The Lady Vampire

Unlike giant monsters and invading aliens, vampires evidently seemed too 'foreign' for Japanese B-movies in the '50s. Nakagawa's attempt to create a Japanese vampire (from a story by Sotoo Tachibana) works overtime to accommodate this 'foreignness'. It opens in a Tokyo suburb so westernised it even has numbered streets, sets plot developments in a western-style hotel and art gallery, has a crime reporter (Wada) for a hero, and winds up explaining that the vampirism stems obliquely from Shiro of Amakusa, a 17th century Christian. The lady vampire is actually a helpless victim (Mihara) who returns to her family unaged 20 years after disappearing; the villain is Takenaka (Amachi), who lives in a subterranean castle with an entourage of freaks, uses little gold crosses to turn cuties into statues and develops uncontrollable urges when exposed to the full moon. Fun enough.