Kwaidan

Kwaidan (aka. Kaidan) (1964)

This movie is a collection of traditional Japanese horror stories. The first is The Back Hair and is about a Samurai who divorces and abandons his first wife to marry into an affluent family for the position and standing it will give him. Years later he realizes his mistake and goes looking for his first wife, who welcomes him back with loving arms. Or so he thinks. The second story should be very familiar to fans of the Tales from the Darkside movie. Here a mysterious winter spirit in exchange for him never telling anyone about her spares a man from an icy death. The following year he meets the woman of his dreams and starts to raise a family. Three children later he mentions the encounter with disastrous results. The third is called Hoichi, the Earless. Here a blind monk gets caught up with some ghosts that bewitch him. The other monks cover him in a magic spell to protect him from the angry ghosts, but they miss a spot (care to guess?). Finally the stories wrap up with one called In a Cup of Tea. Honestly I’m not sure what this one is about. There seems to be some sort of assassin or ghost that is able to come out of a cup of tea and kill. There is this other subplot about writers never finishing their stories that must of lost something in translation.

As a group the stories were interesting. By far the best of the four has to be Hoichi the Earless, which has a flashback that is told thru traditional storytelling. I got a huge kick out of that, and the parts later with the monks were creepy as hell. The weakest was the last, which I honestly had a hard time following. The other two had there moments and were worth checking out. Though altogether the movie did have long periods where the action drug down quite a bit. The performers in all four stories do a fine job and are fun to watch. I caught this on cable with subtitles, which is always how I prefer to watch a foreign film. Especially good were the actors involved in Hoichi the Earless and it’s flashback.

It is also readily apparent that the director and crew knew exactly what they were doing when filming this. The camera work is amazing and by itself is very entertaining to watch. The lighting, especially in the second story, is used to great effect to create a feeling of otherworldliness that enables them to pull off the winter spirit without the use of distracting special effects. Also the period clothing and sets throughout the entire movie are impressive and very professionally done.

As much as I enjoyed this movie I have to admit that it is terribly slow at times. Also the final story makes little sense, which doesn’t help the pacing of the film at all. This movie would have been much better off losing the final story and cutting down on it’s very long runtime (125 minutes, cut from 183 in the Japanese version!). I caught this one on cable and if you get the chance I recommend checking it. But I can’t recommend purchasing what is basically a mediocre oddity that you will most likely watch once and forget about.

2 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer