The Rain Women + High-School-Terror + UNK

Director: Shinobu Yaguchi

1990 / 100min / DCP

The Rain Women Before making a name for himself as the director of eccentric hit comedies like Swing Girls and Waterboys, Yaguchi produced this playful, ingenious shapeshifter of a film, which begins by following the fanciful, impulsive misadventures of two Rivettian young female roommates—including musical sequences!—before taking a sharp turn that leads to meta-cinematic inquiries into the nature of cinematic fiction and sumptuously gloomy atmospherics. Capricious, singular, and entirely delightful.

High-School-Terror Following up on the success of his 8mm film Fantastic Party, produced when he was still in high school, Tezuka made a splash at the Pia Film Festival with two audacious shorts: UNK and High-School-Terror, in which he elevates a simple ghost story premise—two girls are menaced by spirits in an empty school building—into something unforgettable via experimental editing and a talent for conjuring up spine-chilling images with the most modest of means. Six years before his feature debut with musical comedy The Legend of the Stardust Brothers, High School-Terror shows Tezuka’s abundant visual imagination already in overdrive.

UNK Brilliantly and somewhat perversely, Tezuka uses 8mm, a format associated with low-budget amateurism, to create a paean to cinematic special effects, usually considered the domain of big studio productions. The son of Osamu Tezuka, a celebrated animator and manga artist, the younger Tezuka illustrates his beguiling story of a young woman’s strange and enchanted urban outing with an exhaustive knowledge of film history and an opulent visual imagination.