FrightFest review – Ningyo densetsu (Mermaid Legend) (1984)

Ningyo densetsu (Mermaid Legend) (1984)

There’s a reading of this Japanese revenge drama that heroine Migiwa (Mari Shirato) dies early on and transforms into an unkillable sea spirit who can slaughter hundreds at a posh party and summon a storm by asking a cast-aside buddha to sweat black ink … but maybe as a diver she can just hold her breath underwater a long time.  Directed by Toshihari Ikeda of the Evil Dead Trap films, this is one of those stories – Lars von Trier’s Dogville is another – where a woman suffers a series of losses, privations, injustices and sexual assaults, then becomes a near-genocidal avenger and the audience is happy to see her covered with blood spray and wielding a modified trident as a weapon.

The set-up establishes that the traditional fishing industry in a small coastal town is on its last legs and a local bigwig (Yoshiro Aoki) is floating big projects – pretending he’s backing a resort/funfair whereas he’s actually in league with a crooked power company and the yakuza to bring a nuclear power station to the vicinity.  A hold-out landowner is killed by a speedboat gang and Migiwa’s drunk husband Keisuke (Jun Ito) witnesses the incident.  He talks Migiwa into diving for the wreck, but as she’s searching Keisuke’s corpse falls into the water – and she is wounded by a spear … and is washed up to find that she’s now wanted for murder.  The prime baddie’s son Shohei (Kentaro Shimizu), a photographer who’s been pally with Migiwa and Keisuke, is inclined to help her hide out – in a brothel on an offshore island – but lets his lust overrule his morality and subjects her to an extended roughie-type sexual assault.  Migiwa takes a gig as a pleasure girl to get more information on her husband’s death, and a yakuza blithely admits the whole run of crimes as a prelim to murdering her – only to get stabbed, precipitating the traditional rampaging orgy of bloody revenge.

Shirato isn’t quite as iconic as Meiko Kaji, but combines a couple of stock Japanese cinema characters – the female diver (there was a whole cycle of sexy fishergirl movies in the 1950s) and the widowed avenger.