Original title: Inugami no tatari

The inugami (dog god or dog spirit) is one of the more localised folk legends of Japan, the belief that someone can be possessed by the spirit of a dog that mainly seems to have taken root in the west of the country. It’s been said that entire families can fall afoul of an inugami and a complex range of beliefs and myths are associated with them. They’ve been regulars in popular culture too, variations of the myth and spirits turning up in manga, computer games, anime television series like Inugami-san to Nekoyama-san (2014) and even in an episode of the American show Grimm (2011-2017). In film, they’ve been less popular than their feline counterparts, the bakeneko, but they have turned up in Inugami (2001) and Shun’ya Itô’s fairly obscure Inugami no tatari/Curse of the Dog God (1977).

The often-bewildering script, written by Itô, begins with a trio of rather laddish scientists, Ryûji Kanô (Shin’ya Ohwada), Nishioka (Shinya Ono) and Yasui (Takeshige Hatanaka) heading out into the countryside to investigate a source of uranium (“the gold of the atomic age”) at the base of a sacred mountain. They spy on a pair of young women skinny dipping in a pond, carelessly destroy a small roadside spirit house and run over the dog of a young local boy, Isamu (Junya Kato). Kanô later marries a local woman, Reiko (Jun Izumi), shoes father owns the land the uranium is on, but Isamu is still bitter about the death of his beloved dog and disrupts the ceremony by firing stones from a slingshot, leading to Isamu’s older sister and Reiko’s best friend Kaori (Emiko Yamauchi) being barred from the ceremony. Back in the city, the newlyweds are subjected to a string of increasingly disturbing and inexplicable happenings and Reiks slowly goes insane, convinced that Kanô has been cursed and that she’s possessed by an inugami. An attempt to exorcise her ends in tragedy when she dies during the ceremony, Nishioka throws himself off a skyscraper and Yasui is fatally attacked by a pack of feral dogs. But the vengeful inugami isn’t stopping there and continues to torment Kanô, manifesting as a severed canine head that wreaks nayhen wherever it goes.

There’s no denying that Curse of the Dog God is absolutely gorgeous to look at, beautifully photographed by the veteran Hanjirô Nakazawa and directed with real style by Itô, better known in the west perhaps for his earlier “women-in-prison” Female Prisoner #701 trilogy Joshû 701-gô: Sasori/Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972), Joshû sasori: Dai-41 zakkyo-bô/Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972) and Joshuu sasori: Kemono-beya/Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (1973) (there were several other sequels, none of them directed by Itô). But it’s also fairly incoherent, wildly inconsistent in tone and not altogether too concerned with explaining any of what’s going on.

There’s a town-vs-country subplot that surfaces fitfully, with the careless, unthinking city folk coming off poorly against their superstitious and looked-down-upon country counterparts, and that popular theme in Japanese cinema, the demands of the modern world clashing with the long-established old ways is well in evidence. The fact that the story pivots around the discovery of a seam of uranium suggests that the film is also concerned with the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but it’s hard to determine quite point – if any – Itô was trying to make. One suspects that, as is so often the way, cultural ignorance prevents a full understanding of the nuances of the plot (there seems to be no consistency when it comes to why the dog god behaves the way it does, nor any attempt to explain them) which may go some way to explaining the film’s relative obscurity in the west.

It’s certainly a lively film – there’s a lot going on here, packed to the sprocket holes with wild and crazy stuff that will leave most non-Japanese viewers (and who knows, maybe a few Japanese too) scratching their heads. It sometimes feels like there’s too much going on, Itô piling on the weirdness almost for its own sake to the detriment of an already hard-to-explain plot. None of the characters are particularly likable either which does little to help, leaving us largely apathetic to their ultimate fates.

It’s in the middle act, after Kanô takes Reiko back to the village, that things start to become seriously unfocused (and gets burdened with both too much chit chat and a trip to a hospital where specialists examine Reiko that recalls the almost identical scene in The Exorcist (1973) where Regan is subjected to a battery ion invasive medical tests), but it rallies again for a wild final act that justifies the time spent watching it. It’s probably best not to think too much about what’s going on or waste too much time trying to make any sense of it, just sit back and enjoy the energetic craziness of it all. But overall, it just doesn’t work as well as it should. It’s at its best when Itô just lets loose and lets the film off its reins to career off down its unpredictable, lunatic and very singular course.

Curse of the Dog God was Itô’s only horror film, though he went on to make the fantasy Kaze no Matasaburô: Garasu no manto/The Glass Cape (1989) and, unexpectedly, an anime, Rupan sansei: Kutabare! Nostradamus/Lupin III: Farewell to Nostradamus (1995), which he co-directed with Takeshi Shirato and Nobuo Tomizawa. Although Curse of the Dog God doesn’t quite work, it would have been nice to see more from him the genre as he has an exhilarating style and certainly knows his way around a set-piece. If Curse of the Dog God is worth watching at all – and it is, with expectations suitably lowered – then that will be because of Itô’s stylish direction.