Bakeneko: A Vengeful Spirit (1968) – In medieval Japan, a usurping noble sets himself up for supernatural vengeance by (a) killing his lord, after which the distraught widow and her cat walk into the nearby marsh and drown; and (b) demanding that a young engaged woman “serve” him at the castle; when her fiance tries to rescue her, the two end up being killed in the same swamp. So the original widow’s cat comes back, disguises herself as various people, and basically makes the usurper’s life a living hell.
It’s an odd sort of story — there really isn’t any protagonist once the engaged lovers die, which is before the halfway mark — but there are lots of subtle “haunting” images which carry it through.
In the Mouth of Madness (1995) – When I first saw this, over twenty years ago, I wasn’t sure if I liked it. Today, after all these years, I’m still not sure. There are definitely parts that I like very much, but the ending doesn’t quite gel for me; it feels more like a perfunctory ending because nobody could think of anything better. In that regard, it reminds me of Prince of Darkness; it seems that when Carpenter tries for some kind of “surreal profundity,” it misses the mark for me; I’d much rather see his straightforward classics like Halloween or The Thing.
Mothra (1961) – Well, I’ll be; I guess I hadn’t seen this before. It’s hard to keep track, what with all of Mothra’s appearances in Godzilla movies and reboots and…
Anyway. Tiny girls get kidnapped from a tropical island by a greedy promoter; big-ass caterpillar goes to Japan to get them back. Phase 2, big-ass caterpillar becomes bigger-ass moth. Fuzzy yet deadly!
More than just the same-old-story; it’s a timeless tale! Kinda reminds me of this:
Abandoned movies:
The Silent Stranger (1968) – A dying Japanese man in the Old West tells a gunslinger that he can make $20,000 for delivery a tiny scroll to the right person in Japan, so what they hey, the gunslinger packs up his horse and takes a ship to Japan! I endured through about twenty minutes of him stumbling around with no clue what he was doing.
Terminal Invasion (2002) – Bruce Campbell stars as a convict whose transport is forced to take cover in an itty-bitty charter airport during a blizzard; Chase Masterson (whose claim to fame is “a recurring non-starring role on DS9“) is the pilot and charter owner. The other people in the airport spend all their time arguing with each other. Oh, and there’s an alien invasion going on, but the focus is still on the bitch-bitch-bitching.