Monthly Archives: January 2021

Tomie (1999)

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Manga creator Junji Ito grew up in a house where he was afraid to go to the bathroom, as it was at the end of a long underground tunnel filled with water crickets. While working as a dental technician, he was drawing at night and submitted a story to a magazine called Monthly Halloween that would become Tomie. The story was inspired by the death of a classmate, which Ito felt was odd that the boy just disappeared from the world. So he came up with the idea of a girl who died but just came back as if nothing has happened.

Director Ataru Oikawa didn’t want to make the movie version to be filled with gore, but more of a horrific youth drama. He still sought out Ito’s approval, taking parts from the original “Photograph” and “Kiss” stories and even had the creator’s approval for the casting of Miho Kanno as Tomie.

The police are looking into the murder of Tomie, a high school girl, which was followed over the next three years by the suicide or insanity of nine other students and a teacher. Soon, the detective assigned to the case learns that Tomie has been murdered and reborn in Gifu since the 1960’s, just as Japan joined the industrial era.

A classmate of Tomie, Tsukiko Izumisawa, can’t remember the three months around her friend’s murder. And oh yeah — her neighbor is nursing a strange baby that soon grows into another Tomie, which seduces Tsukiko’s boyfriend before attacking her at her therapist’s office by shoving cockroaches down her mouth. So our protagonist’s boyfriend does what any of us would do — he cuts the head off Tomie and takes Tsukiko to bury the body in the woods, which of course backfires. Tomie reappears and kisses Tsukiko full on the lips, who responds by setting her on fire.

That said, a few months later, Tsukiko begins to realize that she is becoming Tomie herself.

While not a horror movie, this certainly is a strange movie. For some reason, in the glut of Japanese horror that was badly remade in the U.S., this series never showed up. I would assume that’s because there’s no easy hook to grab on to.

Kyûketsu Shôjo tai Shôjo Furanken (2009)

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Monami is a transfer student with a secret and a burning need for Mizushima. As Japanese women share chocolate to show their love, a piece of the candy with her blood in it has brought him into her world of vampires, while his jilted girlfriend Keiko pays the price by accidentally dying, then coming back as an undead creature still in love with him.

That description is a poor — and oh so quick way — to explain to you the insanity that this movie has within it. Starting with a knife battle between zombies and our heroes and expanding to include a Kabuki mad scientist who works alongside the school nurse — who has eyeballs embedded in her breasts — who creates the Frankenstein Girl; Japanese girl cultures like Lolitas and Ganguro; a wrist-cutting competition; and finally the Tokyo Tower being used to create a near-indestructible creature seeking revenge.

Yoshihiro Nishimura, who directed Tokyo Gore Police, and Naoyuki Tomomatsu, who made the Lust of the Dead series, combined efforts to make this film, based on a manga (where the title characters never met).

Also — on the subject of Ganguro, it was a “fashion trend among young Japanese women that started in the mid-1990s, distinguished by a dark tan and contrasting make-up liberally applied by fashionistas.” The first tour I went to Japan, I was shocked to see so many young girls basically wearing blackface. Then again, it is also influenced by kabuki and noh dress, as well as the yamanba mountain witch. It’s a really strange look and while this movie takes things way further than they are in reality in so many ways, the look of the girls in this is actually pretty close to the trends that it’s parodying.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Tōkyō Zankoku Keisatsu (2008)

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You know how Videodrome would destroy the brains of those that watched it? Yeah, that’s exactly what this movie is.

While working on special effects for The Machine Girl, Media Blasters asked director Yoshihiro Nishimura if he was interested in making another movie. He decided to take his short Anatomia Extinction and expand it into this film, which more than lives up to its title of Tokyo Gore Police. It has plenty of influence from RoboCop, which is seen through the commercial scenes in the film, which were filmed by Noboru Iguchi and Yūdai Yamaguchi.

In the future — let’s call it 200X — Japan is overpopulated. That’s why a mad scientist (Itsuji Itao) has created a virus that transforms humans into mutants called Engineers that kill everything in their path. The privatized Tokyo Police Force has started a team of Engineer Hunters and this special force is devoted to violence, sadism and executions with no trials.

Joining them is a loner named Ruka (Eihi Shiina, who was a fashion model before movies like this and Takeshi Miike’s Audition) who excels at destroying Engineers before the scientist implants her with a tumor that makes her one of them. Meanwhile, as policemen are being turned into them, the commissioner announces that anyone even suspected of being an Engineer will be killed.

Ruka makes her way to the scientist’s — known as Key Man — home, where he explains that her father had actually adopted her after assassinating her activist father. When he went to the commissioner to find out why, he was killed in front of Key Man, who has injected himself with the DNA of Japan’s most famous criminals.

Runa goes to war with the police, her left arm mutating into an alien appendage and her eye being replaced when it is shot. The commissioner confesses to killing her father, but says that he has tried to apologize by making her the perfect killing machine. She responds by slicing him apart and decapitating him.

