Passages

[zeroism]

Trish Keenan. Utterly heartbreaking.

Far too young. The word tragic in this case is all too appropriate.

[colinr0380]

Trish Keenan. Utterly heartbreaking.

Far too young. The word tragic in this case is all too appropriate.

Absolutely, and what a voice. I like to pretend I See, So I See So was an unreleased song from The Wicker Man, but it would perhaps be more appropriate on a film forum to link to Valerie.

[ambrose]

Hideko Takamine

I am perfectly aware that posting this very belated Guardian obituary might be a breach of forum decorum but the fact that two and a half weeks had to pass before an obituary appeared in a quality English paper has to be mentioned and inquired about!

Although Japan had been making films since the beginnings of cinema, Japanese films remained virtually unknown in the west for more than half a century. Shamefully, it has taken almost as long again to recognise the greatness of the director Mikio Naruse, and consequently the remarkable talents of Hideko Takemine, his leading lady in more than a dozen films, who has died of lung cancer aged 86.

Of course I might have welcomed this obituary more fulsomely if Mr.Bergan had managed to spell Miss.Takamine's name correctly! (A typo I had initially copied before a quick edit.)

Ricardo Montez.

[antnield]

Susannah York

[domino harvey]

Jesus, this week sucks sucks sucks

[kinjitsu]

Was infatuated with York back in the day... deep sigh

Ellen Stewart, of La MaMa

[perkizitore]

Jesus, this week sucks sucks sucks

I know it sucks when someone that you admired died, but i am always more saddened when young people on the peak of their creativity leave us early instead of old and retired people.

[MichaelB]

Hideko Takamine

I am perfectly aware that posting this very belated Guardian obituary might be a breach of forum decorum but the fact that two and a half weeks had to pass before an obituary appeared in a quality English paper has to be mentioned and inquired about!

Oh come on, be realistic - it's pretty impressive that they got one up in two and a half weeks, considering 99% of the paper's readers wouldn't have heard of her.

In fact, I had a brief correspondence with Ronald Bergan when we were both simultaneously writing Walerian Borowczyk obits - him for the Guardian, me for Sight & Sound. His one kept getting pushed off the schedule by higher-profile deaths, and at one point it was touch and go whether it would appear at all, though it eventually did several weeks later. I think he just about beat me into print, but there was a much narrower gap than you'd expect between a daily newspaper and a monthly magazine.

[Perkins Cobb]

I know it sucks when someone that you admired died, but i am always more saddened when young people on the peak of their creativity leave us early instead of old and retired people.

I rather doubt that Ms. York would've characterized herself as either "old" or "retired."

[GaryC]

I know it sucks when someone that you admired died, but i am always more saddened when young people on the peak of their creativity leave us early instead of old and retired people.

I rather doubt that Ms. York would've characterized herself as either "old" or "retired."

Indeed. She mostly appeared on TV in the last few years, most recently (according to the IMDB) an episode of Doctors last July, and I think she did stage work as well. And 72 isn't ancient.

[perkizitore]

My comment was not referring to Mrs York especially, but never mind.

[ambrose]

Nat Lofthouse, The Lion of Vienna R-I-P.

Toshiyuki Hosokawa Eros Plus Massacre (1969) Trailer

[Ovader]

Don Kirshner

[tavernier]

Don Kirshner

just another old and retired person

[manicsounds]

Ben Wada, Japanese TV director/writer, and husband of designer Emi Wada

[kinjitsu]

Sargent Shriver

[ambrose]

Hideko Takamine's Telegraph obituary

Kitty Godley
Passing through the Image: Takamine Hideko By Chris Fujiwara

[dx23]

Jack LaLane

[Donald Brown]

I thought he'd make it past 100.

[Markson]

Writer/producer Bernd Eichinger.

[ambrose]

George Douglas

[dadaistnun]

Charlie Louvin

[John Cope]

Toshiharu Ikeda.

[triodelover]

Charlie Louvin

That one really hurts. Not only from watching the Opry as a boy, but the rediscovery through Gram, Emmylou and the Byrds in the late '60s after a decade of thinking I was too cool for Charlie and Ira and their kind.

[colinr0380]

Toshiharu Ikeda.

Ikeda is probably best known for Evil Dead Trap, from 1988, which is a completely insane film! I remember first reading about it in the Pete Tombs book Mondo Macabro, which gave eye-popping synopses of all sorts of weird and wonderful films, and being unable to believe that such a wacky, demented film really existed! I was younger and more naive with regard to bizarre films then (and wasn't aware of the existence of House, which is even crazier, though in the same kind of vein), but when I finally caught up with Evil Dead Trap on the Synapse disc years later it managed to live up to the synopsis, and more!

It is nominally a variation on a 'group of teens in a dark house getting killed one by one' slasher film and refreshingly for modern times non-ironically set in the 1980s, with all sorts of wonderfully dated clothes and haircuts presumably the height of fashion for the time! There are plot-holes and illogicalities everywhere in the film, but this is a piece of work which simply powers through all of that stuff with its own brand of nightmare logic.

