The Vampire Inspector – review

Director: Yûichi Harada

Release date: 1982

contains spoilers

Made for TV, this Japanese film has a really interesting premise that gets bogged down in a period Samurai story, which features little in the way of gore or horror and way too much melodrama.

It starts with a Christian shrine and Tokugawa Shogunate agents attacking the Christians. This is representative of the Shimabara Rebellion, an uprising of Japanese Christians against the Shogunate between 1637 and 1638. The Rebellion led to the slaughter of around 37,000 rebels. In this sequence we hear rebel leader Amakusa Shirō speak of a demon in his dreams, selling his soul to the devil and having to go back to the land of the living.

Inspector Shiranui

A ship is wrecked at sea and two men, a samurai named Akenosuke Kito and an engineer named Jirokichi survived, clinging to a piece of wood. They wash up on an island described in the narration as deserted and see some sort of atmospheric light effect over the ocean. They are approached by a woman who leads them to a house where a further woman is. There is also a large dog – which is later apparently meant to be a wolf but they use a Doberman – and inside a man who calls himself Inspector Shiranui, after the island.

drained

The men are perplexed that Shiranui seems to know their names and more so when he suggests he is 160 years old. He asks about the Shogunate and Akenosuke admits that it is corrupt. Whilst they are entertained, Jirokichi momentarily sees one of the women’s hands seem to become skeletal. Once they go to sleep the women approach the Samurai and, binding him in magical ribbon, go to bite him as they are, of course, vampires. However the engineer awakes, sees them and runs and so they pursue him. In the morning Akenosuke finds the building derelict and Jirokichi dead with fang marks.

vampire concubine

The Inspector is actually Amakusa Shirō and we discover that, when his rebellion failed, he sold his soul to the devil and has slept 160 years to awaken and avenge himself on the Shogunate. We also discover that, when he was alive, his love committed suicide and get a reincarnated love aspect – though rather than it being the Shogun’s wife (as one might expect) it is the maid of the wife – who is also Akenosuke’s lover and believes him to be dead in the shipwreck. Nevertheless, the vampire has a job to do, and he turns concubines and palace drug dealers to attack others and essentially strikes at the heart of the palace corruption.

using the cross

Luckily, a local doctor has an old Dutch book that explains vampires. Common in the West they are fairly unknown in the East – the inference being that it is Christianity that has allowed them to come to Japan but it is also Christian iconography that can destroy them. The Shogunate has made Christian symbolism illegal, but the Doctor, very luckily, has a crucifix. He also knows that garlic flowers will repel them. Apparently, a sword will also kill them just fine.

vampire women with the 'wolf'

So I liked the merging of the Western vampire in an Eastern setting and the use of Christianity as both cause and cure almost. There is very little to no gore and the Samurai drama aspect was pedestrian (the narration in parts did not help). Probably the worst aspect of this was the melodrama (surrounding love, memory and heralded by the most god-awfully overemotional soundtrack moments). A mixed bag, certainly. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.