Hebi musume to hakuhatsuma (1968)
Languages: Japanese
Country: Japan
Genre: Fantasy
All Genres: Fantasy
Rating: 7.0 -Votes: 18
Year: 1968
Runtime: 82 minutes
Director: Noriaki Yuasa,
Cast:Tadashi Date, Mariko Fukuhara, Yuko Hamada, Sei Hiraizumi,
Excerpt from a review on Mark Hodgson's Asian Macabre website:
"THE SNAKE-GIRL AND THE SILVER-HAIRED WITCH (1968) is also listed as HEBI MUSUME TO HAKUHATSUMA, and bear in mind that I've watched this without the benefit of any subtitles. As it opens, a housemaid goes down into the basement of a big house. There are dozens of snakes and scorpions in glass tanks. A figure hiding in the shadows takes out a snake and throws it at the maid. Its bite kills her instantly. Someone hears her scream, but the murderer is nowhere to be seen. It all looks like an accident with an escaped snake...
Meanwhile Sayuri, a young girl with a short boyish haircut, leaves the care of an orphanage to live with distant relatives. Things get off to a bad start when Sayori arrives at her new home, just as the dead maid is being carried out the front door on her way to the morgue! Her new found family consists of Mum, Dad and the surviving maid. Their house is large, almost a mansion. (There's an impressive shot from out of the front gate and across the street - the sky has been blotted out by a gigantic facade of scaffolding, a huge new slab of building being constructed).
Inside, Mum seems a little preoccupied, Dad is never around, and someone is peeping at Sayori through a hole in her bedroom ceiling. Worse still, she gets a live snake dropped on her while she asleep! She dreams of a snake-faced girl in her bedroom...
The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired WitchSayori soon discovers that there's a conspiracy to conceal another girl in the house. Tamami is the cousin from hell. She's the rudest, cruellest, nastiest little girl you'd care to share a house with. Her cover blown, she moves in with Sayori. She has a strange waxy appearance, and when she sleeps, her hair falls away from her face revealing a crack down each side...
Eventually, Sayori is all but imprisoned in the loft (full of scary masks) which is haunted by a white-haired crone with a skeletal face and murder in mind. What the hell is going on? Are her nightmares coming to life? Will these creatures succeed in killing her?
To give you some idea of the tone of the movie, I'd compare this to one of Hammer Studios' 'psychological horrors', one of the black-and-white ones with the driving-the-heroine-mad-in-a-big-house plot (like TASTE OF FEAR, 1961), mixed up with the plot of THE REPTILE (1966), but for kids! It resembles one long children's nightmare, but that's like calling JAWS a fishing trip. It's bordering on full-on Japanese creepy horror.
It's also kept interesting by the blurring of Sayori's imagination. Much of the horror is in her dreams, but she also sees the snake-girl when she's awake. The movie is fast-paced and visually interesting, even sub-textually. The characters motivations keep you guessing and the dream sequences are full of effects that are probably also Freudian! Analyse that.
I found it entertaining and surprisingly violent, probably because I thought it was going to be for kids. Tamami's escalating cruelty fails to break the gutsy spirit of the young heroine, but provides us with many jaw-dropping moments - not least of which is when she tears Sayori's pet toad in half! Snake-girl's full of surprises like that.
There's another instance when Sayori catches Tamami looking at a natural history book, staring and mumbling at a page full of frogs. It reminded me of a similar scene when one of the villagers is obsessing over some newly found spirals in UZUMAKI.
Whilst the film isn't as lavish or sexual as the more famous sixties ghost stories like ONIBABA, this is certainly faster-paced and more eventful. Its atmosphere of nightmare and sadism are certainly unique.
It was directed by Noriaki Yuasa, who also helmed the original GAMERA movies. He must have been one of Daiei Studio's top directors of FX films. Sadly, Daiei went bust in 1970, relegating Yuasa to directing TV for the rest of his career (including some ULTRAMAN 80 episodes).
Despite his expertise, there's occasionally some obvious model work, and some fakey spiders and snakes. But that's countered by the imaginative scenarios and great make-up effects - Tamami's waxy mask is as eerie as the famous EYES WITHOUT A FACE, and there's a glimpse of the snake-girl's hinged jaw, with cheek-splitting action, just like in ICHI THE KILLER or CARVED - THE SLIT-MOUTHED WOMAN. The witch's face also looks effectively zombified.
The small cast are super, with the young actress Yachie Matsui as Sayuri, practically carrying the entire film. The parents are suitably twitchy in a classic horror movie dark-tortured-secret kind of way. The artist Kazuo Umezo even scores a cameo as the taxi driver."
Download
Big file:
Code:
http://ryushare.com/1330ba034816/The.Snake.Girl.and.the.Silver.rarSmall file:
Code:
http://depositfiles.com/files/k0gqp0746 The.Snake.Girl.and.the.Silver.part4.rar
http://depositfiles.com/files/xkuzx73xy The.Snake.Girl.and.the.Silver.part3.rar
http://depositfiles.com/files/sb3sajapa The.Snake.Girl.and.the.Silver.part2.rar
http://depositfiles.com/files/a8fc7x3aq The.Snake.Girl.and.the.Silver.part1.rar
Or
http://uploaded.net/file/0i2iuq35/The.Snake.Girl.and.the.Silver.part3.rar
http://uploaded.net/file/j702e2tz/The.Snake.Girl.and.the.Silver.part1.rar
http://uploaded.net/file/2uh6lnwj/The.Snake.Girl.and.the.Silver.part4.rar
http://uploaded.net/file/d2lsqkpf/The.Snake.Girl.and.the.Silver.part2.rar