31 – Musical Mischief (The Happiness of the Katakuris)

As you and Roland carefully pick your way through the undergrowth the picture becomes clearer. The house is not abandoned, far from it, several figures are exiting the building.

Some have shovels and two of them are carrying…is that…a body?

Roland gestures for you to stop.

“I don’t know these people. The place was abandoned, I swear on my life.”

Keeping your eyes on the group you watch as they walk, procession like, deeper into the woods. Reluctantly you follow, Roland slightly ahead, his years of silvan living allowing him near silent movement.

You have no such advantage.

Crack

As the stick breaks beneath your foot, the sound is like a gunshot in the silence of the night.

“Run, back to the camp, fetch the others!” shouts Roland.

As you crash through the undergrowth, you hear music behind you.

Something I love about making the decision to collect any and all horror is that you get such variation. OK so horror tends to have a general theme running through it of…well…not actually horror, not all ‘horror’ related films are scary, or horrifying in fact. I think the theme that links them all is something like the macabre.

Now I may be wrong, perhaps it’s still too strong a word to cover all horror but it works for me. Something can be both funny and macabre at the same time, something like Casper isn’t scary but it IS macabre, we’re hanging out with a dead kid. Now the theory maybe falls apart a bit with creature features, though they usually involve death and dismemberment so actually, yeah, that works.

Anyway, where was I? Macabre. Is covering up a bunch of deaths whilst singing about it macabre? I think so.

It’s Takashi Miike’s, 2001 film, The Happiness of the Katakuris.

This is another film that I acquired recently but saw many years ago. I actually bought it as a birthday present for a friend back in the early 2000’s, back when the only Japanese films that made it over to the UK were generally the weirdest ones, it’s what you came to expect at the time, it gave the impression that all of Japanese media is just nuts. Now I’m certainly no expert and I happen to like that side of filmmaking but I would hazard a guess that in reality there’s plenty of mundane films and TV available to Japanese audiences. This…isn’t one of those.

The film follows 4 generations of a family who live together at, and run, a B&B. Business isn’t going particularly well as the promised road that was supposed to be built hasn’t materialised and so they have no guests. Eventually they do receive some guests but they all start dying under various odd circumstances, then as a side plot we have a man claiming to be related to Queen Elizabeth seducing the young mother of the family. Eventually these two plots coincide and we reach a dramatic finale. I’ll go into some of this in more detail in the spoilers sections but what makes this stand out, apart from the black comedy aspect of it, are the musical numbers.

Now there aren’t songs ALL the time, this isn’t a full fledged horror musical a-la the Little Shop of Horrors remake or Repo the Genetic Opera, but there are a fair few of them and they really raise this film for me, they’re what makes it stand out. I love how ridiculous they are as well, whether it’s a song about love where a character is flying through the air, a dramatic backlit song about discovering a dead body, or a zombie dance number straight out of Thriller, they’re just a huge amount of fun and contrast well with the sombre tone of some scenes.

I do need to rewind a little here and talk about the intro. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the plot of the film but it’s a wonderful grim little stop-motion, yes that’s right, sequence where we transition from real actors to following the journey of creepy little cherub as we witness the cycle of life and love and death…or something like that, anyway, it’s fantastic! You can never go wrong with some stop-motion I say.

Something else which stood out to me, or rather didn’t, was how believable the cast were as a family. They really gelled together and weren’t either too nice to each other or too antagonistic, just the usual family ups and downs…well except maybe the grandad, he’s pretty out there. With surreal comedies like this it’s often hard to judge the acting but there’s enough somewhat serious portions of the film to say the acting is good, nothing stands out as excellent but as I mentioned it’s all believable. Interestingly enough the father of the family, Kenji Sawada, and the Con Artist character, Kiyoshiro Imawano, were in fairly well known bands in Japan.

In terms of this being a horror film I already touched on that in my intro, this is in no way a scary film. What it does have is a good amount of black comedy, dead bodies and even some zombies at one point, pretty damn good looking ones as well, out doing some dedicated Zombie films.

This is an odd film…very odd. It’s 100% an acquired taste, a marmite movie, you’ll either love it or hate it, you’re unlikely to think it’s simply ‘average’.

On that note I should probably tell you what I think of it. I definitely fall into the love camp, I’m a big fan of very strange films, however…very strange films are rarely going to be a 5 for me. I enjoy the craziness, I enjoy the songs, but I would be hard pressed to say that the story is truly engaging. It’s not bad by any means but if it wasn’t for all the madness then I think I’d find myself a little bored, maybe that’s a little unfair, it was never going to be anything other than what it is, a mad musical about love and death, it just doesn’t have that little bit extra. I’m therefore going to give The Happiness of the Katakuris 4 logs out of 5.

If you enjoy musicals, black comedy and something a little out of the ordinary, then give it a watch!

**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**

Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.

I mentioned earlier about the stop motion into, well I’ll go into a bit more detail. This section is absolutely bizarre and is one of those scenes I’ll show to people on it’s own as a “What the fuck” sequence. It starts with a live action scene of a lady eating a bowl of soup in a restaurant. She soon finds something odd in there, the aforementioned cherub, she screams, we switch to stop motion and the little guy see’s her very heart shaped uvula in her mouth, grabs it, rips it out and flies through the window! We then get a fairly decent length combo of the cherub being eaten by a crow, which is then killed by a creepy toy…bear I guess…with wolverine claws. Then a poster of a crow, turns into an egg, which gets eaten by a snake, which gets picked up by a vulture, it drops the egg, which hatches into another cherub, which gets immediately eaten by another crow who then gets taken out with a log by the grandad from the main portion of the film. So yeah, weird! Sorry for the long ramble but you’ll be just as confused watching it.

OK so I have a favourite character. He’s not a nice character but the premise is just bizarre. Richard Sagawa is a conman who convinces the character Shizue that he is a British Royal Navy Pilot who’s related to The Queen. It’s such an outlandish claim but Shizue falls for him entirely. To be fair to him he wears a rented uniform when they first meet, then speaks to her on the phone whilst mimicking the sounds of battle so he goes pretty hard with the deception. In reality he’s just a swindler, out to get some money from Shizue and meets his end at her and her grandfather’s hands.

The strangest part of an already strange film is the ending. A nearby volcano erupts and we get another stop motion scene where a lava flow picks up the guesthouse and floats it to a beautiful verdant pasture. Next we get a Sound of Music style song which is a scene that anybody who has seen the cover art or trailer will be familiar with. It’s a happy ending for the family, then suddenly we are informed that the Grandad dropped dead a year later, but hey, “That’s life”.

I wasn’t really sure how to sign this one off but I figured keep it simple, no need to make a song and dance about it.

2 – The Old Ways are the Best (Ring – 1998)

The sound of silence greets you as you awake, a sliver of sunlight cutting across your eyes like a bright scar. You slept well, despite the muffled sounds of singing from the rooms below going on well into the night. After freshening up you head down to the bar area where you are greeted by a thin, middle aged man with a thick black beard and deep set green eyes.

Good morning friend, I am Gregor, the landlord. I hope your night was a pleasant one, no bad dreams, no tap tap tapping at the chamber door?

Excellent! Breakfast will be served once my daughter Willa returns from the well, if you’re hungry you may wish to give her a hand, it’s out back, can’t miss it.

At the far end of the Inn’s rear garden you see a young dark haired lady in a light summer dress, its geometric pattern reminds you of the 70s, all oranges and browns. She turns quickly at your approach.

Oh! You startled me! You must be our new guest, and come to help with the fetching of the water, very good of you. I’m Willa, and this is our well, deep, dark, and full of history, as well as water. Sometimes when I’m bringing up the bucket I fancy the weight of the water is something holding onto the other end, wanting to come up. A girl can dream. Here now, help me with this water and I’ll get some breakfast going for you.

No, no, you’ve done more than enough already, go sit in the lounge area, put your feet up, breakfast won’t be long. Why don’t you read a book or watch a videotape, hah yes VHS, after all, the old ways are the best, don’t you think?

I would imagine that today’s film needs little introduction, after all, we’ve all seen this film, right, it was huge? Perhaps not…which version have you seen? Just Gore Verbinski’s 2002 version? If so, then you haven’t seen this film. Today we are reviewing Hideo Nakata’s 1998 film, リング or Ringu (Hepburn romanization), or Ring.

Not in fact the first film adaptation, that title goes to Chisui Takigawa’s 1995 version made for TV in Japan, but the 1998 version was the first theatrically released.

All three of the films above are based on Koji Suzuki’s 1991 novel, called unsurprisingly Ring.

The story follows a reporter, Reiko, who is looking into the mysterious deaths of a group of teenagers, all of whom have watched a supposedly cursed videotape. The urban legend states that anybody who watches the tape will die exactly 7 days later. As Reiko discovers more and more about the tape and its contents, the stakes become increasingly high.

The two main protagonist, Reiko and her ex husband Ryūji, are excellent, they come across very natural and you can believe there was once something between them. It’s really these two who hold the film together as we discover the story behind the cursed tape and feel their increasing urgency as time goes on.

