Curse of the Dog God (1977)

I don’t know much about Folk Horror other than that, whenever it’s brought up, most people simply point meaningfully to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, and their audience nod their heads in enlightened agreement.  And fair play, because that is the ne plus ultra of the subgenre.  From what I understand, Folk Horror is rooted firmly in European traditions, but, when I look at something like Shunya Ito’s Curse of the Dog God (aka Inugami no Tatari), I have to wonder why films from other cultures can’t be included?  Maybe they are, and I’m simply ignorant of the fact, but a lot of Asian Horror that involves itself with the supernatural tends toward the struggle between modernity and tradition.  Perhaps proper Folk Horror’s ties to religious themes is the key, since they specialize in Christian/Pre-Christian ideologies in conflict, and Christianity isn’t the religion that most think of when they think of Asia.  Even in Ito’s film, the only religion represented is Shinto, but the eponymous Dog God is an ancient, rural force taking revenge on a man who is contemporary and interested in exploiting a small village for its Uranium deposits (that is, something which brings more modernity, both good and bad).  Still, this man, Kano (Shinya Ohwada), quickly embraces the concept of the Dog God and the old methods employed to try exorcising it.  Also, there is no ancient sect at the heart of the plot, just some paranoid, superstitious farmers (who happen to be half-right).  With that in mind, I can’t say that the film is Folk Horror by definition, but it is in spirit, at least to some degree.  But, hey, I could be wrong.

Kano and his co-workers race around the countryside looking for Uranium to refine.  On their way to the village of Kugamura, they pull a trifecta of transgressions.  First, they spy on a pair of maidens skinny-dipping (this is really the most innocent of the three, though the women play a crucial part in the remainder of the story).  Then, they run over a shrine (guess who it’s devoted to).  Then, they run over a young boy’s dog, and then they split.  No amount of business success is going to save these guys at this point.

Outside of the Folk Horror shadings, Curse of the Dog God is a story of supernatural revenge that stems from several sources.  First, it is pure vengeance, as the outsiders take advantage of the villagers and their land.  Granted, the villagers are paid for their property, but the fact that this company rolls in and starts digging in the mountains, despoiling its natural purity is important.  Kano marries Reiko (Jun Izumi), daughter of one of the men whose land Kano wants to lease.  Despite Reiko and Kano’s statements that they are genuinely in love, it still feels exploitive, or maybe it was at first, but true love developed (we’re never shown this progression, so we have to fill in some blanks).  Therefore, on the one hand, the Dog God is attacking to protect its home turf and for the disrespect it has been shown by these outsiders.  On the other hand, there is the angle of human love and jealousy.  The Dog God, apparently, does not invoke itself but rather is invoked through someone else in a Pumpkinhead sort of way.  The person accused of this is Kaori (Emiko Yamauchi), Reiko’s longtime friend and daughter of a farmer who refused to lease his part of the mountain to Kano and his cohorts.  Kaori also loves Kano, and since she didn’t win his favor (because her dad didn’t acquiesce to Kano’s business dealings, most likely), she wants to remove the competition.  

Yet, even this doesn’t completely explain the mechanics of this sinister force.  In fact, it’s never entirely discernible exactly what, who, or why the Dog God is what it is or does what it does.  There is no exposition clearly detailing what the Dog God wants, what will sate its appetites, or why it chooses whom it does to possess.  It is nebulous and fickle, like the natural world from which it springs.  The one thing it definitely desires is the destruction of Kano and anyone in contact with him.  Even when Kano makes a strong connection with the village and becomes genuinely concerned for the welfare of its inhabitants, he is still a target.  Kano becomes the redemptive hero once certain events and facts come to light, but the Dog God truly doesn’t care.  This encompasses a level of innocence corrupted, not only of the land but of its people.  Young Isamu’s (Junya Kato) innocence dies with his dog, Taro.  The boy is bent on making Kano’s life miserable, going so far as to pelt him in the face with a rock at Kano’s wedding.  The villagers themselves become corrupted, physically by the byproduct of the Uranium mining and spiritually by the superstitions to which they cling.  The turmoil of their traditions vying with their more mercenary desire for money and what this allows into the village breaks them down.  They do not accept that their choices caused any catastrophes they experience.  It has to be caused by the Dog God, so the obvious thing to do is attack the only family in the village who didn’t join in selling out, and that would be Kaori and Isamu’s.  Interestingly, their family were outsiders before any of this happened.  When things go tits up, they are only further ostracized and persecuted.  Finally, there is Mako (Masami Hasegawa), Reiko’s younger sister.  She is friends with Isamu, and she alone tries to bridge the gap between the oddball family and the rest of the village.  Nevertheless, there is a secret in her own family that marks her as corruptible as well, and the Dog God is, if nothing else, an equal opportunity defiler.

