If it’s highly controlled yet mad gothic you’re after – plus a wackadoodle title – Horrors of Malformed Men, a Japanese cult item from 1969, should do it for you.
Director Teruo Ishii wastes no time setting out his stall. The opening shot is of a woman’s bare breast, followed half a second later by a knife aimed at the chest of the only man in a cell full of half-clothed women. Breasts abound. If this is your thing the entirely well formed women of this movie are an extra bonus.
The knife turns out to be a stage prop, and the man is not in any immediate danger. Once rescued from the cell by a guard who doesn’t seem that curious about how Hirosuke Hitomi (Teruo Yoshida) got there in the first place, Hitomi’s voiceover takes over – I’m not insane, he is telling himself, so how come I am in an asylum? Examining his memory further he knows for certain he is a doctor but there is almost nothing else of his previous life he can rememeber.
It makes little difference because, in a series of episodes that situate this film decisively in the world of the gothic, Hitomi has in short order killed an attacker, escaped from jail, met a mystery woman who is also soon dead, then wound up impersonating a dead man he resembles so exactly that we suspect there’s more mad plotting to come.
For the moment, though, things calm down, and Hitomi settles in as dead man Genzaburô Komoda, enjoying the lifestyle and passing his days learning to be a more exact replica of the rich man he is standing in for. This involves convincing both the dead man’s wife and mistress that he is the real thing.
And then this relatively peaceful interlude is interrupted by Hitomi’s decision to visit the island where Komoda’s father lives, only to discover that he is creating an army of “malformed” creatures. This is where the showdown finale will take place, and it’s excessive, inadvertently funny, Freudian, breast-fixated and madly camp.
The original story is by Edogawa Ranpo, the cult writer born Tarō Hirai, who borrowed his pen name from Edgar Allan Poe (write it like this – Edoga waRan Po – and you see what he’s done), but who also loved a bit of Sherlock Holmes. Which explains the strange ending, when a detective arrives and explains everything, much as the sage of Baker Street might do.
Whatever else you might say about this mad concoction, it’s a well made film, looking good all these decades on in spite of its fairly low budget. Ishii has an eye for a tightly controlled image and has clearly watched the more carnivalesque of Fellini’s films. There are almost moments that seem to reference Hitchcock visually, an echo, perhaps of the fact that the plot is a bit like North by Northwest subjected to psychedelic interference.
There is a paranoid, bad trip aspect to the whole thing, the notable thing being that the longer the hair, the more villainous the character – the film did not do well at all internationally, and wasn’t seen in the USA for decades. This has often been put down to the sheer number and variety of breasts on display. But it was out of step with the counterculture of late Sixties and early Seventies USA, which didn’t particularly want to see itself demonised. There was no audience for Horrors of Malformed Men.
Their loss. It is a brilliant summation of the gothic, almost an encylopedia of tropes – mad experiments, snakes, cackling, a revenge plot, dark secrets, twisted family relations, left-field death, incest, insects, incarceration, insanity.
On top of that, there’s stuff that’s this film’s own, like men and women sewn together, a creature whose face appears to be made of cake, humans crossed with dogs and goats, many a wild woman (breasts again) in many a cage.
Jogōrō, father of Komoda, has webbed fingers and is almost always shot from beneath to add lurid heat, and Tatsumi Hijikata does a good job keeping his character within the rails of reason, as far as he possibly can with a screenplay this overheated. Yoshida also understands his job – whether he’s Hitomi or Komoda, he’s the single source of calm and reason in a roiling stew of excess.
Style to spare, excess to spare too. More than just a mad title in search of a plot. Watch the Arrow 2K restoration if you can and as well as being able to see the skill of cinematographer Shigeru Akatsuka, you can better hear the Morricone-influenced score of Hajime Kaburagi. There is method behind this madness.
Horrors of Malformed Men – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