I should also mention their young son Yoichi who somehow manages to be super creepy but cute at the same time, perhaps due to Reiko’s questionable parenting.

The Ring franchise became synonymous with scary movies, I remember at the time it was becoming well known it was considered one of the scariest, if not the scariest film out there. So, is it? Or more specifically is this particular Ring film scary? Well it’s hard to look at this film through the eyes of a late 90’s, early 2000’s viewer. Is it scary? Yes, it has an excellent premise, making an everyday mundane object into something that can kill, and the way in which it does this is again some grade A fear inducing stuff. Is it the scariest film? No, certainly not by 2022, but even back in in the early 2000’s it was surpassed in shear fear factor by fellow Japanese film Ju-On: The Grudge, to name but one, my opinion of course.

What Ring is however is a film which influenced a generation and opened many peoples eyes here in ‘The West’ to the horror films of other nations and the Asian horror scene in particular, even if it was often through Hollywood remakes. Their popularity and the burgeoning internet had people seeking out the originals of many of these films, and if Ring was one of those, then they wouldn’t have been disappointed.

I’ve been lucky enough with my random number generation (I swear, my collection has some real stinkers) to have two good films for my first two reviews. So you know now that I think it’s good, but how good? Well, as much as I would like to give Ring full marks, I just can’t quite do it. The main characters are great, the concept is compelling and creepy, and the film has an inevitability and urgency about it, but yet it does this, whilst somehow feeling too slow at times. I also felt a bit of a disconnect with the other characters we learn about surrounding the tape and its origins. I didn’t know enough about them, to really care about them, which is a shame and is something which I felt would have lifted the film.

Therefore I’m going to award Ring, 4 Towels out of 5. This is a great horror film. Creepy, suspenseful and ultimately important.

**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**

Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.

At this point in time I have yet to see the Gore Verbinski version, I watched the 1998 film way back in the early 2000’s but never saw the remake. Perhaps it’s that film that people are referring to with regards how scary it is, or maybe it’s just early 2000’s sensibilities, because although I found it creepy there wasn’t anything that terrified me. Of course the iconic scene where the girl Sadako emerges from the TV is excellent and the jerky way she moves disturbing but perhaps I have been spoilt by the similar scenes in Ju-On: The Grudge. The scariest part of the film for me was when they were in the well looking for Sadako’s corpse. The idea of feeling around in the dark, in stagnant well water, looking for a dead girl just gives me strong nope vibes and was one of the highlights of the film.

I wasn’t a fan of the inverted colours bits to represent characters being killed by Sadako, it felt a bit gimmicky and my personal feeling is that they should have just had the characters scream then cut to the next scene.

I’ll expand a little on my feeling that I didn’t care enough about Sadako and her mother Shizuko. We discover that both Sadako and her mother had some level of psychic ability. Sadako’s father Dr. Heihachiro Ikuma exploited Shizuko’s abilities but the resultant negative media reports drove her to commit suicide. Sadako herself was much more powerful, even killing a man who called her mother a fraud. She was ultimately killed by being thrown down a well by her own father.

So we have a mother committing suicide (By jumping into a volcano of all things) and a young girl murdered by her own father, surely that makes for some emotional scenes right? Well, not really, we don’t ever really meet them, it’s like we are reading about them in a book, it all feels very detached. This is where the film could have really been improved for me, If I had cared about Sadako in particular and then discovered her fate then this film would have been a 5 for me.

This spoiler section seems very negative but honestly it’s all relatively minor. This film is so influential to the genre that I felt I had to go into more detail about why it didn’t get top marks.

The scene where Reiko awakes to find her son watching the tape is where the film really picks up. For me, less to do with Yoichi being involved in the curse, again he’s a character we don’t spend a huge amount of time with, but because it raises the stakes for Reiko and Ryūji. They’re now fighting not only for them but for their son, and their increased desperation adds to the emotion of the subsequent scenes.

The reveal that Reiko and Ryūji, were wrong about the way to end the curse was excellent. The whole time that Sadako is emerging from the TV to kill Ryūji you’re saying to yourself, why? He tried just as hard as Reiko, surely Sadako isn’t that petty! This is the death you care about, it all feels so unfair! We discover that an earlier scene where Reiko made a copy of the tape and showed Ryūji is what saved her, you have to make a copy and to show somebody else, therefore keeping the curse going.

As the film ends and Reiko drives towards her father’s house, video player at her side, asking him for a favour, we’re left wondering, who is going to be the sacrifice? Her father? A great end, to a great film.