Terror is a Man’, an ambitious and well-realised 1959 horror film directed and produced by Filipino nationals Gerardo de Leon and Eddie Romero.

Although ‘Terror is a Man’ was technically a 100% Filipino production, the audience that Romero and de Leon were aiming their film at is as clear as the Pan Am baggage ticket that presumably took their film canisters across the Pacific. Shot in English with a Caucasian central cast, the film purports to be set on an island “…one thousand miles off the coast of Peru”, and relegates Filipino performers exclusively to servant / villager roles. In just about every respect in fact, it follows the pattern set by American b-horror films of the ‘40s and ‘50s to a tee.

The big surprise here however is that ‘Terror is a Man’ is actually a really good faux-American b-movie, drawing as much from the storied Lewton / Tourneur legacy is it does from the kind of lurid creature features that it was destined to share bills with in middle-American drive-ins.

On the face of it of course, there is no reason why we should be surprised at the film’s quality. Operating outside of anyone’s stereotypical assumptions about ‘third world’ movie making, Romero and de Leon both seem to have been cosmopolitan, internationally-minded gentlemen who had been working as film industry professionals for many years before they embarked on their first horror film.What makes ‘Terror..’ surprising in retrospect rather is the knowledge that, during the decade that followed, the two men returned to the fray with a fistful of the most shamelessly stupid, cheeseball trash-horror films that the late 1960s had to offer, produced on-spec at the behest of haemoglobin-fixated New York-based distributors Hemisphere Pictures.

Hopefully we’ll  return to those little wonders at some point in the future, but when it comes to trying to account for the drastic change of approach that separates them from this relatively sombre and seriously intended first foray into the genre, perhaps we’re best to simply conclude that ‘Terror is a Man’ taught our dynamic duo an important lesson re: subtlety rarely paying anyone’s bills at this level of the industry. (“Bring your own tranquilisers!” thundered the posters when Hemisphere belatedly re-released the film as ‘Blood Creature’ in 1965.)

Essentially operating as a minimalist rewrite of ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ - perhaps with a touch of Hammer’s ‘The Curse of Frankenstein’ thrown in for good measure - ‘Terror is a Man’ essentially concerns the travails of Bill Fitzgerald (Richard Derr), a shipwrecked American sailor who finds himself washed up upon the troubled shores of the aforementioned island.

Bill awakens to find himself recuperating in the home of one Dr Charles Girard (Francis Lederer), formerly a successful family doctor in New York, who has relocated to this unsurpassably remote locale along with his unfeasibly glamorous young wife Frances (Greta Thyssen), in order (of course) to obtain the privacy he needs to pursue his own private research. (Sure, whatever ya say, doc – I’ll just get the chains and tranquilizer darts ready in advance, shall I?)

It seems that Bill has arrived on the island at an inopportune moment. Moments after he has regained consciousness, the Doctor’s surly assistant Walter (Oscar Keesee) appears to announce that some ill-defined “animal” has escaped “again” from the doctor’s laboratory, prompting the island’s small native population to finally call it a day and bugger off for pastures new in their fishing boats. Only the two young orphans who serve as the Doctor’s loyal servants have chosen to remain, reducing the island’s human population to a slim six, with a rickety wooden dinghy constituting the only way off it.

Recuperating with admirable speed, our hero takes these unpromising developments in his stride. Finding Girard and Walter desperately digging a series of vast pit traps and baiting them with raw meat, he begins cheerfully bantering with them about what kind of critter they’re lookin’ to catch, failing to take the hint even when they continue to evade his questions through the strained, formal dinner that follows that evening. Meanwhile, the rain pours down, storm winds shake the shutters and, out in the distant undergrowth, the “animal” howls with disquieting desperation.

All of which may sound like business as usual for an island-set monster movie, but ‘Terror is a Man’s consummate execution nonetheless places it significantly above the norm for this kind of material.

