‘No yellow beak like you can outwit us!’
A coup d’etat in a remote Japanese province leaves its rightful Lord dead and an evil warlord in charge. The Lord’s young children escape to a nearby mountain, which is guarded by a stone statue of the local god. A decade later, the grown up son comes out of hiding to take revenge on his father’s killers, but gets captured and faces execution. Luckily, the warlord decides to tear down the statue, and that doesn’t go down at all well with the god of the mountain…
Very serious medieval fantasy from the Daiei organisation, who were the era’s main rivals to Toho Studio and their stable of giant monsters. While Godzilla and his buddies were beginning to flex their comedy muscles after a decade of serious ass-kicking, Daei decided to keep it real (relatively speaking!) and deliver a straight and dramatic folktale instead.
The story is simple but efficiently told and aided by committed performances, particularly from heroine Miwa Takada and villain Yutaro Gomi. He proves to be a very bad egg indeed, enslaving the locals and crushing all resistance to his rule with deadly force. The tone is generally very dark, with one particularly striking scene featuring the execution of the local priestess demonstrating considerable visual flair on the part of director Kimiyoshi Yasuda. Similarly, the photography is excellent and there’s an impressive score from Akira Ifukube, who was usually to be found soundtracking the exploits of Godzilla and friends over at Toho.
He was just not a morning person…
The intervention of the vengeful god through the giant samurai statue in the last 20 minutes may be a little too convenient in terms of the story, but the world building has been convincing enough so that it doesn’t appear either inappropriate or silly. Actually, its rampage through the detailed miniature sets is rendered fairly impressively, although somewhat less so when human elements appear in the frame.
One of the story points that’s also refreshing is that the statue doesn’t simply target the bad guys but goes after everyone, although whether it’s because the locals have stopped their acts of worship or because all the kerfuffle has woken him up remains unclear. The god’s role is a little underwritten, after all, so we never get a clear idea of his motivation! Anyway, it takes the tears of a pretty girl to persuade him to give it a rest and bugger off.
Daiei obviously had faith in their creation as two sequels followed and they shot all three in the same year, then released them a few months apart. Given the vintage of the film, it stands up well, although the setting and location obviously assist in its timeless quality. The story certainly doesn’t belong in any contemporary world and credibility would have been stretched to breaking point if the ancient statue had spent its time marching through downtown Tokyo!
Recommended.
Mark David Welsh 