江戸川乱歩の美女シリーズ: 湖底の美女 / Edogawa ranpo no bijo shirīzu: Kotei no bijo (1982) / Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series: Beauty at the Bottom of the Lake

Release date: October 23, 1982

Director: Umetsugu Inoue

Studio: Shochiku/TV Asahi

Cast: Yumiko Nogawa, Chiaki Matsubara, Akihiko Hirata, Kojiro Kusanagi, Emiko Yamauchi, Tatsuhiro Itō, Yoshio Inaba, Masaya Takahashi et al.

Availability: Full series available on DVD; it also has been aired on Shochiku Tokyu every Sunday since April of this year as part of a celebration of Edogawa Ranpo's birth. Available on U-Next (Japan-only).

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Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series was a series of TV movies that ran for a remarkable 17 years (from 1977 to 1994) as part of TV Asahi's Saturday Wide Theater timeslot. As the title implies, the series adapted works by the author Edogawa Ranpo (the more famous pseudonym of Tarō Hirai). This one in particular is based on "The Lakeside Pavilion Incident". For a TV movie, it's surprising that this is relatively accessible; Hirata worked extensively in television after he left Toho in the late '70s, but the vast (and I do mean vast) majority of TV movies from that time are virtually lost media. Apparently the series takes a dip in quality after this film, which was the last one directed by Umetsugu Inoue. The soundtrack was done by acclaimed and prolific composer Hajime Kaburagi.

This will contain full spoilers, so beware. As I always say, all images are copyright Shochiku, and I claim no ownership - I'm just the weirdo with the DVD. Here are some scans of the booklet. This is the 2002 King Records release.

I always find it really interesting to hear what movie/series people use when they say "Akihiko Hirata from[...]" since he was in SO much stuff. In this case, the booklet chooses to mention his recurring role on Taiyo ni Hoero!, which is virtually unknown in the West.

Detective Akechi (Shigeru Amachi's character throughout the series) finally gets a vacation at a picturesque hotel on Lake Shirakaba with two characters who I assume are from earlier episodes. At the station, he meets up with Hirata's character, a finance lawyer named Kamimura, who he apparently is familiar with. They greet each other and then part ways.

At the center of the plot is a painter named Yosui and his family problems. This seemed like it was on track to becoming an inheritance drama, but it gets a little wacky - you'll see.

All the players end up - in classic murder mystery style - staying in the same hotel: Akechi, his friends Fumiyo and Kobayashi, Kamimura, Yosui's model Yukari, and Yosui himself, as well as another painter, Kaga, and his model, Maki. Very abruptly, Yosui walks in on Shinobu in bed with her younger lover, Nozaki, also a pupil of Yosui's. We learn that Yosui contrived this as a setup, convincing Nozaki to sleep with her so that he could get a speedy divorce. Nozaki's condition for doing this was that he would be allowed to marry Yosui's daughter Yoko, but she eventually dumps him.

There's a lot of girls in swimsuits in this.

After a rapid-fire argument that I honestly didn't catch a lot of, Yoko discovers a kokeshi doll with a skull carved into it in her bed. The booklet says that this "foreshadows a murder"; I'm not sure if that means the kokeshi doll is a recurring motif throughout the Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series films or just this one. Yoko runs to Yukari and the two remember that they conveniently know a detective staying in the same hotel - no vacation for Akechi after all. 

Just after the girls ask Akechi about the doll, things get even more complicated: while sitting down to watch a televised live performance by the Marine Girls (an underwater dance troupe also responsible for some of the diving scenes in the film), Akechi and friends witness a corpse at the bottom of an aquarium. It's Yosui's daughter Yoko, and the news finally sends Yosui - who had a weak heart - over the edge. It doesn't kill him, but he's incapacitated.

Other detectives interview the security guard/aquarium maintenance guy who was overseeing the monitors - he had taken sleeping pills on the job and wasn't watching. By the time he got back to his post, the body was already there. A second hotel worker attests to this. Akechi also talks to Yukari about the doll, but pretty much just tells her to take it to the police. (He's playing it cool, but you can tell gears are turning in his head.)

🤨

The detectives also question Shinobu (with Kamimura assuming lawyer duties), and as soon as she namedrops Akechi, the whole mood in the room changes - oh, Japan's #1 detective is in the area? We gotta get him on this! 🎶Zubatto sanjo, zubatto kaiketsu!🎶 (Sorry, I hear somebody say "kaiketsu" and that's all I think of.)

love seeing him play lawyers. putting that law degree to good use.

Akechi gets everybody in a room and looks into their alibis. Shinobu is coy about it in a way that screams "I have something to do with this", Kamimura is offended to even be asked, and I didn't entirely catch what Nozaki says but I think he claims he was alone. Akechi shows the kokeshi around and nobody says they've seen it. We move into a montage of other interviewees describing what they saw of Yoko prior to her death.

Amachi is wearing this sweet jacket for most of the film

As abruptly as we're shown Shinobu and Nozaki together, we're VERY suddenly and completely out of nowhere shown Shinobu and Kamimura in bed together as well. Oh, alright then. 

And then - oh.

Oh, okay?

Well, now Maki's dead.

Fumiyo and Akechi have another chat with the aquarium guy about Maki's murder, and they watch Yukari on the monitors as they talk - oh. Oh no.

Yukari survives her skullman encounter and we load up the funky Hajime Kaburagi score as Akechi pursues the killer(?). This of course goes nowhere. Too early in the movie for a big reveal like that.