For one thing, the film is flawlessly atmospheric, as Emmanuel I. Rojas’s classically brooding black & white photography - incorporating some surprisingly elaborate camera movement and looming shadows all over the joint - combines with the authentically primeval tropical locations to create a palpable sense of isolation. If I tell you that the directors’ pacing is ‘deliberate’ meanwhile, that’s not merely a synonym for ‘boring’. On the contrary, the movie ebbs and flows with a distinct rhythm that makes for a highly engaging slow-burn.

For another thing, the film takes a pleasantly off-beat approach to characterisation relative to the cardboard cut-out stuff common to movies like this, aided by a set of performances that, if not exactly Oscar-worthy, are at least pretty solid. I liked the way for instance that Bill is initially far cheerier and less immediately judgemental about all the sinister goings on than macho heroes generally tend to be, and Lederer for his part is actually pretty great in the role of the Doctor. (If you recognise him, b-movie fans, it might be for playing the title role in 1958’s ‘The Return of Dracula’.)

Though Dr Girard is shifty and secretive to a fault to begin with, the scene in which he is eventually forced to come clean about the nature of his experiments actually becomes one of the film’s highlights. After showing Bill a notebook full of (rather cool) sketches of idealised human/animal hybrids, the doctor seems surprised when, rather than greeting these revelations with outraged disgust, Bill expresses a tentative interest in the ideas behind his work. Sensing that he might finally have found a friend, the doc immediately changes his tune, happily inviting the crude sailor down to his previously verboten basement to take a look around and see what he thinks. In terms of mad scientist etiquette, it’s really quite sweet.

Poor Frances too gets a bit more to chew on than the token dames generally do in these things, especially when her character directly addresses the inevitable question of why a beautiful blonde always seems to end up hanging around in these inhospitable locales. Concisely explaining her circumstances to Bill, she asks - what trainee nurse wouldn’t jump at the chance to marry a handsome and wealthy doctor and move to a tropical island? Be careful what you wish for, etc.

Even the servants – a teenage brother and sister whose mother, it later transpires, was killed by the monster – are fairly likeable (the filmmakers are considerate enough to credit them with a certain amount of charm and intelligence), but really, what most people will take away from this film is the memory of that monster itself.

Essentially representing a panther that has, through hundreds of hours of gruelling exploratory surgery, been transformed into the shape of a man, this ghastly, hate and fear-driven shambler, with feline fangs jutting from its jaw and wild patches of fur bursting from its mummy-like bandages, lies somewhere between Christopher Lee’s creature in ‘Curse..’ and the hideous cellar-dweller in Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak on the fear vs sympathy scale.

Though ‘Terror is a Man’ may be subtle in some regards, the vividness with which de Leon and Romero depict the cruelty and torment suffered by this unlikely creature falls way outside the Lewton ballpark. Though there is little explicit gore, the ‘feel’ of the material probably rivals anything that had been done in the horror genre to this point for sheer nastiness.

I mean, at least Dr Moreau’s creations got to roam around in relative freedom, establishing a community and interacting with each other. This poor bastard by contrast has spent its entire waking existence in the House of Pain, leaving it crazed by the constant torment, even before the brutish Walter, resentful of the doctor’s fixation with the creature, begins delivering sadistic beatings to it, in a series of scenes more gruellingly upsetting than anything your correspondent has ever seen in a 50s / 60s monster movie.

Who can blame the misbegotten thing for going on the rampage? Certainly not I, given how comprehensively its suffering casts a pall over the ‘action’ that takes place in the second half of this curiously compelling, thoroughly down-beat attempt by two Far Eastern filmmakers to carve out a space for themselves in the Great American Grindhouse.

Posters sourced via Wrong Side of the Art.

October Horrors #6: Santo in the Wax Museum (Alfonso Corona Blake & Manuel San Fernando, 1963)

Ah, El Santo! Despite my occasional fondness for Mexican luchadore movies, it occurs to me that I’ve never actually written about any of them on this blog, so, ‘Santo en el Museo de Cera’ from 1963 should prove a pretty good place to start, right?

