Legend of the Cat Monster Appreciation Post (Halloween Special) [麗猫伝説]

I wrote about this film at length on my film review blog here back when it was first fansubbed. It is - at the risk of sounding pretentious - cinema looking at itself, and it's one of my favorite movies of all time.

Like I said in my review, the plot involves a film studio that had been successful during Japan's golden age of film but was now struggling to keep itself afloat, and many of the actors Ōbayashi cast - Makoto Satō, Akihiko Hirata, Akira Ōizumi, just to name a few - were people who the audience would have recognized as having been at the height of their fame during that bygone era. Takako Irie and her daughter Wakaba play the same character at different ages; the elder Irie was a famous silent film actress who went on to star in bakeneko (cat horror) films. The film uses a lot of bakeneko tropes as a recurring motif and this is what qualifies it as a Halloween-appropriate film in my eyes - possibly the closest thing to an actual horror movie that I will talk about on this blog.

The fact that Hirata would die less than a year after the release of the film gives a real-world layer to that feeling that Legend of the Cat Monster is looking at an era of cinema - and an era, period - that was moving further and further into the past. Hirata plays a producer who was implied to have been a new member of the fictional film studio's production crew in the flashbacks that take place 40 years prior; I'm not sure if this was an intentional nod to how Hirata himself got his start in the film industry behind the camera (as an assistant director at Shintoho), but it could have been.

The film is the 100th installment of Tuesday Suspense Theater, and in 1998 a theatrical version was released - this is the reason why you'll sometimes see the release year given as 1983 and sometimes as 1998. In November 2020 it was released to DVD for the first time. In December 2022 it was given unofficial English fansubs, and an unofficial DVD can now be bought through Far East Flix. (#notsponsored, but wouldn't it be nice if I was.)

Here is a Google-translated review from a user named "Mucho" on kinenote.com who watched it when it first aired on television:

"I haven't seen the movie version, but here are my impressions of the 1983 TV version from my movie notes.

What is the secret of the eternal youth and beauty of the great actress who was once the star of a monster cat movie? A new screenwriter meets her and the mystery is solved.

This is a revolution in TV dramas! My head went crazy and exploded. Every time there was a commercial break, I was dancing around the room. If someone else saw that, they would think I was crazy. Yes, just like the main character's screenwriter... This masterpiece was not talked about at all in the streets because of the disposable and forgetful medium of TV. What a shame!

The pain of the screenwriter who can't write is deeply felt, the director's position is clearly explained, and the sadness of the old actress is conveyed.

You will need a lot of knowledge to enjoy this drama. The main part is reminiscent of actual anecdotes, and movie fans will praise it as a movie that talks about movies, or rather a TV drama. But how do ordinary viewers feel about it? The punch line is that it's a slightly unusual drama and people immediately change the channel. It's a special production that is not aimed at everyone, but at a select few. Why was such a drama allowed to be aired on TV?"

Here also is a very detailed analysis of the sets and how they reference prior films, with citations at the bottom. I've linked a Google-translated version, which seems minimally garbled.

I can't give you much besides some posters that you maybe haven't seen before, since this is not a terribly well-known movie (although neither is it very obscure) and there's not much in the way of merch tie-ins. But trust me, this movie is so good. It is so, so good. If you watch any movie based off of a recommendation from some random person on the internet this Halloween, I hope it might be this one.

Saturday Wide Theater Spookiness (Halloween Special) [土曜ワイド劇場]

I wasn't sure I was going to include this in my roster of Halloween-appropriate posts because there's so little information on most of this Saturday Wide Theater stuff that I didn't know if it would be worth it. But, as there's no English-language info about these TV movies out there, anything I write about them would technically be fulfilling the purpose of this blog.

So, what exactly is Saturday Wide Theater?

