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Village of Doom
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Unearthed Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (7th December 2024). |
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The Film
 Rural Japan, 1938: Residents of the mountain village of Kamo near Tsuyama in the Okinawa prefecture are bidding farewell another group of young men conscripted for the war effort, possibly never to return (especially should they lose). Twenty-one-year-old Tsugio (Female Teacher's Masato Furuoya) is eagerly awaiting his opportunity to serve his country. Living alone with his grandmother (The Inugami Family's Izumi Hara) and self-studying to become a schoolteacher, Tsugio lives a lonely life estranged from the rest of the village due to his family's social position and the resentment it engenders from people who nevertheless borrow money from his grandmother. When he develops a cough, his grandmother insists he sees the doctor who prescribes him three months rest for inflamed lungs. His wastrel friend Tetsuo (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters' Yasuhiro Arai) suggests that he needs some relief – averring to his playful but chaste relationship with Yasuyo (The Beautiful Women's City's Misako Tanaka) which can never progress to something more because they are cousins – and gifts him some pornographic pictures (while borrowing money for prostitutes and suggesting that Tsugio look beyond his own bloodline). Walking the village at night, Tsugio discovers what the lonely wives of soldiers get up to in their absence and soon himself finds solace and pleasure in becoming the village stud; that is, however, until the doctor diagnoses him with tuberculosis, simultaneously ending his dreams of serving in the army and making him even more of an outcast than before. One night in May, Tsudio decides to bring the war home in what has become known as "The Tsuyama Massacre". Directed by Noboru Tanaka, who had served as production assistant on Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo before starting out as an assistant director at Nikkatsu where he would make his directorial debut at a time when the studio was exclusively making Roman Porno films – Tanaka's output in that genre would tackle both literary subjects like The Watcher in the Attic from the story by Edogawa Rampo and true crime like A Woman Called Sada Abe (more popularly the subject of In the Realm of the Senses) – Villlage of Doom was based on a true crime and seems a departure as much from the Roman Porno genre as Tanaka from the studio for Shochiku. As depicted in the novel by Bo Nishimura and scripted by Takuya Nishioka who worked prolifically in the Roman Porno cycle, the film has the setup to be an erotic film – Nikkatsu's requirements left the subject matter and genre open to the filmmakers so long as the film featured sex scenes every ten minutes and ran at least seventy minutes and sometimes ended in bloody violence with a moralistic tone – but while the director delivers the requisite sex, nudity, and graphic violence, the film is far more of a character study whereas the characters in more socially-relevant Roman Porno films were often types rather than individuals.  Both ostracized by the village and held up by his grandmother as a "bright boy" the type of which only comes every hundred years of so, Tsugio and his grandmother both embody and are victimized by the prejudices of insular Japanese village life before the war. When a neighbor borrows money from the grandmother, she proclaims they are relatives while the grandmother points out that everyone in the village is blood kin and she and Tsugio live hand to mouth like all the others; and yet she seems to derive a sense of social superiority as much from lending money as being the target of passive aggressive attacks from the villagers. For the repressed Tsudio, the mountainous region seems as claustrophobic as his own bedroom where his grandmother can overhear his every cough. His only respite at first is running into his cousin who wants to marry him – she seems uninterested and inexperienced in sex but she defends the circumstances of her gender when Tsugio criticizes them for their needs (as much a judgment on the women as the relative "class" of the villagers) – until he too starts participating in the practice of yobai, or "night crawling", entering the homes and bedrooms of assenting local women who see virility where the village men see arrogance and gawkiness. Tsugio and his grandmother are relative outsiders, grudgingly tolerated compared to others deemed real outsiders who are killed and buried in the hills by a local night militia if they prove to usefulness is outweighed by their trouble-making. They appear to see themselves as keeping the peace and quietly maintaining order while Tsugio sees it as a form of social control and abuse of power only to discover visiting authorities seemingly in collusion when he speaks up about the mysterious "suicide" of one of the outsiders even though the victim was just as abusive to him and his grandmother as to the other villagers. While this telling uses the killer's perspective and provides some context and even some empathy to his situation – while taking some liberties with what facts have been available (see below) – once Tsugio finally snaps, director Tanaka uses the film's voyeuristic visual devices to transform the viewer into an observer and witness to the ensuing massacre which is a harrowing sequence made all the more unnerving as his spree seems random but we are reminded that he has mapped out the town and committed his targets to memory. In the light of the epidemic of school shootings and public spree killings, the film demonstrates in retrospect that the signs and the inability or unwillingness of people to respond to them are almost universally-recognizable. Tanaka – who may have been attracted to the story because the real killer Matsuo Toi was obsessed with the story of Sada Abe and apparently had written his own novel inspired by it – and cinematographer Keiji Maruyama (Beast in the Shadows) evoke the period effectively enough; however, the synthesizer and drum machine scoring of Masanori Sasaji is only intermittently effective at its most minimalist as busier passages seem more appropriate to a modern comedy and the end credits song is so tonally jarring as to trivialize what has come before it. While there is probably much we can learn from the story behind Village of Doom, it perhaps for the best that it has not been dramatized more recently given a recent more prurient armchair detective/analysit fascination with true crime and its perpetrators over their victims. 