Well… as it turns out, I actually found the first half of this one a bit of a chore, sad to say. The Wax Museum Owner Guy – Dr Karol, played by Buñuel regular Claudio Brook - is initially more of a self-regarding blowhard than a scenery-chewing villain, banging on endlessly about how unfair it is that the police dare question a man of his stature about the assorted murders that have taken place in the vicinity of his establishment. He even goes so far as to recruit Santo to try to prove his innocence by “catching the real killer”, or somesuch. (I know this is relatively early in his crime-fighting career, but shouldn’t ‘El Enmascarada de Plata’ be dedicating his time to something a little more socially improving than clearing the name of some entitled asshole? Or punching some mummies, at the very least?)

Moreover, the wax museum itself seems like a bit of a shoddy affair too. Despite its owner’s grandiose claims, it is neither as grotesque nor as atmospheric as one might have hoped of a wax museum in a ‘60s Mexican b-movie. Furthermore, there is precious little action to be found between all the overly respectful yakking in the first 45 minutes here, unless of course you count the several lengthy wrestling sequences.  

[I’ll readily admit that these are never a big selling point for me, beyond marvelling at all the flagrantly illegal moves that seem to have been allowed down in old Mexico. I don’t think that Greco-Roman purist chap from Dassin’s ‘Night And The City’ would have approved.]

But, this being a Santo movie, there are of course also some welcome eccentricities to enjoy along the way – not least the fact that Santo and his Important Scientist Friend apparently share an innovative piece of technology that allows them to “tune into” each other via giant TV sets in their respective laboratories, giving them a view of what the other is doing at any time of the day or night, even when they are nowhere near any kind of camera or receiving device.

Leaving aside its obvious technical implausibility, you’d think this arrangement might raise some questions about the nature of the relationship between Santo and his Important Scientist Friend, especially given that, to my knowledge, ISF appeared in no other Santo movies and is promptly killed off in this one, but… I’m sure we have better thing to do here than get bogged down in snarky over-think, so let’s just accept it and move on.

As Todd Stadtman observed when reviewing this film on his old Lucha Diaries site, poor old Santo actually cuts a rather lonely figure in this movie, and, aside from his televised chats with Scientist Friend, his life seems to revolve entirely around wrestling engagements, investigating crimes, and knocking about forlornly in his conspicuously empty and heavily shadowed lab. (No high-flying associates or glamorous lady-friends for our hero here.)

At this comparatively early stage in his movie career in fact, Santo’s parallel roles as wrestler and superhero don’t really seem as neatly integrated as they would later become, and, at several points in ‘..Museo de Cera’, he – adorably - says things like “I have some important new evidence that may reveal the identity of the killer, but, I have to go and wrestle now – I’ll tell you in the morning.”

Also of note here are the Wax Museum Guy’s hired goons, who command a great deal of screen-time, and perhaps justifiably so, as they are rare paragons of their much-maligned profession. Not only do the two turtleneck-clad heavies carry out their boss’s commands with remarkable efficiency and determination, they even manage to best mighty El Santo in hand-to-hand combat, stabbing him and leaving him for dead after a lengthy outdoor slugging match. Of course, he gets better, because he is Santo, but still – whatever Dr Karol was paying these two, it wasn’t enough.

They get their just desserts though of course, with one of the two getting dunked in a huge feeding trough of molten wax during a confrontation in Dr Karol’s secret underground lair – a welcome addition to the film’s final act that more than makes up for the longueurs earlier in the picture via the tried-and-tested means of going absolutely bananas.

Though the museum’s living mutant monsters may be a bit of an after-thought, they do become a little more interesting when we realise that – somehow or other – Dr Karol seems to be in the business of creating ‘Island of Dr. Moreau’ styled animal-men (he even gets a whip out at one stage to keep them under control, ala Charles Laughton in ‘Island of Lost Souls’).

