Release date: July 5, 1983
Director: Yoichi Maeda
Studio: NTV with cooperation from Shochiku Eizo
Cast: Masakazu Tamura, Kyoko Kobayashi, Hiroko Shino, Keiko Orihara, Ryusuke Oki, Akiko Sodeki, Yoshiko Otowa et al
Availability: Home media release of this specific film is unknown. If you are as desperate as I am, you can peer into the past with Wayback Machine and watch it via a dead link here. (Be patient with it.)
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Today we're going to be looking at the only feature-length film I've managed to dredge up that includes Yoshiko Otowa in the cast. And I really did dredge it up: I used Wayback Machine to resurrect a deleted YouTube video (which was actually the second of two links that I found, the first was gone for good) and watched the entire thing that way. I know this is kind of a "don't you have anything better to do?" post, but I do have something better to do - sleep, it is 12:45 AM - and I'm choosing to do this instead. And you know what? I'm super excited about it.
For those of you just tuning in, Otowa is Hirata's younger sister. I talk about her and what is probably her most well-known credit here. Her work is obscure and sparse; in the late '50s and '60s she was frequently in films directed by their older brother, Yoshiki Onoda, but she never appeared in anything alongside Hirata. (The Onoda Venn diagram is surprisingly complicated.) After that she did a few things in the '80s and then mostly fell off the map.
Some background: "Tuesday Suspense Theater" was not a "television series" in the usual episodic sense of that term, but a series of made-for-TV films directed by and starring many, many top names of the time. A longer explanation of the series would just take up space since it's been running for so long and includes so many titles, a lot of which are pretty much lost media. (Although I will say you should watch Obayashi's Lovely Devils, it's an underrated gem of his.) This particular film also stars Masakazu Tamura of Nemuri Kyoshiro fame. This will be my first time seeing him out of a chonmage.
The link I posted includes commercials, which is always fun. I think we all love retro Japanese TV ads. I assume, because of the ads, that the video was ripped from a VHS recording somebody made during the original airing (as far as I know this was never rebroadcast). It's in atrocious quality, but what do you expect from a YouTube link that was literally brought back from the dead.
The film begins with a couple, Tomoyuki Katsuhara and his wife Katsumi (played by Tamura and Shino, respectively), returning to their apartment after an extended trip to Spain. The atmosphere is immediately off, and Katsumi finds a trap door under their kitchen floor that hadn't previously been there, leading to a small hole with a ladder. There are rumors that the guy renting their apartment in the interim, Nogawa, was a bit... odd, to say the least (we get a fantasy montage of him doing stuff like tying his girlfriend to a balcony and killing kittens). The film seems to set us up to think he had something to do with the trap door.
Otowa's character is one of the perennial nosey housewives who often congregate outside apartment buildings in older Japanese films. Her character is the one responsible for the nasty rumors about Nogawa. It took me a minute to figure out who she was even though I'd seen her in Comedy Trio because she's a bit older in this, but as soon as I saw her in profile I was like oh yep.
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| imoto |
Katsumi tries to tell her husband about the hole, and about Nogawa, but she gets a firm "baka" response, of course. But Katsuhara does go down into the hole with a flashlight and discovers something written on the wall: the name "Tatsuo Sasamoto" scrawled over with Xs. Both this and Nogawa's general weirdness turn out to be red herrings.
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| pictured: hole dispute |
Nogawa comes over while Katsumi is alone and is generally a creep to her. I didn't catch much of what he said, but he seemed to know something about the hole under the kitchen floor. When Katsuhara comes home, his wife again attempts to talk to him about the hole, but he continues to be dismissive; this is when the jackhammers come out. Katsumi has men over to dig up the floor, but they don't find anything immediately. When she's down there alone, though, she finds a wristwatch and then a necklace buried in the dirt. She recognizes the necklace as belonging to a woman her husband used to date, and as she tries to pull the necklace up, she unearths... a skeleton!
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| this film is now 💀CERTIFIED SPOOKY💀 |
Katsuhara returns home and Katsumi confronts him, and he admits that the skeleton is who she thinks it is: a woman, Akiko - actually a coworker of Katsumi's - who he'd been seeing. We get a lengthy flashback that ends with Katsuhara and Akiko arguing and him strangling her in maybe the least dramatic murder scene I've ever watched. He picks up the phone, presumably thinking about turning himself in, but then decides instead to be reasonable and carve a hole under his kitchen floor to hide her body in. As one does. Back in the present, he confesses everything to his wife.
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| future skeleton on the left |
They then decide to both commit suicide with red wine and opiates. Buuuut first we get a long Spain montage. There's flamenco dancing, that's nice, I always like to see flamenco dancing. There's also bullfighting, which is... markedly less nice.
Katsuhara wakes up from the suicide attempt, but Katsumi doesn't. He, of course, drags her body down to the hole under the kitchen. Katsumi eventually does wake up too, after she's been thrown into the hole with no way of escaping. Her husband can hear her calls for help, but he piles furniture over the trap door and ignores her. After a while she figures out she can make a good deal of noise banging on a pipe, and the whole building hears it - while Katsuhara is out feeling sorry for himself due to murdering two women, Katsumi is managing to summon the authorities despite being locked in a hole. The film ends with Katsumi in an ambulance and Katsuhara in the back seat of a police cruiser, tailing her.
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| big surprise for this Ultraman stan: that's Kitajima [Shūsuke Tsumura] from Taro on the left, behind Tamura |
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I gotta admit this is not the best movie ever. It has a few fun scenes, but on the whole, it's "get home from work and fall asleep in front of the TV" cinema. It could just be because I thoroughly read every scrap of plot summary I could find beforehand to prepare myself for watching something I would only half understand, but none of the twists and turns feel very surprising. From the moment that Katsumi finds that hole, you know she is going to end up in it eventually. Everything in between is just a lot of stuff. Nobody reacts to anything in a reasonable way. It's all TV-land dramatics and filler.
But I still had fun. If nothing else, this was definitely the oddest way I've ever found and watched a movie. I'm scheduling this to post on a Tuesday for authenticity's sake.
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