Starting in 1977 a variety of original TV movies were broadcast on TV Asahi every Saturday night as part of this series (although it's more of a timeslot than a "series", since all the films were unrelated). It pioneered the format of a consistent, recurring broadcast of 90-minute original movies (later some of the films would run for 2 hours or more) and continued running films until 2017. Other similar programs began doing the same thing, including Tuesday Suspense Theater, but I believe Saturday Wide Theater was the first. Nothing mentioned in this post has a physical media release and I can't find any records of it ever being re-aired; whether or not TV Asahi still has the tapes is doubtful and they may in fact have been destroyed due to copyright laws.

From what I can gather, a lot of the films shown during this timeslot were mysteries. I'm going to be taking a look at a few of them that Hirata was in - as I've mentioned, after he left Toho he worked extensively in TV but unfortunately the majority of that work is most likely lost - but be warned that none of these are really horror; they're mostly just murder mysteries with unusually spooky-sounding titles.

None of this stuff has official English titles, so these translations are done by machine.

1. The Devil's Mask: Full Moon Murder Case [魔性の仮面] February 24, 1979 - directed by Katsumune Ishida

Very few details about this can be found anywhere, but it sounds like a psychological thriller-type thing that apparently entails a lawyer and a reporter exploring a horrific incident from a woman's childhood after she's accused of murder.

The script for this (pictured below) is held in the National Diet Library.

2. House of Evil Spirits [悪霊の住む家] June 7, 1980 - directed by Hideo Suzuki

I mean, that sounds pretty scary, doesn't it? What's interesting about this one is that the plot sounds quite similar to Chitei no Satsui, a Tuesday Suspense Theater film that I looked at here due to Yoshiko Otowa having a small role in it. The plot concerns a woman who kills her boss (played by Hirata; sounds like he kind of had it coming) and buries him under her floorboards, but is then tormented by guilt over what she's done.

We do actually have an image from this one! See a bigger version of this image (with watermark) over here.

3. The Mystery of the Ghost Ship [幽霊船の謎] October 18, 1980 - directed by Yoshiyuki Kuroda

This sounds like it was the second installment in a series of detective mysteries starring Tatsuya Mihashi. It involves an inspector solving the mystery of some murders on a yacht. No information available, but the script is, again, held in the National Diet Library.

That is pretty much that for suspense/horror-adjacent TV stuff. I would really love for someone to get in the National Diet Library and scan or just summarize those scripts so we could have some idea of what these movies are about beyond the few sentences that tvdrama-db.com provides. It is nice to know somebody is taking care of the scripts, at least.

The H-Man Appreciation Post (Halloween Special) [美女と液体人間]

What do I do for the Halloween season as a horror movie lover running a fansite about somebody who wasn't really in any horror movies? I talk about some horror-adjacent movies, I guess.

I'm going to structure this the same way I structured my Sanjuro post: since most of you have probably already seen The H-Man, I'll focus less on the film itself and more on things like merch, international releases, and other stuff that will hopefully be new to at least some readers. I would argue that The H-Man is the strongest contender for a horror label in the Transforming Human series, as the transformed humans in this film bear very little resemblance to humans anymore, whereas the antagonists of Secret of the Telegian and The Human Vapor do retain their human form.

This will be the first in a series. Throughout the month - in addition to regular, non-themed posts - I'm also going to cover Legend of the Cat Monster and maybe some Saturday Wide Theater stuff if I can find enough information about it. (I personally consider Godzilla a horror movie, but that's fairly controversial.) There's also episode 20 of Operation: Mystery, which is arguably a horror show more often than not, but I am currently unable to talk about that for secret reasons.

The H-Man was released to Japanese theaters on June 24th, 1958. It shares a lot of its DNA with Godzilla, having also been directed by Ishirō Honda and including explicit references to the Lucky Dragon no. 5 incident, but whereas Godzilla presents nuclear testing and weaponry giving rise to an external threat, The H-Man looks at the possibility of humanity itself becoming infected by the aftereffects of nuclear power. Honda visited Japan's first nuclear reactor (the now-defunct JRR-1) and interviewed a scientist from the University of Tokyo's nuclear science department as research for the film.