None of this is really explored in much detail, but it certainly adds to the fun to have it all kicking off when Santo (finally) busts in on a nocturnal rescue mission to free the movie’s entirely unremarkable happy young couple from the depredations of Dr Karol, who by this point has happily dropped his earlier patina of uppity respectability and emerged as the ranting maniac we always knew he could be.

Much as you would hope, the villain’s secret lab/waxwork creation facility/whatever-the-hell-it-is is pretty awesome, complete with a towering gantry, steaming trough of molten wax and all kinds of quasi-Frankensteinian equipment, including what looks like a Tesla coil and a strange modern art type installation made of piled cylinders with circular lights fitted inside them.

As Santo, the aforementioned hired goons and the animated animal-man wax-monsters all start throwing down for the finale, this whole joint is trashed with great gusto, as Dr Karol meanwhile rants feverishly at the screaming heroine he has strapped to his operating table, pushing a film that has already upped its game to the level of ‘uproariously entertaining’ into the hallowed realms of pure delirium.

In the course of his ranting, Dr Karol reveals that he is in fact a survivor of the Holocaust, who, driven insane by the trauma of being subjected to Nazi tortures at Dachau, now seeks vengeance against the entire human race. “You may have heard about it, but you didn’t THINK about it”, he chides his victims. “Human beings are monsters,” he declares. “Those who tortured me proved it. I want your face to reflect what is in every human soul. I want to create a world of physically deformed beings, where one can see the face of the Apocalypse!”

So, uh… good grief.

Mere minutes of screen time later, Santo leads his two young charges unharmed from the smouldering ruins of the Wax Museum. Outside, the police have arrived just in time for an awestruck officer to exclaim, “Truly you are an admirable man, Santo!”

“I just believe in justice and fair play”, our hero curtly replies, before jumping into his convertible sports car, waving goodbye to everybody and disappearing into the Mexico City suburbs as the sun rises on the horizon, leaving the remaining mess of congealed wax, charred half-human corpses and malfunctioning electrical equipment behind for somebody else to deal with. God bless you, El Santo!

(Please note that all dialogue quoted in the above review is taken from a set of fan-subs, so it’s possible that it is not 100% reflective of the original Spanish, but I’m confident that it at least gives us the general idea.)

Nippon Horrors: Horrors of Malformed Men (Teruo Ishii, 1969)

Although it has achieved a certain level of cult notoriety in the West following its release on American DVD, Teruo Ishii’s ‘Horrors of Malformed Men’ remains largely unseen in its country of origin. Surprisingly, it is effectively banned in Japan to this day, with no officially sanctioned screenings or releases on the horizon.

From a foreigner’s point of view, the film’s continued suppression seems slightly mystifying, but most likely it all stems from the use of the taboo word kikei (translated as ‘malformed’) in the title. Direct reference to physical disability has always been a big no-no in polite Japanese society, and this word - perhaps roughly equating to something like ‘schizo’ or ‘spastic’ in English but with more of a sweary connotation - was considered extremely distasteful when used on a movie poster, particularly in conjunction with a storyline that touches on the idea of disabled people taking their revenge against the able-bodied world.

Presumably, such potentially offensive material made distributors reluctant to handle the film, and the ensuing negative publicity caused Eiran, the usually fairly relaxed Japanese censorship board, to single out ‘..Malformed Men’ for special attention, making it a hot potato somewhat along the lines of ‘The Devils’ or ‘Straw Dogs’. Quite how Toei (the studio who produced the film) reacted to this controversy, I’m unsure, but perhaps they simply chose to bury the damn thing forever, too resentful to bother opening old wounds again, in spite of the growing demand from cult movie aficionados for the film to be seen.