Ito brings a nice sense of style to the proceedings, just as he did to no less than three of the famous Female Prisoner Scorpion films, including the arguable best of the bunch: Jailhouse 41.  There are Dutch Angles galore, and Ito does some truly haunting things with lighting throughout the film.  My main problems are twofold.  First and foremost is the point that none of the characters are interesting, with the exception of Mako.  Confoundingly, she also gets the least development and/or attention paid to her until the very end, but by that point, anything that happens to her feels like it’s brought about simply because she’s one of the last characters in the film.  Kano is a slab, and both Reiko and Kaori’s fawning over him is inexplicable, even moreso since we have seen none of how their relationships grew to start off.  There’s no real reason for the audience to care about them.  Additionally, is the fact that the Dog God appears to play by a set of rules we are not only not privy to but that change at a moment’s notice just because.  While this part of the whole setup, it makes for some chaotic viewing.  Thus, Curse of the Dog God is mildly intriguing for how different it is, but this is also the same reason it just doesn’t succeed like it should.

MVT:  Ito’s professionalism and devotion to his craft shines through.

Make or Break:  The big finale plays it as straight as the film ever will, and this part, at least, works like gangbusters.

Score:  6.5/10           

The Dragon Lives Again (1977)

I was a fan of Bruce Lee before I had ever seen one of his films in full (which wouldn’t have been until my college years).  Further, he died before I was born, so the fact that he had (and I would argue still has) such a cultural impact is fascinating.  Ironically, the first film of his that I was intrigued by as a youth was Game of Death, the one during the production of which he died.  When I saw that brief shot from the trailer of Lee squaring off against Kareem Abdul Jabar, I was mesmerized.  It had to be a special effect or a trick shot.  The difference in size between the combatants was mind-bending for me.  More than that, it made Jabar into a monster simply by dint of his gargantuan size, something which was right in my wheelhouse.  

Later, when I saw the slow motion shot of Lee preparing for battle (I want to say from Enter the Dragon), his arms duplicating and flowing into one another, reminiscent (again, maybe only to me) of Ray Harryhausen’s Kali statue from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, it made the man into the myth in my eyes.  How many pop culture figures can say that they inspired an entire wave of exploitation films feeding off both their lives and their legends?  I don’t know that Lee would have appreciated films like Law Kei’s The Dragon Lives Again (aka Deadly Hands of Kung Fu; incidentally, also the title of a Marvel Comics magazine that featured martial arts characters like The Sons of the Tiger and Iron Fist), but you must admit, it would certainly catch his attention.

Bruce Lee (Bruce Leong aka Siu-Lung Leung) lies in state before the King of the Underworld (Tang Ching).  Upon waking and learning of his situation, Bruce is shunted off to a local village, where he runs into and makes an enemy of Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman (Wong Mei).  Turns out, Zatoichi is in league with the Exorcist (Fong Yau, dubbed in English with a French accent for absolutely no reason), the Godfather (Sin Il-Ryong, who looks more like a Sonny Chiba character than either Vito or Michael Corleone), Clint Eastwood (Bobby Canavarro, in Eastwood’s Man with No Name guise), Dracula (Cheung Hei), James Bond (Alexander Grand), and Emmanuelle (Jenny), who want to usurp power from the King.  Joining forces with the One-Armed Swordsman (Nick Cheung Lik), Kwai Chang Caine, and Popeye (a very young, fit Eric Tsang), Bruce takes on the villains and stands up for the rights of the common man.  Huzzah!

Bruceploitation is one of the oddest trends to ever hit celluloid.  I can think of no other personage who inspired an entire exploitation cottage industry.  Sure, there have been Nazisploitation, Nunsploitation, Blaxploitation, Mexploitation (which is just exploitation films made in Mexico, not genre films exploiting Mexicans), Canuxploitation (again…), but there has never been Elvisploitation (for the most part, and if there has been, it’s an extremely small pool), McQueensploitation, and so on.  Lee’s legacy carried beyond his actual achievements.  Many of the Bruceploitation films are either factually inaccurate biopic/documentaries (a la Chariots of the Gods) or simply cheap Martial Arts films where its star was given a moniker similar to Lee (Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bronson Lee, ad nauseum) and billed on the poster as the true successor to the genuine article.  The Dragon Lives Again is something altogether different.  It’s a pure fantasy that plays with the legend of Bruce Lee as a symbol.