It's one of my personal favorite tokusatsu movies. It's entertaining, fast-paced, and genuinely scary at times, but it also has that Honda introspection that makes it stick in your brain long after watching it. I talk about it on my film review blog here.

The film was actually based on a story by a contracted Toho actor, Hideo Unagami, but Unagami passed away the year prior to filming. Unagami would write scripts on the side and bring them to Toho's planning department, and got the idea for a story about a new human born from the radiation of a hydrogen bomb during filming of The Mysterians. Takeshi Kimura took Unagami's manuscript and finalized it into a script for The H-Man.

As per Kenji Sahara, the climax of the movie was filmed in an actual sewer and apparently smelled as bad as one would expect. (I always get a kick out of seeing Akihiko Hirata hanging around down there in a plastic jumpsuit with a full suit and tie under it.)

American lobby cards for this film fetch semi-ridiculous prices, for some reason.

The film was first screened in American theaters a little less than a year after its original release, on May 28th, 1959. Columbia Pictures handled the release and surprisingly they still retain distribution rights to the film to this day, after having renewed the license in 1987. I haven't seen the Columbia dub, but as I mentioned in my review, it apparently removes all mention of the "H-Men" retaining their human memories after they've been transformed, which, to me, ruins a lot of the film's impact. From what I understand the American cut also guts the special effects to a large extent. You can read more on the differences between the two cuts of the film here.

Other theatrical releases of the film extended to twelve more countries over the next four years.

West German poster - Google Translate says the title is "The Terror Creeps Through Tokyo"

French poster included with the leaflet inside a Japanese laserdisc release of the film

Speaking of fetching insane prices, there is a sequel manga that was released shortly after the film itself. This has been translated in full over on Toho Kingdom. It isn't fully scanned, but the translation does include a selection of images from the manga, and you can check out some more on this Mandarake listing. The protagonist is a youngish boy as per shounen manga tradition, but Chief Inspector Tominaga actually does have a decent role in it. There's also baseball, and a white guy with a fearsome mustache.

Nicholas Driscoll from Toho Kingdom apparently bought this for $800. I feel solidarity with him as I myself have done some questionable spending lately.

There is technically another manga, but I don't think you're ready for it. It appeared in the January 1971 issue of Saturday Manga. The best I can figure, a man drinks some kind of whiskey that H-Man-itizes him, a woman kisses him and somehow... swallows him... and then coughs him out... but it all turns out to be a dream sequence in the imagination of a woman who is being given CPR after nearly drowning?

Let's move on to merchandise... if you really, really need your own liquid human, you have some options. CAST has, of course, produced an ornament of one of them, which comes packaged with the poor frog who gets liquified in the film:

That's the deluxe version, though. If the frog weirds you out, there is a version with just the human.

Hang him on your Christmas tree. You must.

There are also more H-Man sofubi than I expected. There exists a possibly unlicensed garage kit that comes not only with a humanoid H-Man but also one of the dancers in mid-H-Man-ification:

This picture really gives off a vibe, doesn't it

 

Or you can get a more normal-looking, run-of-the-mill (and licensed) sofubi that you don't have to assemble and paint yourself.

We're going to end our H-Man journey here, since there's not a lot out there in the way of merch and fun stuff. I think it would be cool if somebody like Super7 did Transforming Human figures, but that feels like it's probably never going to happen.

You can watch The H-Man right this instant on various streaming services (Tubi, Amazon Prime, etc), but unfortunately all legal online streaming platforms have the shortened English dub. However, Columbia Pictures' "Icons of Sci-Fi Toho Collection" DVD, which packages this film with Mothra and Battle in Outer Space, appears to include both the original and the dub, and is pretty cheap and easy to find secondhand. (Interestingly, the back of the box covers all its bases by referring to Ishirō Honda using both his real name AND "Inoshiro".) Mill Creek and Eureka have released it on DVD with subtitles as well and both times it is packaged with Battle in Outer Space.

Tune in next time for more vaguely spooky films...