Akechi has been, in the background, nonchalantly questioning people about this print of one of Yosui's paintings that the aquarium guy has in his office. With his expert detective skills, he intuits that it has to be relevant to the case. He enlists Fumiyo and Kobayashi to find as much information about the mountain as they possibly can, and they learn that Yosui himself is somehow involved with events that transpired there in 1961. Akechi goes so far as to travel to the mountain... but so does the killer!

Akechi goes missing after an attempted murder by rockslide, and we transition back to the hotel, where we see an unknown figure deposit another skull doll on Yosui's bed and then turn off his oxygen while his attending nurse naps. Unfortunately for his would-be murderer, he still doesn't die from this. The other detective, in Akechi's absence, grills a room full of murder suspects quite dramatically.

Yosui, still recuperating, is wheeled into the room and tells his story in front of everyone. 20 years prior, on the mountain from the painting, Yosui took shelter in a hut occupied by a woman and her daughter during a bad storm. Yosui raped the woman, whose daughter turns out to be Yukari. So Shinobu was not Yoko's biological mother.

So, no matter how suspicious Shinobu and Kamimura looked, no matter who was sleeping with whom, it was all a bunch of good old red herrings. Yukari had the motive. It looks like it's her. But here is where it all takes a hard left turn. Now Sanzo, who I've been referring to as "aquarium guy", points to Yosui and says "that man isn't Yosui"! "Yosui" reveals that Sanzo is Yukari's father! "Yosui" takes off his fake facial hair and wig! And begins to peel off the mask he'd been wearing!

I had been a little bored at the beginning of this film but I will admit this moment made me go "oh NOOOO!" out loud.

Akechi Columboes his way through an exposition dump: Yukari's mother killed herself following Yosui's assault, leaving Yukari alone, and Sanzo had to witness it all. Now Sanzo is the one with the motive, and we see it all revealed: he killed Yoko, pretended to be sleeping, dumped the body in the aquarium, and then killed Maki because she saw him do it. He also pretended to attack Yukari in the skull mask to throw Akechi off. But in a final dramatic moment, Sanzo shoots himself through the heart rather than be arrested for his crimes, and Yukari kills herself in the same lake her mother did, unable to live with herself.

So that was a wild ride. I can't compare it to other episodes of the series since I haven't seen any, but I can believe that this was considered the peak of it.

I tend to associate Hirata and Amachi with each other, since they were both of the same generation and both died very young within about a year of each other, but they really didn't work together very often at all. I like Shigeru Amachi as well, his cool-guy persona really works for this role, but I'm not sure how I felt about his younger assistants - they seemed like they were just there for audience relatability, or something. I would also imagine the plot was changed drastically from the source material, since so much of it relies on things like television monitors that would not have been around in the 1920s.

I had a lot of fun with this overall; it was a little cheesy but in all the right ways that make a murder drama a good time.

ザ•ハングマン / The Hangman (1980 TV Series)

I'm making a post about this series because it just sounds really interesting to me. I would love to be able to watch some of it someday.

The Hangman was a crime show produced by Shochiku that followed the activities of a clandestine organization named "Hangman", whose purpose is to capture and execute criminals under the supervision of a leader who calls himself "God"¹. It was intended to be a modern adaptation of the Hissatsu series, a massively popular jidaigeki drama about assassins which ran for a whopping 30+ series and spawned spinoff movies, comics, books, games, and, yes, pachinko machines. The twist is that "execution" in The Hangman does not refer to actual capital punishment, but instead a complicated series of traps and set-ups that lead to the criminals being exposed to the public, which is referred to as a "hanging".

The hour-long show began airing in November of 1980 and would run for seven series until 1987. The first series ran for roughly a year and 51 episodes, while the second series ran for 28 episodes from June to December of 1982. After that it was followed by New Hangman (新ハングマン, Shin Hangman), which ran for 26 episodes from July of 1983 to February of 1984. This is what we're going to be looking at today.

Multiple well-known older actors played God, often in a voice-only role, including Sō Yamamura, Frankie Sakai, and, in New Hangman, Shigeru Amachi, although Amachi only appeared in the first episode. New Hangman was in general a departure from the previous format of the series, and all of the Hangman operatives were in disguise as travel agents. Instead of God appearing directly, his orders were relayed to Hangman throughout the series by his butler, Sonoyama, played by Akihiko Hirata².

As per some YouTube comments, this series has been (perhaps is?) sporadically rebroadcast as re-runs, and the whole thing was re-aired on Family Theater in 1999. The first series was released to DVD in 2004, and the subsequent series were planned to be released as well, but they were put on hold indefinitely for unknown reasons, so, you know, that's just great. The first episode of New Hangman was actually given away as a freebie with an issue of COMIC Deka, which is, uh, an erotic manga magazine, I guess? But that's the extent of its home media release.

New Hangman's internet presence amounts to a handful of clips of less than two minutes in runtime. It's been difficult to turn up any photos of Hirata in his Sonoyama role, and previously the only thing I'd been able to find was this...

...computer, enhance!

You can also see his name in the credits here.

Which I think you'll agree is not very satisfying. I combed Twitter, though, and have been able to find a few more pictures:

See more here, here, and here.

It does seem like the show has been re-aired at least once (otherwise we wouldn't have the above pictures), but it's sorely lacking a home media release. Hopefully at some point someone will give it a release in the form of an actual DVD box set and not a single disc stuck in a nudie manga magazine.

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¹ I was fully expecting this to just be Google Translate rendering the word "kami" into English, but looking at the Wiki article in the original Japanese, it is actually, literally "God" in katakana.

² He also had a guest role in episode 7 of the first Hangman series, but this episode is similarly unavailable unless you have the (out of print) DVD.