The film skirts the more unsavory aspects of the whole Bruceploitation movement (but that someone had this idea at all is audacious as hell) by dealing with the man as myth.  Bruce is first shown with a blanket over his dead body and sporting a massive erection.  Said tumescence is revealed to actually be Lee’s signature nunchaku, a weapon he keeps on him at all times.  Right off the bat, we get allusions to Lee’s sexual power and his skill with nunchucks in one fell swoop.  The two are inseparable.  Just about every character remarks about how sexually powerful Lee is, and the women all want to bed down with him (even the King’s wife and concubines, who want to “try him out for size”).  Once Bruce gets to the village, he becomes a hero of the people, teaching villagers Jeet Kun Do (let’s just say that’s what it is), standing up to corrupt policemen, and staving off the machinations of both the bad guys and the King.  Yet, Bruce isn’t exactly a nice guy.  He’s a conceited braggart who knows just how good he is at what he does.  He has posters of himself in his room, for crying out loud!  Conversely, Bruce realizes that he was flawed when alive.  He states that, “I used to play around just too much,” and even apologizes to Linda Lee Cadwell (Lee’s widow) directly.

Similarly, the characters Bruce encounters in the Underworld are myths, cultural icons of the time.  That he is thrown in with them asserts that this is an idealized Bruce, a character of superheroic proportions.  Still, Bruce is Bruce, and though he is the legend, he is also the person (though he’s not really).  Even when the other characters use actual peoples’ names (read: Clint Eastwood), they are still acting as the character that person made famous.  Most surreal in this regard is the appearance of Kwai Chang Caine, a character reputedly created to be played by Lee on the Kung Fu television show but that wound up being portrayed by David Carradine.  Needless to say, Bruce takes potshots at Caine throughout the film, and the floppy-hatted, wandering warrior-philosopher takes it all with a sheepish grin, knowing his place before the true master.  Further, Bruce himself appears in the film in the guise of Kato, the sidekick character he played on The Green Hornet.  Why?  Why the hell not?!  The point is that Bruce is simultaneously the most iconic and the most real of all the legends of the world in this film.  While he’s still a cartoon portrayal of the man, Bruce is less of one than everyone else here.  The sole exception to this is the villagers, and even they are playing the roles laid down in every Kung Fu movie ever made; even they are cultural reference points.

You can’t really judge this film based on its story (it doesn’t really have one that it cares enough to follow, and what is there is standard for its base genre), its acting, its success as a comedy (it isn’t, or at least, not intentionally), or even its fight choreography (which is passable but unremarkable).  Instead, The Dragon Lives Again should be judged on how far it’s willing to go, on how imaginative the producers were willing to get with their premise.  For example, whenever Bruce squares off against one of the villains, they suddenly all appear in a rock quarry, and the film essentially becomes one shade away from a Japanese Tokusatsu effort.  The film pushes every limit it has (budget, scope, taste, you name it), and though it’s ultimately a wildly hot mess, it’s still wild, and, I would argue, one of the most unique films ever made to cash in on a pop culture icon.

MVT:  The size of the balls it took to make this film.

Make or Break:  The opening credits where Bruce spars with each of the fantastical characters he’s about to meet in the film.  This itself is a common trope in the Martial Arts genre, but it’s somehow more insane in this instance.

Score:  7/10       

Seven Notes in Black (1977)

I don’t know that I believe in psychics.  Brushing aside any of the science (or pseudoscience) about the human brain and how much of it is actually “tapped into” or not in that regard or whether that’s all just bullshit fueled by fantastic fiction (surely not), I’m just unsure on a core, cynical level that there are folks who can access some nebulous spirit world or glimpse into the future simply with the power of their mind.  But like Fox Mulder, I want to believe, and this is one of the many struggles that goes on daily between my rational and irrational mind.  I want to believe in things like this, because I want to believe that the world isn’t as drably mundane as it actually is.  By that same token, I’ve never personally encountered any convincing evidence to prove the converse (to be fair, it takes a lot to convince me).  