Anyway, regardless of the exact details, you’ll appreciate that I was pretty apprehensive about the idea of sitting down to watch a film that caused such consternation in a land that happily accepts the excesses of Norifumi Suzuki and Takashi Miike (not to mention those of Ishii himself, who came to ‘..Malformed Men’ off the back of such hits as ‘Inferno of Torture’ and ‘Orgies of Edo’). Believe it or not, I’m not usually someone who much enjoys excessively gruelling or icky cinema, and all signs pointed towards this one being a singularly grim experience. But nonetheless, reviews I’d read sounded intriguing, images I’d seen from the film looked fascinating, and it certainly seems to hold an exalted position within the pantheon of Japanese cinematic weirdness. And, well, y’know - no obscure movie fan ever gained anything by NOT watching a film, right? Taking a deep breath and preparing for whatever morbid insanity you’re about to witness is all part of the fun.

And to be honest, the first feeling that hit me once I settled into the flow of ‘..Malformed Men’ was one of happy relief. Whilst admittedly still stuffed with enough warped behaviour to keep a convention of mental health professionals busy for weeks, Ishii’s film is nonetheless a lot more fun than I had been anticipating – a colourful and vibrant work that often seems closer in spirit to the cracked surrealism of early 20th century pulp fiction than to the bleak travails of modern day Endurance Horror.

One of those movies that throws together so many different strands that trying to tie them all together in a few paragraphs is liable to leave one pretty breathless, ‘..Malformed Men’s pleasantly pulpy atmosphere is far from accidental when viewed in the light of a storyline that fuses a particularly disturbing variation on H.G. Wells’ ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’ with a mish-mash of additional ideas taken from the writing of celebrated mystery writer Edogawa Rampo. And you guys all know what’s up with celebrated mystery writer Edogawa Rampo, right..?

Well, ok - time for another deep breath. A hugely popular figure in Japanese culture, Rampo – real name Tarō Hirai - began writing in the 1920s, taking his cue from Western weird tales and detective fiction, and in particular that certain, peculiar combination of the two perfected by Edgar Allan Poe (just try saying his pen-name out loud with a Japanese accent). Rather than simply rehashing the work of his inspirations though, Rampo refashioned the form in uniquely Japanese style, adding strong elements of the perverse and erotic imagery that fascinated him in his private life to create a new sub-genre of horror/mystery fiction, the ubiquitous ‘ero-guro-nansenso’ (yes, that’s ‘EROTIC GROTESQUE NONSENSE’ to the likes of us), that has gone on to exert an influence upon just about all subsequent horror-themed films and manga in Japan.

I’ve not yet had the pleasure of reading Rampo’s work in translation, but I can easily believe that watching the opening half hour of ‘..Malformed Men’ gives a pretty good idea of what being thoroughly immersed in the world of ‘ero-guro-nansenso’ might be like, as a succession of bizarre and seemingly inexplicable incidents pile up at dizzying speed, pulling us into a macabre web of mystery, and establishing a pulpy atmosphere that Ishii cannily proceeds to cross-breed with a heavy dose of the kind of confrontational experimentalism that makes Japanese culture from the late ‘60s such a consistently wild ride, resulting in a cinematic experience that is, well… unique, to say the least.

Unsettling right from its opening seconds, ‘..Malformed Men’s credits sequence sees composer Hajime Kaburagi offering up a unholy mess of doomed choral bombast and crashing industrial noise, accompanying close-up nature footage of assorted poisonous spiders, broken up by bright blocks of primary colour. Following this, the first shot of the movie proper gives us a screen full of darkness and a deranged female shriek, before our gaze moves down across an unhinged woman’s face and a mighty pair of bare breasts, coming to rest on the blade of a nasty-looking dagger raised in her hands. As the camera pulls back, we find a lone male, trapped in a poorly lit prison cell, surrounded by a crowd of apparently insane women in torn red kimonos who cavort around him in uncoordinated and generally menacing fashion, drooling, cackling and writhing in erotic oblivion as they caress the bars of the cell and torment their male prisoner, the camera  leering at their distressed bodies in a decidedly distasteful manner. If there’s a more comprehensively ‘ero-guro’ way to begin a movie than this, I’d like to see it.

