Rampo Noir is a Japanese horror anthology that pays homage to the works of writer Edogawa Rampo, someone who is famous for his horror and mystery fiction. It contains within it four short films, each a different take on Rampo's stories, with this produced by the same team behind the cult film Ichi the Killer. At two hours fifteen in length, this is the longest horror film I have seen for a while, but as always, I do love anthologies.
It begins weirdly with 'Mars's Canal'. This six minute long short was done by music video director and visual artist Suguru Takeuchi. I can't say I was that taken with it. The first half of the short plays out in complete silence, this led me to thinking I had an issue with my speakers and so spent that time trying to fix them! It was actually meant to be silent however. What little story there is has a naked man (Tadanobu Asano who features in each of the stories) walking towards a pool of water in a barren desolate location (assuming it is meant to be the surface of Mars?). In the water he sees a version of himself reflected that has him naked while beating up a naked woman. I didn't really get what this was meant to be about, very arthouse in style, but thankfully it was very short.
I felt like things really began with the second short, 'Mirror Hell', which at around forty five minutes in length was able to tell a decent story. In this one, directed by new wave auteur and long time Ultraman director Akio Jissoji, a detective (Asano) is investigating the strange deaths of a series of women, each victim found with their face melted and a similar looking mirror near their body. The evidence seems to point to local mirror maker, a beautiful young man who fears his mirror making skills are hampered by his sordid desires. This one mixed a blend of the procedural police drama type genre of people investigating the crime scenes and the victim's bodies, mixed with the supernatural. It had a surreal tone to it, reflections playing a key part, with mirrors seeming to be in every single scene, so characters are constantly being reflected multiple times. I liked the H.P Lovecraft style feel to elements of this, and the face melting scenes played out in an artistic way, suggesting, rather than showing things. It got a bit too weird before the end, but I did like the interesting way this one finishes.
The third story is the thirty eight minute long 'Caterpillar' by cult director Hisayasu Sato (The Bedroom, Naked Blood) which was certainly one of the more disturbing ones! Here, a war hero returned home severely injured, facial burns, all his limbs missing, and the inability to speak. His wife looks after him, but maybe disgusted at what he has become, she also abuses him, frequently torturing the man. Her pet name for him is 'caterpillar', the two sharing a seemingly unhealthy co-dependent relationship. This mainly takes place in a dank dusty cellar type area, the effects for the man were effective, and the story twisted. It eventually heads in a somehow even stranger direction, finishing before its story had really ended. This continues the theme of both nudity and what has been termed 'erotic grotesque'. This was seen with 'Mars's Canal' with the man beating the naked woman, again in 'Mirror Hell' with the mirror maker dripping hot wax onto a love interests body, and here with a prolonged scene of possible sexual assault against the invalid character. It was very arthouse in style, such as the scenes shown from the man's perspective, a fish eye lens type of effect used and his thoughts appearing as text on the screen.
This leads into the final film, 'Crawling Bugs' which was the directorial debut of manga artist Atsushi Kaneko (Bambi and Her Pink Gun). It stood out due to how bright and colourful it was in comparison to the others. It told somewhat of a more simple story, though this one was shown from the perspective of an unreliable narrator in that what is shown isn't actually the reality. Here, an obsessive fan kills his love interest - Fuyo, a famous star of the stage. Determined to preserve her body, he tries various different ways to stop her from rotting. There were plenty of darkly humorous moments here, the protagonist villain convinced that there are bugs crawling around his body, so wants to prevent the same thing happening to his victim. The biggest comedic darkness comes when it is revealed what the actual state of the corpse is, as opposed to the man's fairy-tale viewpoint. Thankfully there were not many actual bugs shown in this one, but plenty of sound effects used to simulate what the man believes he is feeling.
The four shorts that made up Rampo Noir were all artsy and surreal, I'm sure this is a reflection on the original stories of the author. At over two hours long this did feel quite slow. None of the films with the exception of the forty five minute or so 'Crawling Bugs' seemed to move at a quick pace. I wasn't keen on the brief first, the others, while I wouldn't say I loved them, at least had plenty of variation to their strange and surreal stories. This was unique and I feel some of the more twisted and demented scenes won't fade quickly from my mind! Rampo Noir is out now on ARROW, the streaming subscription platform as well as on limited edition Blu-ray.
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