Two Japanese ghost movies

These two dvd releases are good reasons to own an all- region player. The EUREKA! label, based in the UK, has been steadily releasing a series of outstanding movies from around the world at the highest quality. They are very much like the US based Criterion, and some of the releases has overlapped, as in the case of Kwaidan. However, you should pick up the EUREKA version of Kwaidan, because this is the definitive, 183 minute version. 21 minutes of more footage added, never seen before to Western audiences. It comes with a very nice 72 page booklet that includes Lefcadio Hearn's 4 stories, and an interview of the director, Masaki Kobayashi. Kobayashi was a director who exploded onto the world cinema scene in the late 1950's with his epic 9 hour trilogy, The Human Condition, featuring Nadakai Tatsuya, and with the classic Harakiri, one of the great samurai films, in 1962. Kwaidan is THE classic ghost story film, four stories dealing with people who become entangled with the supernatural. The segment Hoichi, the Earless, is my favorite. Hoichi is a blind musician/priest who is called upon to perform before a lord and his entourage. What he doesn't know is that they are all ghosts, and that they will kill him after several perfomances........

Kuroneko is a major find, and the movie that led me to discover the EUREKA label. This is another classic Japanese ghost story movie, directed by Kaneto Shindo, in 1968. Shindo also directed Onibaba (1964), itself a classic in world cinema. This concerns a mother and daughter who are brutally raped and murdered by a band of roving soldiers during a war; the house is burned down, and in the smouldering ash ruins, a lone cat appears and licks the remains of the women. They are transformed into avenging spirits, changing into human and cat form, who terrorize the woods by killing every solder who travels through. Black and white, sparse, but well paced (the scenes showing the baiting, seduction, then murdering of the soldiers are repeated, but reduced in time in each instance, respecting the viewer's knwoledge of how things will turn out), terrific performances by everyone involved, this is mandatory viewing for any cinema fan.