"Kaidan (KWAIDAN)"

by Jules Carrozza

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One of the greatest Japanese horror/art films ever made! This is a wonderful, perfect, four story anthology based on tellings by Lafcadio Hearn. It's full of beautiful Cinemascope images with gorgeous color. The first story concerns of how an ungrateful samurai husband deserts his poor wife and marries a rich one. This story uses many lush greens and loud noises. The samurai realizes he doesn't love his second wife, and he loved his first wife so much more. So he abandons his second wife and returns to his first. They make up and just when you think it's gonna be all right, BANG!! The man finds his wife a rotted corpse. However, as the man grows older and whiter from terror, the wife's black hair literally comes back to haunt him. My little sister loves this scene and cries out "Monkey Man!" whenever she sees it. I did notice the man looked a bit simian. So anyway, in one part the guy clings to a wood pole. But he looks up and the hair is at the top of it. The story ends with the man looking at his reflection in the well, when he opens his mouth to scream, the screen freezes. The next story has two woodcuters stranded in a strange snowstorm. They struggle in the snow as the wind blows and strange eyes watch them from the sky. Suddenly, they have a horrifying encounter with the "Woman of the snow", a bloodthirsty snow vampire. She kills the old woodcuter but spares the young one because he's so young as long as he promises never to tell anybody about it. He falls ill after the experience. Later, he recovers and returns to work. Later, he meets a nice, kind, beautiful peasant woman. He starts dating her and then marries her. They have children. One night he looks at her and has a flashback. He notices that she looks exactly like the snow woman. When he tells her, she confesses that she is the snow woman. She promises if they had no children, she would kill him. Then a snowstorm starts and the eyes in the sky appear. The wife/snow woman leaves and vanishes. This sequence ends with a tiny bit of humor as the man throws out his wife's sandals. They disappear. The next and most eleborate story, Hoichi, the Earless, begins with an epic sea battle between two samurai clans, the Genji and the Hieki in the 12th century. The Hieki realize their defeat and all of them commit suicide with their infant emperor (no wonder they lost). This sequence is my favorite scene, it uses the film's narrator and a song sung by a minstrel to tell the story and explain what's happening. It has lot's of Hong Kong style swordplay and tons of gorgeous colors as well as some Japanese paintings. The sea, Dano-ura has been haunted ever since then by the ghosts of the Heikies. Several hundred years later, a statue of Buddha and a Buddhist shrine were built there to protect the dead samurais' souls. One night, the ghost of a Heiki greets a blind bhikku named Hoichi. He advises him to come to the palace. Every night, Hoichi goes to this place he thinks is a palace but is really a graveyard. He pleases the ghosts by chanting songs about the battle at Dano-ura. When the head priest and his group of monks find out about this they come up with a way to stop this. They paint calligraphy symbols on Hoichi's body in one of the films most well known and famous scenes. However, one of the monks goofs and forgets to paint his ears. Thus that night, the ghost samurai sees only two ears where Hoichi should be. Then poor Hoichi gets his ears cut off by the angry ghost. However, Hoichi soon becomes famous when word of the strange story reaches other towns. He becomes a wealthy man. The finale story is, if you ask me, the weakest. One morning, a guard is drinking tea when he sees a strange face in it. He drinks the tea and the man comes to life as a mysterous ghost warrior. The guard puts up a fight with him, injures him and then has a final duel with some other ghost warriors who look like some of the ghost warriors strait out of the video game Mortal Combat. He kills them too as he laughs his head off. The story shifts to a publisher's office. The publisher is reading this story. Suddenly, he screams when he sees a ghost warrior in his tea! This is my altime favorite film. The pace is a bit slow, but it still works. Toru Takemitsu's score is one of the greatest scores I've ever seen. It isn't even a real score, just some tradition Japanese music and strange, unusual and very scary noises. As it has been quoted by some film critic (his name I can't recall of the top of my head) the film plunges you into a strange world of vivid colors and scenery as well as sounds. I can tell Masaki Kobayashi put so much thought into this film it's unimaginable. The current video edition from Home Vision is the best I've ever seen so far. It's a beautifully pristine print in full widescreen and is so crystal clear it looks like a new film. After seeing Video Yesteryear's grainy, Panned and Scanned print which robbs the film of at least half it's power this video version seems soo nice. Recommended to Japanese horror and fantasy film fans as well as art film afficionados.

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