Rampo Noir (2005)

"Great Author. Great Shame About the Film"

Arrow Films are releasing 2005's RAMPO NOIR on Blu-ray. It's an anthology film by four different Japanese directors that purports to ‘adapt’ (and I use that term loosely but not as loosely as the people who made the film) four stories by the Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo (a play on 'Edgar Allan Poe' - his real name was Taro Hirai). Rampo became famous in his homeland for his detective novels, but many of his short stories contained controversial elements of what were termed 'ero guro nansesu' or eroticism, grotesquerie and the nonsensical. His tales of cruelty and psychological horror haven’t been translated into English much, although there is a nice little paperback from Tuttle publishing that includes the classic tales ‘The Hell of Mirrors’ and ‘The Caterpillar’, both of which have both been filmed here.

We start with the very brief 'Mars' Canal', which is essentially plotless and features a naked man wrestling with a naked woman who might be his reflection that he saw in a lake. There's some fascination with lighting and skin texture here but in terms of narrative there's very little of substance.

An emphasis on imagery (plentiful) over storytelling (mediocre at best) and pacing (terrible) is present in the second story which adapts the mirror tale, and adds to its bare bones source a plot about women being discovered with their faces burned off. It turns out they all have hand mirrors made by one particular man, who ends up inside the mirrored sphere of the original piece. Despite attempts to make a police procedural out of it, this is far too slow and far too in love with its own visual style to hold the attention.

After that we get ‘The Caterpillar’ one of the most outrageous of Rampo's stories as well as being one of the cruellest and most despairing. The story of a war hero who comes home without his arms and legs only to be tortured by his wife was banned by the Japanese government out of concerns it would affect their war effort, and it could have formed the basis for a painful, tragic meditation on loss and desire. Instead once again we get something that is far more concerned with imagery than narrative which, especially coming after the similarly dirge-like previous segment makes for testing viewing indeed. Finally comes 'Crawling Bugs', a story whose execution is confusing rather than ambiguous and the denouement silly rather than horrific.

I'm being more vitriolic than usual here because I'm a big fan of Rampo's stories and it would be awful if RAMPO NOIR was to put off new prospective readers. Here his stories have been hijacked by filmmakers who have seemed determined to turn some excellent pieces of short fiction into relentlessly dull and self-indulgent cinema, and that's a great shame.

Extras include a new commentary track from Jasper Sharp and Alexander Zahlten, a 76 minute making of from 2006, 15 minutes of footage from the Japanese premiere with the directors on stage, an image gallery, and a stack of new interviews.

The new interviews include Mars Canal director Suguru Takeuchi (14 minutes), Caterpillar director Hisayasu Soto (25 minutes), Crawling Bugs director Atsushi Kaneku (14 minutes), Caterpillar cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa (16 minutes), and Mirror Hell cinematography advisor Masao Nakabori (25 minutes) and actress Yumi Yoshiyaki (14 minutes). There are also image galleries for each story. The disc also comes with a reversible sleeve and an illustrated booklet with new writing on the film.

RAMPO NOIR is out on Blu-ray from Arrow Films on Monday 6th January 2025