Maybe it goes back to my love of Godzilla films and Eiji Tsuburaya’s philosophy of having a sense of wonder about the world and wanting to pass this on to others through his work.  I mean, if things like psychics or Bigfoot or UFOs don’t exist, all that leaves is a workaday existence filled with the crushing realities of life (I know, I’m starting to get depressing here).  Contrarily, these things really probably shouldn’t be proven one way or the other, because then they would become as unremarkable as everything else we face daily.  In some ways, this is the same function that film bestows.  Cinema provides us with lives less ordinary, and we live in these narratives for a time, staving off the real world and all its problems, even as it reflects and/or addresses them.  My reasoning on all of this may read as murky to you, but that’s only because it’s murky to me (I’m notoriously bad at being black or white on a lot of things; the curse of a semi-open mind).  So I’m okay (and we, as an audience, are okay) with investing in the possibility that Virginia Ducci (Jennifer O’Neill) can see a murder she wasn’t actually present for in Lucio Fulci’s Seven Notes in Black (aka The Psychic aka Sette Note in Nero aka Death Tolls Seven Times).  I mean, why watch a film about a psychic, otherwise?

When she was just a young girl, Virginia “saw” her mother’s death while she was miles and miles away. Now an adult, Virginia, housewife of the wealthy Francesco Ducci (Gianni Garko), suddenly begins to have visions again, this time of a murder.  Obsessed with and plagued by her second sight, she pushes on in her investigation, placing herself in mortal peril.

Time in this film is fragmented in much the same way that reality is fragmented in other Fulci films (in fact, I would argue they essentially are the same).  We are constantly taken from the linear present to the murder, which is never presented in a straight line.  We get a shot of a smashed mirror, a shot of a yellow (giallo) cigarette in a blue ashtray, a shot of a man’s feet dragging across a carpet, etcetera.  This continuously happens to Virginia throughout the film, and it is usually accompanied by a quick zoom into her eyes (a form of Fulci’s signature ocular trauma motif?).  In other words, the camera attacks her, and the result is a disorientating reordering of the real world.  In this sense, Virginia is brought into Hell (or a hell), similar to that which bursts forth through the portal under the hotel in The Beyond and so forth, the difference here being that a person is the gateway rather than a place, and she is drawn through her mind to this Hell rather than this Hell being drawn through a door to us.  Another contrast is that Virginia’s reality is a knot ceaselessly being untangled, whereas in The Beyond, reality is being twisted, though both stories will eventually still make some sort of sense in their own way (one is just more literal than the other, arguably).

Also fitting with Fulci’s other work, Seven Notes in Black is a fatalistic film (as films about psychics tend to be).  Virginia has witnessed something, and she must follow the line of it to the bitter end.  There’s no getting around it, because this is the only way for her to unburden herself of her visions (at least for now).  Plus, there is the aspect that what’s coming down the pike is inexorable, despite attempts to avoid it.  The segments have to be pieced together in the proper sequence for order to be reinstated (whether or not this reinstated order is better or worse than what came before it is debatable).  Yet, as the pieces fall into place, Virginia understands (as do we) that she is following a preordained narrative; she just didn’t realize it at first.  Her free will, then, is robbed from her, for the most part.  The only question left open is whether or not she will survive (you can argue that her free will kicks in here, but previous evidence makes that claim suspect), and this provides the tension of the film.  Just because you can see into another time or across continents, doesn’t mean you can halt the universe’s forward movement.  There is still cause and effect, but Virginia’s agency is limited in its influence on them.

From what I’ve seen of Fulci’s filmography, I feel fairly confident stating that Seven Notes in Black is not only his most coherent film, but it’s also his most accomplished (I’m sure some would contend that Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is the winner in the latter category).  The film stays on point from start to finish.  It builds its story from disparate elements, and said story remains unambiguous despite the ambiguity upon which it’s constructed.  There is also a lack of gore to be found here.  The most ludicrous visual we get is of a dummy having its plastic head bashed repeatedly off a cliff side (this was pretty amusing, all things considered, and proof that you can take the man out of the outrageousness, but you can’t take the outrageousness out of the man; not completely).  The film’s weakest point, ironically enough, is O’Neill.  She’s certainly attractive enough, and can pull off being anxious, but she has no real presence onscreen, otherwise.  Thankfully, Fulci is enough of a visual stylist to keep things interesting.  It’s surprising to me that the filmmaker doesn’t get more respect because of work like this (maybe because it was so infrequent in his oeuvre), but he deserves it, as does this film.

MVT:  Fulci shows some real restraint here, proving that ridiculous gore wasn’t the only thing he could do very well when given the chance.

Make or Break:  The prologue sets up the premise nicely, and it’s as enigmatic as it is audacious.

Score: 7/10