ONE HUNDRED MONSTERS: Great Daiei supernatural tale!

[Chris K.]

The plot: A small village is besieged by a greddy magistrate and plans to turn the place into a brothel. During the magistrate's stay, a priest stops by to tell him the story of the 'One Hundred Ghost Stories' while a young samurai is spying on the magistrate's plans. Yet, the magistrate's fate lies in the hands of the One Hundred Monsters.

Daiei has been known in the Japanese film history as a company that produced some lavish films with great special effects. However, Daiei never became much of a household name as Toho did. Of course, this was because Toho was able to deliver a much better product that offered special effects, top quality actors, better stories, and first rate directors throughout it's ongoing run. Daiei, on the other hand, originally had those items that Toho did during the 1950's. Yet, the company began to rely more on special effects extravagana's rather than top-noch directors when the 60's rolled in. Daiei executives placed more money in special effects work and in turn while making a profit it also began to hurt their department more than ever. Because of that, by the late 60's Daiei began to make a few cutbacks on some of their projects, mainly the Gamera films and in turn the quality began to decline. However, Daiei did spend a few extra dollars on their MAJIN films and some of their supernatural films.

ONE HUNDRED MONSTERS was basically a change of pace from their Gamera features and offered something more: an engaging story, fleshed-out characters and little focus on special effects work. In fact, their is very little effects and more concentration on the story and characters, which in turn might turn-off most Daiei fan's who expect ONE HUNDRED MONSTERS to be a film on par with the low-key Gamera films of the very late 60's. Yet because of that, here is a chance to see Daiei at their most grand moment. Here, the story is the key and it's pretty much the special effect in it's own self! The script detail, camerawork, and actors do a convincing job carriying on the story that no effects work at all would be able to carry it. But, Daiei does supply some optical/visual effects and the results are good, but not 100% nessisary.

Another aspect of the film is that the main characters are the human ones, the ghosts are not! ONE HUNDRED MONSTERS doesn't really focus on the ghosts as much as one would think it would. In fact, the ghosts are such a small part of the film that if you edit them out, you nonetheless would still have a good tale of murder and greed, while the ghosts are simply the backstory filler material. Whereas in the film's followup SPOOK WARFARE, the ghosts are the main portion of the story and when about halfway into the film it plays like GAMERA VS. GULLION (1969; U.S. Television Title: ATTACK OF THE MONSTERS) in which special effects and absurd moments take over the storytelling.

ADV Films presents ONE HUNDRED MONSTERS in it's original Daieiscope 2.35:1 and enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Transferred from original negative materials, the transfer is very impressive. Very little scratches are visible and the picture quality looks as if the film was shot two days ago! Only during the special optical effects their is some weird color change and grain, but this is likely due to the optical printer process that was used for the special effects. The film certainly looks better than the SPOOK WARFARE release, but that's another story for latter. The audio is in Japanese with the usual removable English subtitles. Extras are limited: the original Japanese trailer is offered, plus a U.S. trailer specially designed for the DVD. I must say the U.S. trailer is a bit of a waste as it offers nothing new accept Engish taglines and dull editing. Even so, I wasn't expecting this release to be a fully packed Special Edition.

ADV is sure giving these films some respect. First the MAJIN trilogy, now the supernatural films. One wonders if ADV will release the original 60's Gamera films on DVD. But for now, I await for the last film ALONG WITH GHOST (1969), which stars the very talented Kojiro Hongo, that ADV will be releasing in September. And expect a review of SPOOK WARFARE very soon as well.