If you read our site, you know that I have seen some things, but man, Tokyo Gore Police has moments of bloody excess and utter depravity that have shocked even me. There’s not a moment of this movie that isn’t filled with sprayed blood, destroyed body parts that would make Cronenberg wince and berserk sexuality. I mean, big points for the flying samurai commissioner who uses spraying blood like a jet to fly himself around the room and attack with his inner organs. Also, Eihi Shiina is most gorgeous person you’ve ever seen to sport a giant lobster claw hand and a glowing cybernetic eye. She doesn’t have any competition, but no one is going to steal the title from her. And man, I loved that she liberated the commissioner’s gimp sex slave, gave her machine guns for body parts and has brought her on board at the end.

This is the kind of film that will ruin you for anything else you try to watch that day. Or that week. Seeing as how I watched it on January 1, here’s hoping that other movies can come close to it this year.

Genkai Jinkô Keisû (1995)

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Otherwise known as Anatomia Extinction, this film starts what Tokyo Gore Police would push forward thirteen years later.

A salaryman sees a murder in the subways and is soon pursued by the killer, who wants him to join a group called The Engineers, who have taken it upon themselves to reduce Japan’s overpopulation. Despite not wanting any part of joining, the man begins to mutate, much like Tetsuo: The Iron Man, running throughout Japan and fighting his urge to kill.

Yoshihiro Nishimura wrote the script, directed this and also created all of the special effects. He would go on to make Meatball Machine Kodoku, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl and, of course, Tokyo Gore Police.

This feels like a cyberpunk giallo made on no budget — which is true, as it was all funded by Nishimura — and has an interesting build to the body horror insanity that it leads up to.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Terror on the 40th Floor (1974)

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How can this be a ripoff of The Towering Inferno when it came out a few months before that movie? I assume that they read in Variety about that film and said, “Let’s get this on TV in a hurry!” That’s not a bad thing, though.

Director Jerry Jameson made Hurricane, Heatwave!, The Deadly Night Tower, Superdome, Raise the Titanic! and Airport ’77, so he knows all about disasters (he also made The Bat People and The Secret Night Caller, so he’s a favorite around here). He’s working from a script by Jack Turley (Prey for the Wildcats, Empire of the Ants) and Edward Montagne.

A Christmas party goes on way too long, which leads to a fire starting in the basement and making it to, well, the fortieth floor. But if you love disaster movies, you know that the plot is secondary to the cast of stars who will be sacrificed for our entertainment.

This one has Dynasty star John Forsythe, TV movie vet Joseph Campanella, Lynn Carlin, Anjanette Comer from The Baby, Monday Night Football announcer Don Meredith, Pippa Scott, Bon Hastings (who also faced death in The Poseidon Adventure) and more. Yeah, it’s not the kind of cast that Irwin Allen would have assembled. Even stranger, only one person dies. Come on — have we learned nothing from movies like Earthquake, where Hollywood favorites are snuffed out with impunity?

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

The Comeback Kid (1980)

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Bubba Newman (John Ritter) has been in the minor leagues for way too long and if he goes down one more level, he may as well never make it to the majors. So he quits to become the coach for a gang of poor kids — Walter Matthau, look out — and finds romance with Susan Dey. But since this is a TV movie, tragedy is looming and everyone will have to realize that life is not always fair.

Director Peter Levin made plenty of TV movies, everything from My Father’s Shadow: The Sam Sheppard Story, Deadly Nightshade and Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story to Popeye Doyle, The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana and Washington Mistress. He’s working from a script by Joe Landon, who also executive produced this and wrote Ritter’s special, John Ritter: Being of Sound Mind and Body.

This is one to watch for the cast, as beyond Ritter and Dey, there’s Doug McKeon (who everyone else would say was in On Golden Pond, but I remember from Mischief), James Gregory (General Ursus!), Jeremy Licht (a member of The Hogan Family), Patrick Swayze, Angela Aames (Chopping Mall, Basic Training) and Kim Fields before she was Tootie.

Spoiler warning — one of the kids gets killed and it gets really dark. That really shocked me. Otherwise, this is the kind of TV movie that was made for those who couldn’t get HBO and the opportunity to watch Amanda Whurlitzer, Kelly Leak and Timmy Lupis play the Yankees.

You can watch this on YouTube.

From the Dead of Night (1989)

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Gary Brandner didn’t just write The Howling, he also wrote a book called Walkers, in which a woman named Joanna Raitt nearly drowns at a party and soon finds the undead coming after her, trying to bring her back to the world of the dead. If you’re thinking that a lot of that sounds very Carnival of Souls, well, the movie will confirm that suspicion.

The trailer for this kept talking about how it was directed by the master of suspense, but never said who it was. The answer is Paul Wendkos, who I guess gets that title from making The Legend of Lizzie Borden, Haunts of the Very Rich and The Mephisto Waltz.

Joanna is played by Lindsay Wagner and she’s torn between two loves — her current man Glen Eastman (Robin Thomas) and her old dude Peter Langford (Bruce Boxleitner) — when she isn’t being chased by zombies or shadow people or whatever this is, across two nights and nearly four hours of your life (with commercials).

Diahann Carroll shows up as Joanna’s boss and wow, her shoulder pads are out of control and probably worth watching this movie to see.