Video
Unreleased theatrically outside of Japan, Village of Doom was most accessible part from Shochiku's own VHS and DVD releases via Artsmagic's British DVD which only suffered eleven seconds of mandatory cuts to a sequence of animal violence (committed by the village troublemakers rather than the budding spree killer). We have no information about the master apart from it being supplied by Shochiku, but Unearthed Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray is free of damage and quite colorful in its rendering of blood red and leafy greens; however, black levels are a bit uneven even under controlled lighting conditions but not in the "wrong color space" of some earlier Japanese digital transfers. Some of the shadows in the location scenes are noisy including a scene at dusk where there is some pixellation in the blacks. 
Audio
The sole audio option is a Japanese LPCM 2.0 mono option that is virtually free of hiss, conveying the deafening silences and the prickly nature of some of the score more effectively than the canned gunfire sound effects of the climax. Optional English subtitles are free of errors. 
Extras
Extras start off with an audio commentary by Asian film experts Arne Venema and Mike Leeder who we usually hear on Hong Kong film commentary tracks. The pair of them provide some background on the true crime and the liberties taken with the film's story, as well as some more information about "yobai" noting that it was a common practice until the early twentieth century when it was discouraged both by the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases but also the invention of the street lamp. They also reveal that there were different rules associated with the practice from region to region, while also revealing that at one point the killer was in "relationships" with ten women of his village. They discuss the ways in which the film resembles a Roman Porno but also how it differs, the career of Furuoya – who they liken to Anthony Perkins in both the pre- and -post Psycho iterations – and his later suicide, as well as the careers of some of the other cast (noting that most of the young women did indeed work in Japanese softcore adult films during this period). More background on the case comes in the form of the YouTube/Spotify true crime podcast "Dark Asia with Megan: Case #57: Japan's Darkest Night, Tsuyama Massacre" (15:02) in which host Megan Lee provides a more focused account on the crime as well as all of the available information on Matsuo Toi, noting that he was more well-liked and popular than his film counterpart but his personality changed after his sister married and moved away (she would later die of tuberculosis which killed both of his parents when he was an infant). In addition to more biographical information and the events leading up to the massacre – including his hypersexual nature which put off some of his partners even when before the stigma of tuberculosis – Lee also provides information from witness accounts of the night. While Toi wrote a suicide note in which he claims to called for greater tolerance for outsiders, Lee also notes that the events that brought the police to confiscate his guns were less dramatic than in the film, being a boast that if he was dying he might as well go out with a bang which makes his motives seem less altruistic. The disc also includes the film's theatrical trailer (1:19) and a promotional gallery (2:50). 
Packaging
The first pressing comes with a slipcover that, like the rear of the cover sleeve, mistakenly refers to the killer under his real name rather than his name in the film.
Overall
While there is probably much we can learn from the story behind Village of Doom, it perhaps for the best that it has not been dramatized more recently given a recent more prurient armchair detective/analysit fascination with true crime and its perpetrators over their victims.
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