jadavix In "Living Skeleton"'s surprisingly brutal opening scenes, we see a group of modern-day pirates indiscriminately massacring a bunch of passengers with machine gun fire - among them a beautiful, Western-looking Japanese woman.Then a title tells us we've jumped ahead a few years, and that woman's identical twin is now spending time among a shadowy Catholic priest.Some people go scuba diving where they find, in one of the movie's more memorable moments, skeletons chained to the ocean floor, presumably of the people who died in the beginning of the movie.The boat the pirates commandeered apparently sunk, but nevertheless seems to return to the shore, and the twin boards it, and some other stuff happens involving unconvincing flying bats. With the film's beginning, its moody black and white cinematography, and the glowering, impassive actors, I thought the stage was set for a disturbing arthouse Japanese flick like "Sword of Doom" or "Woman in the Dunes". However, by the end, which involves a mad scientist in a laboratory with lots of opportunities for gruesome deaths, some of which of course involve acid which burns people up quicker than lava might, I began thinking it's more in line with a Jess Franco flick from about the same time. Kikko Matsuoka, who plays the main character, does look a bit like Soledad Miranda.Problem with this movie was, I had no idea how it got from moody impressionism to full on camp blood-bath. It's pretty confusing, which wouldn't matter so much if the tone was even. It wasn't.

Hitchcoc This is not a bad ghost story, though some better editing and a couple of transitional scenes would have helped the viewer a bit. A group of vicious modern pirates board a ship carrying millions of dollars in gold. They aren't satisfied just pillaging; they kill everyone on board in a cold-blooded slaughter. We now go forward three years to a young woman whose twin sister was on that ship. She has that weird connection that twins sometimes do, feeling the terror her sister felt. One night she sees the ship (even though it had been sunk) and boards it. She sees the ghost of her sister and learns the story of the massacre. She is no bent on destroying the guys who were responsible. The rest of the movie involves her gaining revenge. She lives with a priest who took her in when her parents died. Anyway, it is kind of satisfying. There are some elements at the end that just don't work very well, involving a horrible acid that was invented by the doctor on the ship. It's an interesting effort, better than most of its ilk.

dbborroughs Some times it takes 35 or more years to find the source of a picture thats haunted you since childhood. My Mom got me this illustrated history of horror films back in the early 1970's an in it was a picture of a frightened girl on the deck of ship terrorized by an odd skeleton. Its an odd picture (http://www.trashpalace.com/images/LivingSkeletonDVDR2.jpg) that made me want to know what the film was that went with it. (actually the image is not in the film and is just a publicity photo-possibly the only one since until recently its the only image I've seen, and recently I've only seen screen captures).The problem seeing the film is that apparently its never been released here in the United States. I'm not sure why, though I'm guessing that the film's black and white cinematography was deemed a drawback for US release when most films were being released in color (this would have been released in the US 1969 at the earliest).I finally fund a copy of the film at the Wizard World convention in New York. It was sans subtitles but I could pretty much work out what was going on, and get creeped out by it.The plot has to do with a bunch of pirates who kill everyone on board a ship and steal a treasure. Sometime later a woman, a relative of one of the victims, and her boyfriend end up setting in motion a series of events that begin to bring justice to the pirates, who are now on dry land, and herald the return of the ghostly ship.This is a strange film that was eerily shot in black and white. The film balances light and shadow to fantastic effect. Much of the film seems to be an odd marriage of Japanese sensibilities and Western style images, with skeletons, bats, vampires, and a Christian church. The plot doesn't completely make sense as we are often in a world of dream logic. Images of the massacre haunt the people there as well as those caught in the supernatural web. Things are often not what they seem. The effect is not so much a straight forward film but a cinematic tone poem that gets under your skin.I'm explaining this badly but if you pop this in and turn off the lights I think you'll find that the film will give you a few shivers Now to find a copy with English subtitles...

fertilecelluloid Made a decade before Carpenter's "The Fog", this is clearly that film's inspiration, and what glorious pulp horror it is.A scar-faced pirate and his cronies gun down a dozen men and several stunningly beautiful women. One woman grips the trouser leg of her killer as she dies, triggering a series of events that will see watery vengeance visited on the miscreants.This has a mysterious fog surrounding a quiet coastal town, a haunted ship of the dead, a local priest who carries a terrible secret and a ghostly, beautiful woman whose appearances strike fear into the hearts of evil men.It is made with incredible affection for its subject matter and total sincerity. Not once does it wink at its audience or betray its genre origins. No, it is proud to be a pulp horror film.Some of the special effects are not exactly believable, but these are part of the key to the film's charm. There is some model work of a ship crossing the ocean shot through clouds that is both incredibly artificial and incredibly beautiful. The "living skeletons" themselves, though not expertly incorporated into the central narrative, are beautiful.Highly recommended for true lovers of fantastique films.