K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces / K-20: Kaijin niju menso den (2008)

I first looked at K-20 because it was written and directed by a woman, Shimako Sato, expecting something similar to Sway or Wild Berries. Boy, was I surprised. What I found instead was a full Spielbergian extravaganza, full of barely credible derring-do told with the same kind of inventive yet nostalgic recreation of the feeling …

Rampo (1994)

The world of Edogawa Rampo's stories have always been a fertile ground for Japanese movie-makers, but there seems to have been a mini-revival in the mid-nineties in three gorgeously photographed films. Two of these were relatively straight-forward mysteries featuring Detective Akechi adapted from some of Rampo's earliest works. Rampo is a different creature altogether. Rampo …

D-Slope Murder / Murder on D Street / D-Zaka no satsujin jiken (1998)

Though looking like a sequel to Akio Jissoji's Watcher in the Attic, the D-Slope Murder dramatizes the very first story featuring Edogowa Rampo's Detective Akechi. Thus, we see the very beginnings of Japan's most popular detective, later rivaled only by Kindaichi.* The female owner of a bookstore decides to sell some fakes of a famous …

Watcher in the Attic / Yaneura no sanposha (1994)

Edogawa Rampo's works provided such a fertile ground for Japanese film and TV that it is hard to sort out how many of his works have been filmed. Watcher in the Attic, for example, had itself been made at least twice as pinku films before Akio Jissoji's version appeared. Of the adaptations of Rampo's stories …

Black Lizard / Kurotokage (1962)

Black Lizard is a caper/melodrama unlike almost anything you are likely to find in American or European films. Black Lizard, here played by Machiko Kyo, is Japan's greatest jewel thief with her eyes set on the largest diamond in the world. But instead of a traditional mystery of the perfect crime, we have a plot …