The Living Skeleton

It's always fun to expect a dud and get a bang. The Living Skeleton is an exceptionally disturbing ghost story/proto-slasher with gorgeous visuals and deaths that would make Jason Voorhees blush. Also features the one thing I love more than bad dummy deaths: Rubber bats!

I love picturing someone pitching The Living ... ... ... Skeleton and all these Japanese investors exploding. Wild movie.

This Japanese New Wave revenge film is barely comprehensible, but consistently entertaining. There's facemelting, skeleton armies, and double crossings enough for everyone! Huzzah!

O esqueleto vivo estreava há 55 anos no Japão. Quando vi gente comparando com Carpenter e Lynch minhas expectativas aumentaram bastante, por isso mesmo a decepção foi maior. É um bom filme, com ótima atmosfera, mas não vamos exagerar, né? Box Versátil Obras-primas do Terror Horror Japonês volume 2.

A surprisingly effective horror film from Japan. You can tell it's very low budget but some of the effects pretty damn cool. The music is also used well with a blend of Jazz and jarring horror music riffs. Enjoyable but still kind of forgettable.

Definitely liked it better until the ending. The stuff with the priest was easy to see but was enjoyable nonetheless. Great photography throughout. Nice use of music as well

Shades of Diabolique, though with more of a supernatural vibe. Certainly, by a long shot, the best "haunted ship" film I've ever seen.

The gorgeous b&w widescreen photography and the foggy seaside locale makes this watchable but the narrative is admittedly schlocky and uninvolving. Gets pleasantly weird towards the end. Seems to combine a lot of elements at once without really succeeding at any of them. Words of interest: fake miniatures, ghosts, fake bats, acid, mad scientist, don't trust the priest (!), attractive Japanese women, face melting, mass murder, skeletons, sunglasses, and REVENGE.

A creepy but absolutely bonkers piece of work. It plays well as an atmospheric ghost story for quite some time, aided by some very nice B&W photography, but some seriously insane twists start piling up and it gets unpredictable fast. It becomes great, moody fun. Some old horror funhouse style effects (rubber bats, skeletons, dry ice) add charm.

It's cinematically pretty, but the story feels very slapdash, and while the atmosphere is good, it feels weird to have a consistent atmosphere alongside an erratic narrative. Also, there was no Living Skeleton! I was very let down by that fact.

This film might have inspired John Carpenter's The Fog as there are a lot of curious similarities. Unfortunately this is nowhere near as good as the latter film. There are some eerie visuals but the film is not able to overcome its low budget, bad miniatures and rubber bats.