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3 years ago, a gang of hoodlums raided the freighter Dragon King and
killed (or tried to kill) everyone on board to steal the gold shipment she
was carrying. Among the dead were Yoriko (Kikko Matsuoka) and her
newly-wed husband Nishizato (Ko Nishimura), the ship's doctor ... Nowadays,
Saeko (Kikko Matsuoka again), Yoriko's identical twin, is still trying to
come over the disappearance of her sister (the abandoned Dragon King was
never found), but has found refuge at a priest's (Masumi Okada) and a
boyfriend in local barowner Mochizuki (Yasunori Irikawa). One day when she
and Mochizuki go diving though, they find a bunch of skeletons chained to
the seabed floating underwater. Later that night, within a heavy fog, they
find the Dragon King, too, and on the ship, Saeko finds the captain's log,
detailing the freighter's takeover. The next day, Saeko is gone - but the
hoodlums who raided the Dragon King start falling like flies, and the only
thing their deaths have in common are weird appearances of the Dragon King
out of thick fog - and Yoriko showed up at all the murder scenes ... Eventually,
the priest and Mochizuki manage to track down Saeko and take her back home
- where Saeko confesses to the priest that it was actually she who killed
the hoodlums (whom she tracked down with the help of the captain's log),
using her similarity to her sister as her ace in the sleeve. Later that
night, the priest murders Saeko - and is soon revealed to be the leader of
the hoodlums, Tanuma. Together with the last surviving accomplice of his
in the raid, Suetsugu (Nobuo Kaneko), Tanuma goes on board the Dragon King
(which has just appeared out of the fog again), only to find out Nishizato
is still alive but has gone crazy over his wife's death, so he has
developed all sorts of things like an incredibly powerful acid and has
brought his wife back into a vegetative state via blood transfusions. He
treats Suetsugu to a taste of his acid, and Suetsugu pretty much dissolves
alive, but when Nishizato goes after Tanuma, he dies in an accident - but
somehow vegetative Yoriko grabs hold of Tanuma's leg and won't let him go,
and then Saeko (no idea how she survived her death) appears to scare the
living shit out of Tanuma. The ship is already half-dissolved by
Nishizato's acid when Mochizuki comes to save Saeko, but she pushes him
back into the water (and to his safety), preferring to die for good with
the ship. The Living Skeleton is quite an interesting a
film as it manages to effortlessly marry extremely atmospheric and almost
artsy filmmaking with a very pulpy plot that verges the far-fetched and
silly in more than one way. Still, on a directorial level, the film knows
how to create menace, to make its deliberately slow pace work for its
advantage, and go for subtlety rather than spectacle, all to the film's
advantage, obviously. So while no masterpiece, this one is still a quite
fascinating piece of genre cinema - and if you find parallels to John
Carpenter's much later The Fog (which by the way is even pulpier in
story), you are not mistaken ...
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amazon.co.uk
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find The Living Skeleton at adultvideouniverse.com
