Kineko Video the other day released to youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akh3_JGlkvA) a laserdisc scan of Sweet Home, which I had watched some years ago (I think with English subtitles before I was avoiding them for Japanese movies) via a VHS rip also on youtube. It’s a truly unfortunate thing that this is how this movie survives nowadays (possibly due to a lawsuit from the director after the fact meaning whoever could release an official version hasn’t bothered to past the laserdisc era), but I’m very glad to see an incremental improvement in picture quality at all for this one (and I hope someday it gets the UHD release it deserves – I would 100% be first in line for it). The special effects in here especially deserve to be seen clearly. And now at least, they mostly can be! Yay! I was posting about it, and realized that when I watched this, I would have been coming to it mainly from the relationship to Resident Evil angle, and at the time I wouldn’t have been all that plugged into the works or reputation of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and I also don’t think I knew who Juzo Itami was (I still sometimes think of him as “the old man from Sweet Home”) and so not having seen his movies at the time, and not putting the dots together later on, I didn’t know until looking at it now that the protagonist in Sweet Home is played by Nobuko Miyamoto, Itami’s wife and star of his movies, and I also didn’t clock just how much of their fingerprints are on this, with Itami as the main producer of the movie and first in the credits. And so it seemed like a rewatch is in order, so impulsively, I watched it again that evening. And I enjoyed it a lot again! It stood out in my memory enough to be familiar, but the better quality and the better perspective on who all contributed to this definitely gave this watch through a new perspective, with my being more inclined to treat it as a movie on its own terms, vs. coming to it mainly as a horror curiosity. In particular, Itami’s movies tend to have a way of making you very much want to root for Miyamoto’s characters, and she came across as very sweet in a behind the scenes interview I saw for I think Tampopo, and so I was especially inclined to root for the protagonist here, and appreciated her performance more for it. And it does also feel like there’s a surprising amount of shared DNA between this and the Itami movies I’ve seen, with a certain amount of that… hard to describe quirky flavor? In the setup that I think makes it memorable moreso than a run-of-the-mill haunted house. And as a special effects driven horror movie, it’s still real real good. There’s one sequence in particular I’d still love to see in as high a resolution as possible.
I watched this with subtitles turned off and did fine (albeit partly because I had seen the movie before).