Kwaidan (1964)

KWAIDAN
1964
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi
Staring Rentaro Mikuni, Keiko Kishi, Michiyo Aratama, Misako Watanabe and Tatsuya Nakadai

Now we're up to a movie in my review docket that's been sitting there for a LONG time.  If you look around the internet for professional reviews of Kwaidan, you'll find a lot of gushing and flat-out verbal orgasm, calling this "one of the most beautiful films ever shot" and an "unequaled Japanese masterpiece" and such.  But that stuff isn't why you come to the Lick Ness Monster (hopefully, because I've dropped the ball on scholarly B.S. a long time ago).  This is the place for story and characters, not technical stuff, so let's see what I can whip up for this movie that film critics the world over virtually fellate.

On many levels, they're right.  Going strictly by visual impact, this movie is indeed a sight to behold, and I'm not even talking about "by 1964 standards."  It's still a feast for the eyes in 2015, and while the special effects are sometimes wonky, they're wonky in a way that dazzle you, not make unfortunate saps point their fingers at the screen and make bad jokes.  The acting is occasionally also a little suspect, but it really doesn't matter.  In movies that take traditional Japanese ghost stories and make them as SLOW BURN and visually impressive as humanly possible, you're not looking for performances that woo the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  What this movie has going for it is PACE - glorious, glorious pace, sometimes achingly slow, but never so damn hectic and unwatchable that it treads into modern-day action movie territory.  Not even close to that.  And while the movie starts much stronger than it finishes, it's still worth watching at least once, 164-minute running time and all.

Once again, Kwaidan is director Masaki Kobayashi retelling four traditional Japanese ghost stories.  First up is "The Black Hair," a story about social advancement, the endangerment of marriage, and swords.  Really, really big swords.  A swordmaker living an impoverished life with his wife decides to leave her when the opportunity arises to marry a much more affluent woman.  In a twist that absolutely no one will see coming, the husband soon realizes that this was a huge mistake, and that his second wife is nowhere near as nice, friendly and devoted as his original wife.  See those last two sentences?  That's like 20 minutes of Kwaidan condensed.  Did I mention that this movie LOVES its pace?  As he still longs for his ex, he breaks the news to his current wife that he wants to dissolve the marriage and head home.  Of course, he does, where a horrific surprise awaits.  This is without a doubt the most effective story of the bunch, particularly because of that ending.  You know how I reviewed Insidious last week and moaned about its woefully bad downer ending?  This is a story where a downer ending is used to PERFECT effect, coming off as completely appropriate.  So +5 points to the movie for this segment.

From here, we get a story that I've seen no less than three different versions of.  Titled "The Woman of the Snow," this one also takes place in really, really olden times and concerns a woodcutter who takes refuge in a hut during a fierce snowstorm.  Unfortunately, a ghost of the snow kills his mentor splitting the hut with him - although she spares him for reasons we cannot comprehend, telling the woodcutter to never speak of what he has seen or else she will kill him.  Again, this leads to a twist that absolutely no one will see coming.  Not that it matters.  On his way home, he meets a woman who looks curiously like the ghost, taking her home where they fall in love and eventually marry.  Ten years down the line, we get the closing twist that, while it is a downer, again feels completely appropriate, unforced, and...not lame.  In this day and age of horror movies forcing twists just for the sake or twists, it's so refreshing to see these endings based entirely on emotion and mood rather than loud noise shocks, no matter how slow-moving it is.  Also, if this plot sounds familiar, it's because it was remade in the really awesome Tales From the Darkside: The Movie.

The first time I saw this film, I remember being so jacked at this point, prepared for more home runs.  But unfortunately, this is where the movie takes a downturn.  The next segment is titled "Hoichi the Earless," and for the most part, it's a musical about a battle that took place long before the segment takes place.  Hoichi himself is a singer who recounts the story of the battle and is called before a royal family to sing his masterpiece for them.  While the previous segments were long, it feels SO much longer here, as the long sections of operatic music unfortunately is one aspect of the film that has not aged very well.  In addition, the character of Hoichi himself is nowhere near as fascinating as the protagonists that we've enjoyed thus far.  When the royal family believes that Hoichi's singing may be calling ghosts, the downer ending that comes from this belief DOES drag the rating up somewhat, but it's still easily the worst segment of the movie.  -2 points.

The movie wraps up with "In a Cup of Tea."  An author wonders why so many writers have started works only to not finish them, eventually reading a story from one of his own books about just such a thing.  This is our framing device for a "story within a story," as a samurai named Kannai is charged with guarding a daimyo.  While eating lunch, he sees a curious face in his teacup that does not belong to himself, an incident that understandably creeps him out.  Within short order, he receives a visitor - amazingly, the same guy who appeared in his teacup.  He introduces himself before pointing out that he was the man that Kannai "wounded" that afternoon, and the samurai makes a few pointless slashes at this ghost-like figure before he disappears, seemingly for good.  The story more or less ends from here, going back to its framing device for another down ending that ranks somewhere between the first two stories and "Hoichi the Earless" in terms of its satisfying content.

Much like many J-horror films, Kwaidan is a movie that you're either going to be very into, or simply not get at all.  In doing my sparse research for this review, I learned that during its initial screenings for American audiences the entire "Woman of the Snow" segment was cut.  While it's arguably the strongest segment, I can understand this, because this running time is simply brutal if you're not a hardened J-horror veteran like myself.  Hey, I sat through Ju-Rei: The Uncanny.  I'm invincible.  Unfortunately, most people aren't.  If you've got a rainy afternoon and nothing else going on, though, this is definitely a movie that you should watch at least once in your lifetime, if for no other reason than it's just so incredibly different from what you're used to seeing here in the States.  And even from its eventual J-horror brethren.

*** out of ****.  Two segments are great, the other two not so much.  Fortunately, those two segments combined with a nice, slow-going slog through ghost country is fascinating enough to seek out a cheap used copy of.  Check it out.