From the Dead of Night‘s screenplay was written by Bill Bleich, who wrote some pretty decent other movies, like The Hearse, The Midnight Hour and The Gladiator. He was also a producer, writer and creative consultant for Poltergeist: The Legacy, which was the TV series inspired by the film.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Tenth Level (1976)

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The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology trials conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, who measured the willingness of men to obey an authority figure who instructed them to administer electric shocks to someone else, even forcing them to continue the punishment until they killed someone. Strangely — or not all that strangely, when you realize how humanity can barely put a mask on when they spend ten minutes in a grocery store — a high proportion of the subjects would fully obey the instructions, even when they thought that it was all real.

That’s what inspired this controversial TV movie, starring William Shatner as Professor Stephen Turner, who is shocked when he discovers just how much pain his students can dish out in the name of science.

Written by George Bellak, who worked on the kind of old TV like Playhouse 90 that this resembles, and directed by Charles S. Dubin, who was ABC’s head director for thirty years, this film was so shocking that it took eight months to line up enough sponsors to get it on the air. It’s never been released in any format.

Shatner gave up his divorce visitation rights on Christmas Day to film this, showing how much he believed in it. It’s pretty stagey — like I said before, it’s very old TV — and even Professor Milgram, who was paid $5,000 as a consultant on the film, thought it was dull.

Somehow, this is my second TV movie in a row with Lynn Carlin in it, so that has to be the universe sending some kind of message. Or maybe she did a lot of 1970’s TV movies, as she was in Silent Night, Lonely Night; A Step Out of Line; Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones; The Morning After; The Last Angry Man; Terror on the 40th Floor; The Honorable Sam Houston; The Lives of Jenny Dolan; Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway; Girl on the Edge of Town; Forbidden Love; A Killer in the Family and The Kid from Nowhere.

It also has Ossie Davis, Viveca Lindfors, Stephen Macht (in one of his first roles), Estelle Parsons, Charles White, Roy Poole, Mike Kellin (Mel from Sleepaway Camp) ad supposedly a young John Travolta, which may be an urban legend.

You can watch this on YouTube.

In the Shadows, Someone’s Watching (1993)

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Also known as With Harmful Intent, this 1993 Richard Friedman (Doom Asylum, Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge, Scared Stiff) made for TV movie has Rick Springfield and Joan Van Ark as parents headed for a divorce when a mystery man beats up their kid. Yes, if you’re the kind of person who says, “Kids never get hurt in movies,” then get ready for this movie, where kids are routinely abused throughout.

Based on the Judith Kelman novel, this giallo-esque film is all about a man — I’m not spoiling it for you — who was abused by the other kids and his mother, while only protected by his sister, but is now out to be the bully to the children of the ones who abused him. It also has an astounding scene where the witness to one of those killings is an elderly man who can’t speak due to a stroke and he keeps trying to tell everyone that they are in the presence of a murderer.

What a cast! Beyond the leads, you have Chris Noth, Daniel J. Travanti, Dey Young (who has been geeky yet loveable Kate Rambeau in Rock ‘n Roll High School as well as the snooty saleswoman in Pretty Woman) and Michael Patrick Carter as the child in danger. You may have seen him in Milk Money and as the kid in the Good Guys commercial in the original Child’s Play.

Man, once major networks stopped making movies like this, the world became a much less bright place.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Goliath Awaits (1981)

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In the days where there were only three major channels, Operation Prime Time was an effort to create network quality programming for small independent stations. I can remember several films that aired locally from this effort, including Yogi’s First Christmas, the Rankin/Bass Jack Frost special, Solid Gold and The Girl, The Gold Watch and Everything. With the launch of the Fox Network, most of the independents all switched to that network and there was no further need for OPT.

This was directed by Kevin Connor, who has some pretty fun movies in his resume, including Motel Hell, The House Where Evil Dwells, From Beyond the Grave and The Return of Sherlock Holmes and plenty of others.

Written by Pat Fielder (The Monster That Challenged the World, The Vampire) along with Richard M. Bluel and Hugh Benson, who often were producers.

It’s a great idea — at some point in World War II, the gigantic ocean liner RMS Goliath was sunk by torpedos, along with its entire crew and 1,860 passengers. 42 years later, however, a crew led by oceanographer Peter Cabot (Mark Harmon) discovers that the ship is still intact, with 337 survivors and their descendants living in an air bubble utopia. Then again, if you consider a world with mandatory contraception and physical abuse utopia, then maybe it’s not for you. Leading the ship is John McKenzie (Christopher Lee), who saved many of them during the original accident.

Oh yeah — the Goliath also has sensitive documents from President Roosevelt, with Admiral Wiley Sloan (Eddie Albert) demanding that Cabot’s team destroys the top secret letters.

You also get Alex McCord from Airwolf, Emma Samms, John Carradine as an actor who replays his same movie over and over again*, Robert Forester, Frank Gorshin, Duncan Regehr, Kirk Cameron, John Ratzenberger and more.

*That movie is The Black Knight, which starred Peter Cushing.

You can watch this on YouTube.