大学の山賊たち / Daigaku no sanzokutachi / University Bandits (1960)

Release date: July 31st, 1960

Director: Kihachi Okamoto
Studio: Toho
Cast: Tsutomu Yamazaki, Akira Kubo, Mickey Curtis, Makoto Satō, Tatsuya Ehara, Yumi Shirakawa, Misa Uehara, Ken Uehara, Sachio Sakai, Kin Sugai, Akihiko Hirata, Ikio Sawamura, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Koji Tsuruta, Tadao Nakamaru et al.

Availability: Online streaming on Japanese Amazon Prime only within Japan; DVD release.

____

This is an exciting one: a movie from Toho's "golden age" with all the dudes in it, directed by Kihachi Okamoto shortly after his solo debut, with a soundtrack by Masaru Satō - and it takes place in some kind of haunted cottage? Sign me up. Wacky unofficial English titles for this film include "The Spook Cottage", "Bad Boys at University", and "University Rascals". (This has nothing to do with Daigaku no Oneechan.)

This film is not obscure at all if you live in Japan; anybody with an Amazon Prime account can chuck it on right now. But having a DVD is so much more fun, isn't it? Almost as fun as having a VHS tape, which is almost as fun as having a LaserDisc.

Together, we're going to find out the answer to the foremost question on my mind: does he ski? (Spoiler: No.)

The film begins with the end of a film: the head of Marukyu Department Store (Ken Uehara) watching a film about skiing. Uehara's character, Niwa, plans to buy up huts on a mountain to take advantage of the current skiing fad. Hirata plays the manager of the department store, and Yasuhisa Tsutsumi plays the store's publicity manager. Tsutsumi's Wikipedia page notes that he turned down invitations to go hang out at Ishirō Honda's house - an invitation that Honda extended to many of the actors he frequently worked with, including Hirata, who apparently would go over there and sing. (Oh to be a fly on the wall, am I right?)

I digress. At the same time, an all-male college mountaineering group calling themselves "Sanzoku" ("mountain bandits") is recreating on a mountain. At the same time as that, a separate group of all-female climbers is also on the same mountain, hearing the college group's antics from farther away.

Sidenote: Mickey Curtis was a very inexperienced skiier when he was cast here, in a role that required him to ski. Yūzō Kayama, who had yet to debut as an actor at the time but was known to be a good skiier, taught Curtis during production. According to Curtis, this may have led to Kayama catching Toho's eye and eventually becoming one of their big stars throughout the 1960s, but it's just an anecdote, so take it at face value.

Mickey Curtis shibari? Alright, fine.

Niwa meets up with Officer Ikio Sawamura as he departs his train to the mountain. Sawamura's character tells him that the hut he's intending to scope out and buy is supposed to be haunted. There was an accident where a man died thirty years ago, and now his widow (chanson singer and Takarazuka lady Fubuki Koshiji) lives there with her servant Rokusuke (Sachio Sakai). The deceased man, as we will see, looked identical to Niwa.

I want to know specifically who got to paint Ken Uehara's portrait. I wish it were me.

Meanwhile, the college boys and the girls become aware of each other's presence because Makoto Satō's character Hara ("stomach", since he's always talking about how hungry he is; they all have nicknames) keeps yelling their catchphrase "Bakkyaro" (バッキャロー) loud enough for the whole world to hear. This is kind of a slangy colloquial term that comes from "bakayarou" ("stupid bastard", basically). Anyway, one of the girls bakkyaroes back at Hara and the two climbing teams begin singing in tandem as they draw closer to each other's camp, with the girls trying to ignore the guys.

Mickey Curtis' character Guinea (I'm thinking there's some kind of pun going on here considering that he is an OB/GYN student... "Guinea" could sound vaguely like "GYN" if you pronounce it a certain way) is pretty bad at skiing even within the film, which makes the anecdote I mentioned at the start of the film even funnier - he was so inexperienced, he had to be taught to be even a bad skiier. He's not as bad on a mountain as Niwa, though, who passes out during a blizzard on his way to the hut. The group - now an amalgam of the guys and the girls - has to rescue him.

The group takes him to the creepy mountain hut so they can all wait out the storm. They meet the widow who lives there and introduce themselves. She's a little "off", and I love how Koshiji is playing this character. It's perfect to have a stage actress in the role, her theatrics feel over-the-top outside of a stage setting and it works great with how eccentric the widow is meant to be.

The widow takes them upstairs to her terrifying cobwebbed attic where the ghost of her husband sits in a chair. Only she can see him. The room is decorated with nude portraits he did for which she was the model. While Niwa is still delirious, the group realizes how much he resembles another portrait: the one of the widow's deceased husband! The widow's behavior is creepy on the outside, but really just kind of sad.

"Shujin desu." ("The man of the house.")

[all bow confusedly]

Sidenote: I really wasn't ready for baby Makoto Satō's super fluffy hair in this.

After Niwa wakes up, the widow just assumes he's her husband - she has been seeing, hearing and interacting with him all this time, so it's not strange to her that he's there in the flesh. But it's quite strange to him.

