The Inugami Family (犬神家の一族) (1976)

Seishi Yokomizo's murder mystery is set in motion by the death of a rich patriarch whose unusual will plummets his extended Inugami family into conflict, and when the bodies start turning up in grisly giallo fashion, Kindaichi Kousuke,  Yokomizo's recurring detective, a vagabond with dandruff (!), must race to unmask a murderer in a plot that, as always with Yokomizo, involves a thousand similarly named characters, centuries of buried family history, and complicated - and here, really, frankly, impossible - characters' comings and goings from busy murder scenes.

★★★☆☆

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八っ墓村 (Yatsuhaka-mura) (Eight Tomb Village)(1996)

Seishi Yokomizo's mystery novel, encompassing 1577 civl war events, a spree killing in the 1930s (inspired by a horrible true event), and then a more contemporary village murder mystery, is a convoluted mess (on top of these occasions of mass murder spread over 400 years, there's portentous lightning strikes, identical twins, hidden treasure, mummified bodies, a labyrinth, madness, a curse, and village unrest) and while director Ichikawa Kon's 1996 remake sticks more closely to the plot of the book than the 1977 adaptation, it still makes the sensible choice to cut some fat off the book's bones, presenting an enjoyable mystery less convoluted than the book, downplaying the horror of the 1977 version and up-playing the English mystery elements, injecting into the mystery much more of Kindaichi Kousuke, the private detective, who is trying to discover who is poisoning the residents of "Eight Tomb Village" while also investigating how the murders are related to the arrival in town of handsome Tatsuya Tajimi, a young man just told he is heir to the enormous Tajimi fortune.

★★★★☆

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八っ墓村 (Yatsuhaka-mura) ('Village of Eight Graves') (1977)

Author Seishi Yokomizo's convoluted mystery has thankfully been trimmed of several characters and the action streamlined in this ripper adaptation of his book, which connects sixteenth-century feudal events in Japan to a modern-day Japanese murder mystery in the village of Yatsuhakamura (Village of Eight Graves) and, though a mystery, it enthusiastically embraces horror — the body count is exorbitant, there's a chilling link to the real-life 1938 Tsuyama incident, and scenes of maniacal villains chasing victims through labyrinthine limestone caves amid ghastly 70s giallo stylings.

★★★★☆

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Island of Hell (aka 'Devil's Island', 'Gokumon-tou', 'Hell's Gate Island' (獄門島) (1977)

Ichikawa Kon's 1977 adaptation of Seishi Yokomizo's detective novel is faithful to the book except in its final moments when whodunnit is revealed and it is whodidntdunnit in the book, a change which will rankle fans of the classic mystery featuring the recurring, dandruff-suffering, scruffy detective Kindaichi Kousuke; meanwhile, non-Japanese speakers also will be frustrated by breakneck cutting, which makes it hard to enjoy the movie's Japanese sets, costuming, and its plot while also keeping up with lightning-speed subtitles. 

★★★☆☆

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Death At An Old Mansion (本陣殺人事件) (1975)

It seems strange to stay completely faithful to the plot of Seishi Yokomizo's detective novel The Honjin Murders yet change the title so no one who has read the book can easily find this adaptation, but I suppose Death At An Old Mansion dispenses with the archaic and unhelpful concept of a honjin and provides a more atmospheric English title better suited to this 1975 adaptation's giallo stylings - in good part a horror movie, chilling at times, but also an effective telling of Yokomizo's classic Japanese locked room murder mystery inspired by Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room.

★★★★☆

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