Cheap Onibaba (Video) (Nobuko Otowa, Jitsuko Yoshimura) (Kaneto Shindô) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Onibaba

Good Karma Bad Karma
Onibaba is a very serious film that probe into your basic conscience. In a deserted village in feudal Japan when wars were fought meaninglessly and food was scarce, life came to basic forms. How could two woman peasants survived? They did it my killing ronins, samurai deserted from wars, and selling their outfits for food (Anybody who have learnt kendo know that these kind of outfit is expensive). So the two women knew the easy way out as these outfits were of short supply as for food.

But what about the conscience. Will the two women get punishment for their "evil deed." Not the younger one who gets sexual satiation as well, perhaps when you are young and robust, you may need both for survival. But the older woman, the mother-in-law of the younger one, gets punishment by suppressing the sexual demand of the wife of her son, who got killed in the war. Why? I suppose it could only be explained by the Onibaba, the deep dark hole of our subconscious conscience in the time of atrocity and famine.

A beautifully made film with erotic shots of nature, and its inhabitants. Onibaba also deliver one important message: once we put on a mask (disguise), we could never take it off(fate), as we mortals will always suffer from our karmas.

Onibaba is a good karma from the director Kaneto Shindo!

---

Brilliant Japanese tale of the supernatural
One of the greatest of all films of the supernatural, Onibaba, 1964, elicits shivers based on its perfect fusion of atmosphere, character, and setting. In feudal Japan, samurais coming home from warrior duty pass through fields of tall waving grass--a powerful leit-motif here--and are enticed by an older woman and her widowed daughter in law to follow them for a much-needed meal. But the two women have no intention of providing food for the men; they've constructed a booby trap that kills.

Stripping the now-dead warriors of their armor, the two sell it for food; this is their nasty means of survival in a desperate land. The younger woman, however, needs more than food to survive. Her hunger for the touch of a man is greater than that for food and she finds one who she is sure will satisfy her. But her mother-in-law is enraged by this possibility. Finding a mask on one of the dead samurais, the old woman dons it, mimicking a demon, to frighten the younger one.

The mother-in-law's scheme does not go as planned.

The director, Kaneto Shindo, has here created a sparse, riveting tale that transfixes the viewer because of its down-to-the-bone simplicity. Greed, fear, jealousy, and rage are all expressed with a minimum of action, but when they are on display, they're intense and that much more powerful. The subtle black and white cinematography is a perfect complement to the film's simplicity of tone. No tale of the supernatural can ever work without at least one of man's baser emotions present, and it works much more effectively when the expression of those emotions is lean amd nean, as it is here.

The much-touted current Japanese horror film, Ring, has been given enough attention by the media to, at long last generate its ultimate homage, an American remake. But Ring, while smacking all too easily of Cronenberg's influence, does not penetrate with its horror, save for one extremely disturbing scene; it's far too superficial.

In contrast, Onibaba works extremely well because the characters of the two women are the focus, which leads ultimately to the horrific events that occur. For a powerful experience in real terror, see this film. It is a masterpiece of the supernatural.

---

vacuous adoration -- the death trap of a bad movie
There is much to say of my surprise at the shimmering reviews this pathetic second rate Japanese movie has received here on Amazon. It is this very incongruency that compelled me to interject a grain of lucidity into this vat of oily adulation. Let's be honest about it -- the movie is horrendous, has very little artistic value, unless you consider the very repetitive shots of the pampas rustling in the wind to be art, and a mundane plot. The only virtues possessed by this flick are its obscurity and er badness -- all requisites for a drinking game with a bunch of degenerated con-vivants. Onibaba is NOT in the same ballpark as Kurasawa by a very long shot. I much rather recommend Kwaidan as far as old Japanese horror goes. Hope you don't fall into the snares, but if you must, don't be fooled into the pretense of substance.