Uehara being called "boya"

One of the girls (Otora, played by Rumiko Sasa) can see the ghost too, and it's a great scene: she wakes up in the night to use the toilet, encounters the ghost-husband sitting by the fire, asks where the restroom is, and he extends his arm for her to link elbows with him, but when she tries, she passes right through him. The ghost is actually very much a part of the film, and he's distinguishable from the living Niwa by his pipe and his wig. He skis. He gets hit with snowballs. There's another cool (and very trademark Okamoto) shot here where the ghost getting hit in the face with a snowball segues into Niwa getting splashed with water as the ghost squeezes out his wet gloves back at the hut. (The ghost can, of course, teleport.)

I'm really not used to seeing Ken Uehara in a comedic role like this. Like, that's Metalder's dad! What's he doing sledding down a flight of stairs?

Niwa does reveal eventually that he's not the woman's husband, he's from a department store and he wants to use her for land development. He explains his plans to develop the cabins into exclusive hotel-style resorts and all the skiiers are against it. Even the ghost is against it.

We are now just over a half hour into the film and the main villains are introduced: Tadao Nakamaru as "Ken", a gangster posing as a foreign prince who is really on the run from the police, and Akira Wakamatsu as "Sabu", posing as his servant. They are being pursued by Yoshio Tsuchiya keibu. The two gangsters convince Rokusuke that they're bigwigs so he will escort them safely to the hut and away from the pursuing detective and cops. I should mention that Masaru Satō score: for most of the film it's very stately and not too distinctive, but there's a faux-Arabesque leitmotif that plays when Ken and Sabu are around that is very much the Satō we're used to.

The cops vs. thugs shootout triggers an avalanche. The skiiers are now snowed in at the cabin along with the widow, the president, and the ghost. They sit down to eat together, but the widow, realizing Rokusuke has been caught outside and is probably dead, wants a moment of silence. During this silence, Rokusuke enters, carrying the two gangsters with him. Back down the mountain, the president's staff and the police are all now well aware that there's trouble going on up at that hut, and send a team up after them.

Akira Kubo's character Uchuu ("Space", kind of the nerdy one) fixes up an old radio, and the group is able to hear a report about what's been going on while they're snowed in. They're relieved to hear that people know they're missing. The gangsters are less than relieved that the skiiers now know they're gangsters and not foreign dignitaries. They order the skiiers to hand over their limited supply of food at gunpoint and also order Tsutomu Yamazaki's character Okashira ("Head" since he's the leader) to escort them down the mountain.

This ends up being their downfall, since Okashira is a much stronger skiier, and leads them down a difficult trail, watching them struggle to keep up while he's doing just fine. He and Tatsuyoshi Ehara's character Zeimusho (literally "tax office"... yeah, I don't see the logic behind that one) leave the gangsters in the lurch and return to the hut with their stolen food.

The widow remarks with pity on how the two gangsters were left to basically die of exposure, which makes Okashira realize that leaving people to die on the mountain is not the way real mountaineers do things, and he decides to go rescue them. Zeimusho objects but is overruled by all, including the ghost. So now we're partying with the gangsters again.

Ken has a knife, but Zeimusho has a gun... an unloaded gun. Ken and Sabu seize the stores of food and begin spitefully devouring it all as the widow and the non-ghost watch. But then it happens: Ken develops appendicitis. Noooobody expects the Sudden Appendicitis. The closest thing they have to a doctor is Guinea. Guinea is forced to do a jury-rigged operation on Ken, but he needs blood; fortunately the widow is a universal donor. (Funny bit here where the group is asked what their blood types are and Otora replies "C!")

With their food stores running out, something has to be done. Okashira and Zeimusho leave the cabin to try to find help. They're gone for a long time, and the group fears the worst, but eventually Okashira returns with a bag full of food. However, with Ken still recovering from his super gross mountain hut blood transfusion, Sabu is in charge, and Sabu is the mean one. He wants that food, and takes one of the girls hostage. The ghost turns on maximum spook mode, but there's only so much a ghost can do, and Sabu escapes down the mountain. Hara, Uchuu and Okashira pursue, catching up to them easily since they're on skis and the gangsters aren't. While Hara is slapping the stuffing out of him, we see the rescue team crest the mountain.

Niwa rips up the contract he brought to try to get the widow to sign over her property to him. The police and everyone else arrive, and the detectives and cops escort the two gangsters out in handcuffs and a stretcher. Koji Tsuruta is here too, but he's got a very nothingburger role. I guess they just wanted him in this. At the very end the actual crown prince who the gangsters were faking affiliation with shows up but I did not take screenshots of him because he's Arihiro Fujimura in brownface. (Everybody is kinda in brownface here because they're all sunburnt to hell, but Fujimura is in, like, brownface brownface.)

This was a fun watch. Kihachi Okamoto is in full swing after crafting his earlier directorial efforts in a relatively restrained, "just doing a job" mode. The flourishes that we love to see in his movies - creative cuts that blend scenes into each other; irreverent, often lewd humor; a little absurdity and a little bit of heart - are all here. I love how the story about the widow living with her husband's ghost looks strange on the surface but is handled with so much empathy - and, really, she's not delusional at all, because the ghost does objectively exist. My only complaint is that this had just the tiniest smallest most inconsequential role for Hirata but I'm plenty used to that at this point.

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. (Edit: The secret reasons were that I was in the middle of subtitling it.)

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...