The Living Skeleton

In the mid-sixties, Shochiku, the Japanese film company that had been Yasujiro's Ozu's  home studio, produced a number of horror films.  The Living Skeleton (1968), directed by Koki Matsano, is an example of  Shochiku's movies in this genre.  It's lively enough, a nasty exploitation film with an interesting anti-Christian theme, but so remarkably incoherent as to be fundamentally unwatchable.  As is the case with most Japanese genre films, the movie is lovingly shot, utilizing leading edge film techniques -- images in the movie resemble Antonioni, particularly films such as Zabriskie Point and Blow-up.  The camera-work is evocative and the editing has a savage, propulsive energy, but you can't ever quite figure out what is going on.  Criterion has released several Shochiku horror films on its label -- on my Tv, at least as broadcast by Turner Classic Movies, much of the movie was so dark that the images were illegible, adding to my not inconsiderable confusion. 

The Living Skeleton belongs to the "everything but the kitchen-sink" style of genre film-making.  If a scene or a plot device worked in a horror movie somewhere in the world, the producers of The Living Skeleton throw it into the mix.  We have a ghost ship, a spectacular massacre with machine guns blasting away directly at the camera lens, apparitions, a deadly ghost-girl, a mummy, vampire bats and a bunch of people reduced to carbonized pulp by "algiform sulfate", a powerful acid to say the least.  The movie hovers between a detective thriller, a revenge drama, and a monster movie mixing all elements together in a chaotic melange.  A group of robbers steals gold bullion off a ship and slaughters all of its passengers -- this is sequence is shot in a series of lurid close-ups punctuated by guns firing point-blank at the audience.  A doctor is (apparently) slain with his wife, Yoriko.  Three years later, Yoriko's twin sister, Saeko, is living with strange, if seemingly gentle, Catholic priest on a promontory in Yokohama harbor.  Saeko has a feckless boyfriend named Machizuki and a dog that looks like Lassie called Johnny.  The scenes with the Catholic priest focus on a funeral with the crucifix hovering in the gloom over the proceedings -- there is something uncanny and scary about Catholicism, at least, as presented in this picture.  The ghost ship on which the massacre took place appears on the dark and stormy sea.  Saeko goes to the ship with her boyfriend where she seems to encounter the figure of her dead sister.  The murderers responsible for the bullion heist begin to die horribly, one by one.  Before they die, each of them sees the pallid corpse of Yoriko looming before them.  One of the gangsters has half of his face melted away by a previous encounter with acid and so he makes a ghastly appearance.  The other bad guys are all grotesques of the kind you might encounter in an old Dick Tracy cartoon -- dipsomaniacs and leering goons.  The killings are accompanied by vampire bat attacks and there are a bunch of skeletons linked together by chains under water in the bay that periodically make appearances.  After lots of misdirection, the film reveals that the doctor married to Yoriko, both thought to be killed in the massacre, has survived and, somehow, embalmed his dead wife -- despite being embalmed (or a "mummy" as the film claims) she's surprisingly energetic and, at one point, grabs a hold of one of the bad guys.  The mad doctor has been experimenting with the dangerously corrosive "algiform sulfate" -- at some point, someone declares:  "it's a powerful chemical", an understatement if there ever was one.  The characters all converge on the scary ghost-ship where the mad doctor and his mummified wife are located.  The kindly Catholic priest peels off his skin to reveal that he's the horribly disfigured gangster -- no longer Saeko's benefactor, he tries to kill her.  And, it turns out that Saeko is completely insane and has been butchering the bad guys involved in her sister's death.  ("Saeko" is pronounced "Psycho", get it?)  At the climax, the surviving bad guys experience unfortunate encounters with the "algiform sulfate" and end up reduced gooey to black gunk.  This is much deserved -- the evil bastards killed Johnny, the friendly collie.  The film is cleverly made, although my plot summary makes its seem far more coherent than it actually is -- with respect to several of the garish murders, I still don't know who exactly killed the bad guys or, even, how the murders were accomplished..  The picture is too gruesome to be fun; too confusing to be gripping or suspenseful -- there's no suspense when you can't figure out who is being killed or why -- and not bad enough to be perversely entertaining.