Daily Archives: May 16, 2020

Horrors of Malformed Men (1969)

Horrors of Malformed Men (Kyôfu kikei ningen: Edogawa Rampo zenshû)
Directed by Teruo Ishii
Written by Teruo Ishii and Masahiro Kakefuda from a novel by Rampu Edogawa
1969/Japan
IMDb link
First viewing/Amazon Instant
They Shoot Zombies, Don’t They?

“I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau

This one didn’t wow me.

The plot has a lot of the feeling of Island of Lost Souls (1932) although it derives from different source material. A medical doctor begins to have hallucinations and is eventually committed to an insane asylum. He becomes acquainted with his apparent doppelganger, a dead man. He is lured to an island run by a mad scientist who has surgically deformed men and women with plans of creating a super-race.  The doctor goes on to experience various horrific and sexual adventures.

This is apparently something of a cult classic.  It is indeed sufficiently weird and inept to merit that status.  I was looking for decent creatures and a few scares.  The film failed to deliver in this regard.  It does feature a lot of bare breasts for connoisseurs of that kind of thing.  The below trailer represents the movie pretty well.