After a few minutes of this sort of thing, a doctor enters, calming the women down with a few blows from his bull-whip, and we learn that we are actually inside an extremely poorly organised lunatic asylum, where Hitomi (Teruo Yoshida), a former medical student and current inmate, has awakened to find himself mistakenly locked in the women’s cell. The doctor returns him to his appointed cell, but this does little to improve his state of mind. You see, Hitomi has completely lost his memory, and has no recollection of how he arrived at his current predicament. The only clues he can dredge up from the recesses of his mind are images of a rocky coastline, upon which a horrifying, androgynous figure dances, and the melody of a particularly haunting children’s nursery rhyme. Furthermore, a sinister bald man in the opposite cell seems intent on trying to assassinate him, which scarcely helps matters.

When the bald man attacks him during the night, Hitomi ends up killing his assailant in self-defence, and in the ensuing confusion manages to flee the asylum. Whilst making his getaway, he encounters a young female circus performer who seems to be humming the lullaby he remembers from his dream. Accosting the girl, Hitomi learns that she is an orphan, adopted by the circus with no memories of her childhood, but that she thinks the melody originates in a village somewhere along Japan’s Western coast. The pair meet again later, at the circus, but as the girl begins to tell Hitomi more about where she learned the song, she is struck down by a flying dagger. Seeing the bloody knife in Hitomi’s hands, the crowd assume him to be the murderer, and he’s on the run again.

And so things go on. Before long, Hitomi discovers that a man with an identical face to his own and an identical scar of his foot, an heir to the wealthy Kimodo family, has recently died. The dead man’s father, a somewhat feared and eccentric character rumoured to possess deformed, webbed hands, has apparently not been seen since he set sail for his private island, a rocky outcrop dimly visible from the mainland, announcing his intention to turn it into some sort of “pleasure island”. A spot of grave-robbing, a faked suicide and a surprise ‘resurrection’ later, and Hitomi has taken on the identity of the dead man and finds himself being alternately seduced by both his doppelganger’s wife Chioko, and his mistress Shizuko (Yukie Kagawa, whom we last saw making her mark on the pinky violence genre in Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack).

At this point, the film briefly threatens to become rather conventional, as the tale of Hitomi trying not to slip up as he impersonates his dead doppelganger rambles on to no great effect. But after Chioko is mysteriously poisoned, and Shizuko subjected to threatening notes and poisonous snake attacks, our hero(?) once again finds himself determined to unravel the mystery of precisely what in the hell in going on… and all clues point toward that mysterious island, where his “father”, the enigmatic Jagoro Kimodo (Tatsumi Hijikata), holds court.

If there is one image in ‘Horrors of Malformed Men’ that viewers will never forget, it is that of Jagoro himself – stick-thin, long-haired, Rasputin-eyed – performing his near-inhuman dance of torment amid the crashing waves and jagged rocks of his island shore. The word ‘extraordinary’ scarcely does justice to this character’s physical presence, and, though I was surprised to find such a notable high-brow personage appearing in a disreputable exploitation film, it still made perfect sense when I hit up Wikipedia and discovered that Hijikata (who also appeared the following year in Ishii’s excellent ‘Blind Woman’s Curse’) was actually a Big Figure in the world of post-war Japanese art - the founder of the Butoh school of dance and performance art, no less.

One of the main themes explored by Hijikata’s dance performances is said to have been “the transmutation of the human body into other forms, such as those of animals”, and, as it turns out, that is a project that his character in ‘..Malformed Men’ has been undertaking in a somewhat more direct fashion, as Ishii proceeds to build Jagoro up into a truly terrifying villain – a sort of unholy amalgam of Dr. Moreau, Fu Manchu and Charles Manson, bent on wreaking cathartic destruction upon both the norms of the human body and those of the world in general, which he sees as having ‘wronged’ him and his deformed ‘people’.

As Hitomi and Shizuko arrive upon the island, greeted by Jagoro as heirs to his insane legacy, the film explodes into a kind of kaleidoscopic oblivion worthy of Alexandro Jodorowsky at his most unglued, as Ishii’s taste for cinematic grotesquery and the choreography and design of Hijikata and his fellow Butoh practitioners combine to summon up a harrowing circus of impossible, Heironymous Bosch-esque delights, in a series of  short sequences upon which the film’s reputation as a world class freak-out presumably rests.(1)

“Let me show you my ideal world”, says Jagoro. As if on cue, an army of slender, long haired figures, naked but for chains and red capes, crest the hilltop, headbanging on all fours like some otherworldly Slayer crowd, as whip-wielding hunchbacks goad them on. On the waters of a river beside a sylvan forest grove, a silver skinned woman sits legs spread on the prow of a boat, juggling flaming torches beside an artificial tree of bird cages. Covered in blood and sand, another naked girl writhes, apparently surgically attached to the rear end of a goat. Huge fires rage as more naked, chalk-covered women writhe in eerie silence… and that’s all before we hit the island’s mylar-sheeting bedecked psychedelic nightclub, to say nothing of the Bava-esque gel lit operating theatre…

Needless to say, once the narrative regains some ragged semblance of normality, there is a wealth of dark and dreadful family secrets to be revealed through the remainder of the film, acts of awful vengeance and twisted reconciliation to be enacted… but, out of respect for the spirit of mystery, I will leave you in the dark about these for the time being.

By this point this is going to sound like a fairly redundant observation, but ‘Horrors of Malformed Men’ is a pretty strange business. In its top-heavy piling of mystery upon mystery, it reminded me a little of Kim Ki-Young’s extraordinary A Woman After a Killer Butterfly. But unlike that carefully controlled venture into labyrinthine gothic melodrama, Ishii’s film has a crazed and rather uneven feel to it. Whilst some sequences are bold and unforgettable, others are shoddy and unconvincing, betraying either an extremely stretched budget/production schedule or a variable level of engagement from the director (in reality a little of both, most likely), often attempting to save the day with ‘shock’ visuals that come across as cheap and prurient, undercutting the film’s stronger, more affecting, moments.

In its attempt to cram as many Rampo stories as possible into a single storyline, the narrative also becomes frustratingly digressive and episodic, failing to capitalise on many of its best ideas and refusing to let any of the characters (save maybe Jagoro) develop any personality beyond a cardboard cut-out level, meaning that, despite grasping at a grand emotional sweep for its suitably bizarre conclusion, it never really manages to transcend its origins as a gory comic book potboiler.

But since when did the weirdo horror warriors amongst us care about that sort of thing, right? Some films invite praise for their perfect conception and realisation, but everyone involved in this one hopefully realised they were competing in a different arena entirely. On a purely visceral level, ‘..Malformed Men’ is as imaginative, repulsive and rich in cognitive dissonance as the contemporary films of Koji Wakamatsu, and as feverishly unpleasant as the later works of directors like Kazuo Komizu.(2) A singular experience, whichever way you look at it, and as perfect an expression of the dictats of the ero-guro-nonsenso philosophy as one could possibly wish for.

(1) For what it’s worth, I think the inevitable influence of Erle C. Kenton’s ‘Island of Lost Souls’ can be felt heavily here too, from minor details such as the cave the visitors walk through en route to the rest of the island, to the disturbingly crude make-up effects used to realise the ‘malformed men’ and the incongruous jungle noises and animal calls that often dominate the soundtrack. I think it says a lot for the 1932 film that, in spite of ‘..Malformed Men’s myriad excesses, it is arguably still the more upsetting of the two.

(2) See Komizu’s ‘Entrails of a Virgin’ (1986) for a particularly mean-spirited cinematic kick to the face.