A late night, fluffy magazine show (which bizarrely seems to specialise in showing the host's revulsed reactions to seeing real animal violence!) is presented by a perky, go-getting young reporter who, on getting a snuff video on tape where her face is superimposed using the latest video editing effects onto the face of the victim (something which bizarrely turned up as a menacing plot device in the Sigourney Weaver/Holly Hunter film Copycat many years later, though I doubt they were inspired by this earlier film!), boneheadedly decides to gather her intrepid team together (cameraman, work experience girl, wardrobe assistant(!) and various boyfriends) to go out to the location of the video, split up and wander aimlessly around until they all get killed. Though they do all stop to get burgers on the way there. It sounds pretty dull and straightforward at this point (though I quite enjoyed the sequence of watching the landmarks on the video in their state of the art jeep and then seeing them 'for real' as the crew reaches them, kind of prefiguring that early procedural section of Blair Witch!), but then once they reach the abandoned US military compound (A political comment? Or just a cool empty location? Either way its a fantastically creepy location) the film throws in a mysterious figure/'hero'/nemesis character, a captured and tortured Renfield-style slave to the evil, inventive demises, near escapes and then in a final coup de grace takes the slowly simmering twin plot and goes into chest-bursting horror territory (It would be as if David Cronenberg had made Dead Ringers in such a way as one of the twins was all in the mind of the other, and then went into The Fly territory of the hero and heroine potentially conceiving an abomination).

The deaths are often completely non-sequitur set pieces (which is something that has lead to critics making a lot of comparisons with the overpowering setpieces in Dario Argento's films), and often sadistically and/or absurdly set up to toy with the characters and the audience in the most painful way possible. There is a fantastically powerful, tipping over into offensive, section in the middle of the film where one of the female members of the crew panics and runs off. Normally this would just lead to a gory set piece, but she is allowed to actually escape the building, reach the jeep, drive it to the gates, get out and unlock them, return to the car, and only then be attacked by the Renfield-style insane accomplice. She puts up quite a spirited fight as well during the following lingering assault sequence (with, in the background of the shot through the front windows of the jeep and unnoticed by either character, the open gates swinging closed again, sealing their fates), until the assaulter is killed and she escapes again, only to be spectacularly garroted from nowhere on leaving the car! It takes a certain knowledge of how to play with an audience to have that sequence play as well as it does.

Of course then the final act shows that all of the slasher stuff that went before was rather irrelevant anyway!

The DVD of Evil Dead Trap also features one of the most uniquely bizarre commentaries ever recorded (even Synapse put a disclaimer inside their packaging about the 'unique qualities' of the piece!) in which Ikeda and his special effects supervisor conduct a strange conversation which sounds scripted but contains bizarre stilted 'spontaneous' exchanges and rather wonky, sarcastic sounding asides on the film and the actors. How much of this is due to the participants speaking in English is difficult to determine (it sometimes seems like a parody of itself, one in which the participants are having difficulty in keeping a straight face!), but it is certainly one of the most bizarre/painful commentary tracks that I've ever heard!

The other Ikeda film that I've seen was Angel Guts: Red Porno from 1981 which is, as the title might imply, one of the most overtly sexual of that already extremely sex obsessed series of films. It is quite pornographically structured as well, often falling into long scenes of characters writhing about under their kotatsus, coupling in children's climbing frames during violent rainstorms, bonking in love hotels (in the most obviously padded of the scenes, which runs about a quarter of an hour in the exact middle of the, only hour long, film and is essentially three different sex scenes strung together in a series and filmed through a lot of wobbly funhouse style mirrors), or, in the most notorious scene, showing our 'hero' spying on a schoolgirl doing something incredibly naughty using a condom, an egg and a bunch of sharpened pencils (when she really should be concentrating on doing her homework!)

It is not the best of that controversially-themed series (that would have to be Angel Guts: Nami), but I suppose it fulfills its intended purpose(!) and there are some beautifully stylised scenes, though this might be put down more to being based on the stylisations of Takashi Ishii's original mangas that Ikeda was following. Jasper Sharp's commentary really says everything that could ever be said about this film and the Angel Guts series as a whole (including valuably giving more background for some of the actresses who only ever appeared in one or two of the films), and even he has trouble finding enough to talk about during the drawn out sex scenes of this particular film!

In some ways Ikeda has been overshadowed a little by his best known films (or at least the couple that have been given a US DVD release!) being made in collaboration with Takashi Ishii - either Ishii was the actual writer of the film (as in Evil Dead Trap), or of the original manga series from which the films derived (the Angel Guts series). I think I would have to see some of Ikeda's non-Ishii related works to get a better impression of him as a director. But as it was probably the Ishii connection (he gathered a small cult in the West for the two yakuza films, Gonin and its sequel, that he wrote and directed in the early 90s. Gonin starred Takeshi Kitano and so probably got released in the West after being caught up with the yakuza films that Kitano himself was directing at the time) that led to Ikeda's films getting a release in the West by association, it may be difficult to see other examples of his work unless some of his Roman Porno films turn up in the DVD series that Impulse Pictures will hopefully be releasing. (EDIT: It is interesting to note though that the Jasper Sharp article notes a couple of Ikeda's other films that have gotten a US or UK release)

To illustrate this connection/muddying of the Ikeda and Ishii relationship, the film in the Angel Guts series that followed Red Porno was Red Vertigo from 1988, made the same year as Evil Dead Trap. It was the Ishii's first film as director, uses the lead actress from Red Porno in an unconnected cameo role as a bar hostess (see the linked clip), and uses the same abandoned US military post from Ikeda's film as the location the central couple uses to escape from the rest of the world.